The Israel Lobby is pushing Congress for an extra billion dollars in military aid to Israel—that’s above and beyond the $3+ billion it already receives. At a time of high unemployment figures, record-breaking government spending deficits, and world-wide financial instability, can U.S. taxpayers afford this? More to the point: American political, economic, and diplomatic standing in the all-imporatant Middle East is at an all time low—further tipping the balance toward Tel Aviv is a dangerous move.

That’s the subject of our Executive Director’s important new article on the internet: “The Israel Lobby Never Sleeps.” Phil Giraldi writes:

Israel and its partisan hacks in Congress are utterly shameless. At a time when the country is screaming for some measure of restraint in government spending, Israel is the one budget line that only sees increases.

– Alison Weir

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and Ranking Member Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA)

The Israel Lobby Never Sleeps

by Philip Giraldi

Republican Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD)

The sponsors include Eric Cantor, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and Howard Berman (all of whom are Jewish) and also Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who is Norwegian but might as well be Jewish given his frequently expressed love for Israel. The bill provides Israel with a blank check drawn on the US taxpayer to maintain its “qualitative military superiority” over all of its neighbors combined. It is scheduled for passage on a “suspension of the rules,” which means it will not actually be voted on and will be approved by consent of Congress.

It is perhaps no coincidence that on Monday the Republicans in the guise of the redoubtable Howard “Buck” McKeon released their proposal for increased defense spending (yes, increased) for 2013. It includes a cool $1 billion for Israel to upgrade its missile defenses.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney appears on a monitor as he speaks at AIPAC in Washington on March 6. Photo by REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

That’s on top of the $3 billion it already receives plus numerous co-production programs that are off the books and defense spending that is not considered to be part of the annual grant.

Perhaps “Buck” should consider changing his sobriquet to “Warbucks.” Buck is not Jewish but he is a Mormon, perhaps a sign of what will be coming if we are so unlucky as to vote into office the born again Hawk Mitt Romney.

Mitt has a foreign policy team consisting of more than thirty stalwarts, mostly drawn from the Bush Administration, and nearly all of whom are neocons. It features Robert Kaplan, John Bolton, and Dan Senor.

Israel and its partisan hacks in Congress are utterly shameless. At a time when the country is screaming for some measure of restraint in government spending, Israel is the one budget line that only sees increases.

Source: Council for the National Interest

The Treasonous Dollar Drain

Written and Presented by Anthony Lawson

Editor's Note: A country that is hopelessly enslaved by Jewish money and Jewish power, is not free to report the truth.

America needs to produce politicians who are more honest and less fearful of the wrath of the Jewish lobby (AIPAC).

However, this won’t happen until mainstream America discovers the disastrous role Israel and her agents play in America’s national life and media control.

Another well-done, excellent example of the truth, which has long been apparent.

Media Lies!

“I believe our time has come,” says Paul. “It’s still going to be a knock-down dragged-out fight.”

**HELP SPREAD THESE VIDEOS AND RON PAUL'S MESSAGE!**
Donate at https://secure.ronpaul2012.com/

• Reining in the Feds
• Ending the Wars
• Promoting sound money
• Taking back our Government from Special Interests

Ron Paul Wins 11 States, Establishment Media Remains Silent

CNN Caught Flat Out Lying About Delegate Numbers!

(True Updated Delegate Numbers Included)

Published on May 9, 2012 by matlarson10 :

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The latest news from Ron Paul's 2012 Campaign:

• MAY 14TH 2012 by Jack Hunter
  

  Ron Paul Has Not Suspended His Campaign

  Today from Buzzfeed: “Asked if this is a dropout, Paul’s campaign manager Jesse Benton said ‘Absolutely not! We are focusing our efforts squarely on winning delegates and party leadership positions at state conventions.” Hopefully this will help clear up some of today’s confusion:

  READ MORE

• MAY 14TH 2012
  

  Ron Paul Statement on Campaign Going Forward

  “We will continue to take leadership positions, win delegates, and carry a strong message to the Republican National Convention that Liberty is the way of the future.” – Ron Paul LAKE JACKSON, Texas – 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul issued the following statement to supporters and the general public concerning the continuation of his historic bid for the [...]

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So we have reached the point where the proverbial cat is out of the bag. Everyone, with the possible exception of the U.S. Congress, has become aware that there is something terribly wrong with Israel

by Philip Giraldi

Criticism of Israel is reaching a tipping point from which we can expect an explosion of public debate in the years ahead

A tipping point is where physical momentum, inclined in one direction, reverses its course, stabilizes, and then begins to move the opposite way.

Those of us who have been arguing for a sane United States foreign policy in the Middle East have well understood that the odds on shifting the prevailing narrative have been heavily against us thanks to the overwhelming resources possessed by a powerful domestic lobby. Ten years ago in America, it was impossible to place even a letter in a mainstream newspaper or magazine that was in any way critical of Israel. Apart from Pat Buchanan, no one on television provided a critique of Israel and its policies. In the U.S. media, Israel was ever the beleaguered little democracy surrounded by savage Arabs.

But then, all of a sudden, the conspiracy of silence began to break down.

It began with the revisionist history of the antecedents of the Iraq War as that conflict continued to drag on. Many began attributing Washington’s initiation of the fighting, at least in part, to Israeli interests. Philip Zelikow, chief counsel for the 9/11 Commission Report, famously noted in March 2004 that the war was “to protect Israel,” surely an exaggeration but containing more than a kernel of truth. Many also began to observe that the agitation for a new war with Iran was following the same pattern, with supporters of Israel leading the charge.

In 2006, former President Jimmy Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It provoked considerable outrage and highly publicized resignations from the board of the Carter Foundation together with charges that Carter was supporting Palestinian terrorism. But the big breakthrough came with the publication of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in the following year. It became a New York Times best-seller, and it suddenly became acceptable to talk about Israel without the usual bromides.

For the first time, people in America were taking notice of the power of the Israel lobby and the inherent downside for U.S. national interests.

Driven by the prospect of unending warfare in an attempt to remake the Muslim world by force, letters and op-eds critical of Israel and its policies began to appear in the mainstream media. There weren’t a lot, mind you, and they were always “balanced” by more numerous contrary commentaries, but there were enough to demonstrate that a shift was taking place. Mainstream Jewish organizations, always vigilant in defense of what they have perceived as Israel’s interest, resorted increasingly to discrediting critics by calling them “anti-Semites.” Indeed, they succeeded in equating any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and even managed to pass legislation in Canada and several European nations that made any criticism of Israel ipso facto a hate crime.

Some American Jews have always been bothered by the dark side of Israel’s story, beginning with the Nakba expulsion of the Palestinians from their homes and including the more recent settlement policy, “security” wall, and the denial of civil and human rights to the Arabs living in Israel and the occupied territories. They were convinced, correctly, that Israel had no intention to permit the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Many began to protest, though their voices were at first confined to the alternative media and they had to work through many progressive groups that were advancing a much broader peace agenda in response to George W. Bush’s horrific “global war on terror.”

But now we Americans have finally reached our tipping point. Recently Peter Beinart, a Zionist and defender of Israel for many years, released The Crisis of Zionism, which explains how Israel has become an armed camp dedicated to repressing and even expelling its Palestinian helots. As a liberal Jew, he rejects the militant values that drive the Israel of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has even gone so far as to support an economic boycott of Israel, similar to the pressure that was put on South African apartheid. The book has predictably provoked a firestorm of criticism from the pro-Israel establishment, but Beinart is not alone. Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman of The New York Times, both Jewish and both longtime friends of Israel, have voiced the same concerns, namely that Israel no longer represents the liberal and humanistic values that they themselves cherish. It has been noted in passing that young American Jews increasingly do not view Israel in positive terms, a sign, if one was needed, that the older generation that believes Israel is always right, no matter what it does, is passing into history.

And it does not end there. Even the mainstream media is now, perhaps reluctantly, on board. On April 22, 60 Minutes, the most watched television news and commentary program in the United States, aired a segment on Israeli persecution of Christians. The program was a real shock for the many fundamentalist Christians who have viewed Israel through rose-tinted glasses. Many evangelicals have promoted the myth that Israel is actually a protector of Christians, which it most emphatically is not; it seeks instead to marginalize them and force them to emigrate, as the 60 Minutes program demonstrated. Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, who tried to kill the story and called it a “hatchet job,” was interviewed as part of it. His performance was alternately smug and angry, and it is widely regarded as a public relations disaster. He even said that mainstream Christian churches are “known for their anti-Semitism.”

Benjamin Netanyahu’s office supported Oren’s contention that the broadcast was a “threat to Israel.” It was Netanyahu’s second venture into public relations in a short time, having previously denounced German Nobel Prize–winning author Gunter Grass. Netanyahu banned Grass from traveling to Israel and said that his writings had “hurt Israel profoundly.” Netanyahu was responding to Grass’s rather mild declaration in a poem that the Jewish state’s nuclear program is a threat to an “already fragile world peace.”

Netanyahu knows that the tide is running against him and everything he represents, particularly as the criticism from former senior officials in his own country continues to mount, but he is too obdurate to do what must be done. One of Israel’s darkest secrets is the extent to which young, educated Jews are fleeing the country for greener pastures, most notably the United States. By some guesstimates, one third of university-educated second- and third-generation Israeli Jews have left the country. They are leaving behind the recent Russian immigrants, many of whom are not actually religiously or ethnically Jewish, and the Islamophobic racists who constitute the core of the hard right in Israel. Israel publishes no statistics on the brain drain, which has intensified the country’s demographic problem and lessened its competitiveness.

So we have reached the point where the proverbial cat is out of the bag. Everyone, with the possible exception of the U.S. Congress, has become aware that there is something terribly wrong with Israel. In Israel itself, where there is often ferocious debate over the country’s policies, it is time for a reckoning. Does Israel want to become a normal state with correct relationships with its neighbors, including an independent Palestine, or does it want to continue down the road that it is pursuing, which is folly and will lead to ruin?

The choice is ultimately Israel’s, but, for the first time, Americans are actually beginning to talk and write freely and openly about the problem.

BRIBEOCRACY

By Anthony Lawson / My Catbird Seat

by Kevin Barrett

The neocon cabal of Zionist Christians and Jews behind 9/11 have tried to disguise their war on Islam as a “war on terror.” But occasionally one of them blurts out the truth: “I always thought it was a mistake not to say what Iraq really was, that is, a war against an expanding Islam,” opined neocon think-tanker James Schall of Georgetown University.*

The election of Barack Obama turned down the rhetorical volume of the war on Islam, but didn’t fundamentally change the policies: continued criminal occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, support for anti-Muslim operations in Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere, drone strikes and kidnappings of Muslim leaders and innocent bystanders, false-flag attacks attributed to Muslims, rabid islamophobia blanketing the media, preparations for war with Iran, and the looting of the US treasury and destruction of the American economy to pay for it all. (All of this despite the fact that no Islamic country poses the slightest geo-strategic threat to the United States, while China surges past us economically and, soon, militarily, fueled by money and stolen military technology from the Rothschilds and their Zionist crime center in Occupied Palestine.)

But now, a cornerstone of the war on Islam – the brainwashing of US military personnel to hate, fear, and mass-murder people because they happen to be Muslim – has been removed by none other than General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation reports:

On Tuesday, April 24th, 2012, the nation’s top soldier, Chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) General Martin Dempsey, initiated a truly seminal message. He finally generated the long-overdue, mandatory edict that all training and educational materials throughout the U.S. military must be immediately reviewed within one month’s time to ensure that no anti-Muslim or anti-Islam references or content remain. Henceforth, officers and enlisted members will no longer be taught and institutionally indoctrinated that “the United States is at war with Islam and we ought to just recognize that.”
In the elective class “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism,” officers from all four branches of the military were indoctrinated with vile Islamophobic programs masquerading as “anti-terrorist” education.

What JCS Chairman Gen. Dempsey seeks to investigate is a heinous curriculum of systemic, anti-Muslim hatred that has warped the cultural competence of United States service members, leading to grim results in combat theaters within which the U.S. has been engaged since 9/11. In 2012 alone there have been reports of bodies being urinated on by U.S. Marines, the proud and brazen display of the Nazi Waffen-SS banner by U.S. Marines, soldiers posing with corpses, and most insultingly, the burning of copies of the Qur’an at Bagram Air Field.

The long-overdue review of the appalling Islamophobic materials used to train our servicemen and servicewomen is a classic case of the proverbial closing of the barn door long after the farm animals have left. President Obama’s surprise visit to Afghanistan on Tuesday, May 1, 2012 starkly illustrated this fact. The ink had barely dried on the Strategic Partnership Agreement signed by himself and Afghan President Hamid Karzai before car bombs and gunfire rattled Kabul in a daring Taliban attack centered on the high-security Green Village compound.

In hindsight, the Department of Defense-sanctioned anti-Muslim training programs have proven to be a quintessentially formidable propaganda asset in the Taliban fight against the “Crusading” NATO forces. Indeed, they provide grist for the mill of regional resentment and strain alliances to a breaking point.

Listen to my interview with Mikey Weinstein:  http://www.americanfreedomradio.com/archive/Truth-Jihad-32k-042312.mp3

But will Gen. Dempsey’s changes stick? The false-flag attacks of 9/11/2001 created tremendous islamophobic momentum in US and Western popular culture and the minds of policy-makers – as they were designed to do.

Philip Zelikow, the self-professed expert on the creation and maintenance of public myths like Pearl Harbor, which continue to impact public opinion and policy down through the generations presumably helped write the script for the 9/11 attacks with this multi-generational effect in view.

The purpose of 9/11 was not only to launch wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, but more importantly to bring the US into a long-term, multi-generational war against Israel’s enemies – namely, the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. One order by Gen. Dempsey to the military won’t be enough to overcome this momentum.

If General Dempsey really wants to end the war on Islam, he should go to whatever lengths are necessary to expose the truth about 9/11. To that end, he ought to consider a Constitutional Counter-Coup in which all those complicit in 9/11 and its cover-up are suddenly and without warning detained and charged by military courts rather than the neocon-owned federal judiciary.

Obviously the media criminals who have been covering up 9/11 would need to be detained and charged, in order to prevent them from lying their way out of the predicament they created for themselves. And, equally obviously, US forces would have to be put on high alert, with all the big guns pointed at Israel, to prevent more 9/11-style chicanery and deter resistance to the Constitutional Counter-Coup.

* International Herald Tribune, 1/11/2005

US military under fire for 'anti-Islam class'

Secessionist rumblings have been getting louder in the United States as disaffection with the federal government has amplified. Wayne Madsen canvasses the growing tide of disunionist tendencies in the United States, which he deems may realistically result in the gradual splintering of the country into separate entities just like those that the United States caused to bring about in many states around the world in pursuit of its own agenda. What goes around comes around, suggests the author.

Voltaire Network

by Wayne Madsen

In April 2009, Rick Perry, the Republican governor of Texas, suggested that his state might ponder secession if “Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people.” In response, the audience began to chant, “Secede, secede.”

The United States, which sought to capitalize politically, militarily, and financially from the break-up of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Sudan, and Czechoslovakia and now seeks to reap the benefits from the similar potential fracturing of the Russian Federation, China, Libya, and Iraq, may receive a taste of its own medicine.

Across the United States, there are increasing calls for secession from a federal government that is not providing for the common welfare of the people. Republicans, joined by a number of corporatist Democrats, are echoing the austerity push in Europe to sell-off public assets to vulture capitalists at rock bottom prices. Calls by corporatist politicians to privatize the U.S. Postal Service, AMTRAK, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and even public schools will have the effect of divorcing most Americans from any regular contact with their federal government. Such a development will nurture current movements that call for secession from the United States and seed nascent emergent movements.

One of the latest regions where there are increasing calls for secession is a unique linguistic and cultural region that was decimated by the British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon oil disaster two years ago. Many of the French Creole-speaking inhabitants of the Cajun region of southern Louisiana now openly talk about leaving the rest of Louisiana and the United States after the state and federal government failed to protect them from the effects of the British petrol company’s oil deluge and the subsequent use of the oil dispersant Corexit, a deadly combination that dealt a fatal blow to the area’s seafood and tourism industries.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal

The U.S. Coast Guard, which became a virtual law enforcement arm for BP, is looked upon as a foreign military force by the Cajuns, people descendant from French Acadians who forcible deported in the 18th century from French Maritime Canada to Louisiana by a conquering British military force. Many Cajuns, concerned that BP would like to see them forcibly removed from their coastal and bayou homeland of southern Louisiana, vow that they will not allow the British remove them again. And, after the protection and assistance afforded to BP by the Democratic Obama administration and Republican administration of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the latter as subservient to British corporate interests as any Indian amah housemaid for a British East India Company colonial lord during the Raj, the Cajun people realize they can, with their energy resources and even a crippled seafood industry, make it on their own.

The Cajuns of Louisiana came from Nova Scotia as a result of the “Great Derangement of 1755” when these French pioneers of northeastern Canada were forced to either swear allegiance to the British Crown or be deported.

Cajun Louisiana, or “Léta de la Lwizyàn” in the French Creole language, has the necessary requirements for sovereignty and self-determination under international law that has been codified since the Peace of Westphalia. The people of Lwizyan have a common ethnicity, history, and culture – all a requirement for sovereignty, plus a defined geographical region, which is basically the region of Louisiana south of Interstate 10. After the federal and state governments’ abysmal reaction to both Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil blow-out, both of which resulted in a district threat to the Cajun way of life, Lwizyan also has a human rights grievance against their governing political entities. Such human rights grievances have been used by the international community to justify the independence of such nations as Bangladesh, Israel, South Sudan, Kosovo, and East Timor.

Louisiana’s unique French culture has prompted it to take part in a number of international organizations, along with other francophone nations and regions, including France, the Wallon region of Belgium, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. Through observer status in the Francophone Community, French Creole-speaking delegates run shoulders with other French-speaking officials from nations as diverse as Haiti and Mauritius and Vanuatu and Switzerland.

After the dissolution of the USSR, fourteen new member states joined the United Nations – including Belarus and Ukraine, which had faux independent UN member state status as “Soviet Socialist Republics.” Although the dissolution of the United States may not be as rapid as that of the Soviet Union, it may experience a gradual breakup as seen in Yugoslavia.

Not only may Lwizyan ultimately take its seat in the UN General Assembly between Luxembourg and Madagascar, but there are other parts of the American empire that have legitimate reasons to break ties with rule from Washington, DC and join the international community as independent states.

Among the first candidates for independence are states and regions with legitimate reasons, including treaty provisions, to go it alone. Native American tribes that signed treaties as sovereign nations with Washington have historical and legal reasons to sever their ties with Washington. Many of the 525 federally-recognized Native American tribal nations possess the requirements to justify sovereignty and self-determination: common ethnicity, history, culture, a defined geographical region, and a long history of human rights grievances, including genocide, against the United States. The Lakota Sioux Nation (which seeks an independent Republic of Lakotah), Iroquois Nation (Haudenosaunee), Navajo Nation, and Hopi Nation have openly advocated for greater independence from American government oppression. The Iroquois have even issued their own passports, a move that was rejected by the Obama administration and American allies like Britain.

Hawaii, which lost its independence as a result of naked American aggression and the abolition of the Hawaiian monarchy, has a strong movement to restore Hawaiian independence. Similar independence movements in overseas territories such as Puerto Rico, Eastern Samoa, and Guåhån (which Washington continues to erroneously call by its colonial name, Guam, and not by its Chamorro name) are gaining in popularity. Hawaii. Guahan, Eastern Samoa, and Puerto Rico were acquired by the American empire during the United States’ 19th century grab for colonial possessions.

There are other American secession movements but many are merely screens and contrivances for racists, including groups that advocate the restoral of Southern Confederate independence and independence for Texas. However, there are other more legitimate secession movements that are based on historical precedent. The Second Vermont Republic seeks the restoration of the independence of the short-lived First Vermont Republic that existed from 1777 to 1791. A number of secessionists have run for statewide office in Vermont.

The Alaska Independence Party, which is a libertarian party, advocates the independence of Alaska, a former Russian territory that was bought by the United States during the American Civil War. Supporters of Alaskan independence refer to the referendum of 1958, in which Alaskans were asked whether they wanted statehood, independence, commonwealth status, or remain a territory. Independence supporters seek another referendum with the same options.

Separatists in Washington state and Oregon seek to join Canada’s British Columbia to form the independent nation of Cascadia. And there are more than a few Californians who would like to resurrect their once briefly independent nation, the name of which appears on the California state flag: “California Republic.”

With calls for the abolition of Social Security, Medicare, the U.S. Postal Service, federally-funded public education, AMTRAK, and even the National Park system, Americans will increasingly find the federal government to be a useless entity that has sold off the public “commonwealth” to unscrupulous bankers and vulture capitalist investors. When Americans realize that the United States of America is a worthless encumbrance on their rights, we may hear the President of the UN General Assembly, perhaps a foreign minister of Scotland or Quebec, welcoming the independent nations of Leta de la Lwizyan, Guahan, Kalahu’i Hawai’i, and the Republic of Lakotah to take their seats in the General Assembly. The phrase “United States of America” will become as meaningless then as the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” and the “Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” are today.

The American Emperor, after his outer and inner threads have been pulled, will be nothing more than a naked representative of stark imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and militarism and will be justly buried in a pauper’s grave.

Wayne Madsen, Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. His columns have appeared in a wide number of newspapers and journals. Madsen is a regular contributor on Russia Today. He has written The Handbook of Personal Data Protection (London: Macmillan, 1992); Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999 (Edwin Mellen Press, 1999); Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops & Brass Plates and Overthrow a Fascist Regime on $15 a Day and co-authored America’s Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II (Dandelion, 2003).

by James M. Wall

Marchers moved through the streets of Hebron, Kafr Qaddoum, Nablus, Nabi Saleh, Ni’lin, Ramallah, al-Walaja and outside of Ofer prison. The picture above was taken in Hebron.

It shows an Israeli soldier with his knee firmly planted on a young Palestinian’s neck.

The picture also shows how American tax dollars and church pensions are at work on this Mothers Day weekend, a commercially-driven event in which American teenagers and their families annually  honor mothers with gifts and family meals.

On this particular American Mothers’ Day weekend, a large contingent of  Palestinian teenagers joined their mothers and other family members to offer their support to prisoners on lengthy and dangerous hunger strikes.

Laura Kacere wrote in A Nation of Change, that Mothers Day had a different meaning when it was initially launched.  In fact, the Palestinian mothers who marched this weekend in support of hunger strikers, some of whom may have been their children, are demonstrating in a manner more akin to the original purpose of Mothers Day.

Mother’s Day began in America in 1870 when Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Written in response to the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, her proclamation called on women to use their position as mothers to influence society in fighting for an end to all wars. She called for women to stand up against the unjust violence of war through their roles as wife and mother, to protest the futility of their sons killing other mothers’ sons.

Amira Hass, the Ha’aretz columnist who has watched Israeli duplicity at work for decades, explains how Israel makes use of  ”administrative detention”:

Administrative detainees have been held without trial for years under emergency regulations inspired by the British Mandate. It’s not important. Hundreds of prisoners from the Gaza Strip haven’t seen their families for six or more years. Why should anyone care?

American tax-payers and church members should care. But do they?  The record is not good.

The Methodist General Conference ended its once-every-four-years confab in Tampa last week with a small step toward caring. They will not have this opportunity again for four years in a governance system first established in the early 1800s by John Wesley.

In their 2012 Conference the Methodists voted to call for a boycott of US companies supporting the occupation. They failed, however, to pass a specific divestment resolution removing church pension funds from three US corporations, Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard and Motorola Systems.

Why did the 2012 Methodists only hit .500?  The Methodist Board of Pensions and their allies roamed about the floor of the conference spreading the lie that divestment from these companies would threaten Africa University’s funding. Those prefabrications were aimed at Central Conferences (overseas) delegates, who are very protective of their continent’s Methodist University.

There were even reports that some Methodist delegates were told they could be sued if they voted for divestment. Would church leaders act in this manner? Hard to imagine, but then, there have also been reports (a tape recording to be exact) that Mitt Romney cannot recall a teenage incident which his classmates insist involved young Mitt cutting the hair of a classmate suspected of being gay.

Now it is the Presbyterians’ chance to divest from three US corporations that support the Israeli occupation. Will they join the Episcopalians and urge tea and cookies with their local rabbis, or will they look more closely at how the Israelis are spending their pension funds?

Meanwhile, the Palestinian hunger strikes continue.

Why hunger strikes?  How else does a prisoner reach the outside world, at least that part of the outside world willing to look up from its tea and cookies long enough to notice?

There are currently 2,000 Palestinian inmates on a mass hunger strike in the Nafha, Ashkelon, Gilboa and other prisons around Israel. Amira Hass writes that it is “the very fact of their decision to refuse food and their willingness to risk being punished by the authorities [that] stands as a reminder of their humanity”.

The US public remains blissfully ignorant during this Mothers Day weekend that 2000 Palestinians hunger strikers, some near death, are refusing food to protest their treatment and their unfair and unjust incarceration.

The bulk of the Israeli public, safe and secure behind a massive Security Wall, remain largely indifferent to the strikers.

Amira Hass explains:

The Israel Prison Service does not have to make much of an effort to conceal this mass action from Israeli eyes. The great majority of Israelis label all incarcerated Palestinians as conscienceless murderers or common terrorists, at the least. They have little interest in acts of personal or collective courage on the part of Palestinian detainees that serve as reminders that they are human beings.

Richard Falk and Noura Erakat have written about the history of the Israeli use of administrative detention, which in case you have not noticed, is a practice the US Congress is currently planning to add to the American legal arsenal against its own citizens.

Administrative detention has constituted a core of Israel’s 1,500 occupation laws that apply to Palestinians only, and which are not subject to any type of civilian or public review. Derived from British Mandate laws, administrative detention permits Israeli Forces to arrest Palestinians for up to six months without charge or trial, and without any show of incriminating evidence. Such detention orders can be renewed indefinitely, each time for another six-month term.

Ayed Dudeen is one of the longest-serving administrative detainees in Israeli captivity. First arrested in October 2007, Israeli officials renewed his detention thirty times without charge or trial. After languishing in a prison cell for nearly four years without due process, prison authorities released him in August 2011, only to re-arrest him two weeks later. His wife Amal no longer tells their six children that their father is coming home, because, in her words, “I do not want to give them false hope anymore, I just hope that this nightmare will go away.”

Twenty percent of the Palestinian population of the Occupied Palestinian Territories have at one point been held under administrative detention by Israeli forces. Israel argues these policies are necessary to ensure the security of its Jewish citizens, including those unlawfully resident in settlements surrounding Jerusalem, Area C, and the Jordan Valley—in flagrant contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention’s Article 49(6), which explicitly prohibits the transfer of one’s civilian population to the territory it occupies.

And how does the US government view the hunger strikes?

When one persistent journalist (identified as “Said”) demanded, politely, that US State Department spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, answer a question about the Palestinian hunger strikes, this is how Nuland handled his query, according to the transcript from the State Department:

QUESTION: Okay. And one – a couple more. On the Palestinian prisoner issue, I wonder if you are aware of the situation of striking – hunger striking Palestinian prisoners?

MS. NULAND: I don’t have anything for you on that, Said.

QUESTION: Well, do you have a position on the hunger strike of prisoners who have not been charged with anything and they have been held for a long time? They’ve gone today – their 70th day of a hunger strike. Thaer Halahla and many others, five others, are probably – are likely to – they could face – I mean, they could die in the next day or so. Would the United States Government take a position on that?

MS. NULAND: Well, let me take the question, Said, because frankly, I don’t have anything one way or the other. I don’t know if we have a comment on it.

QUESTION: Because, lastly, I mean, it – if something happens to these prisoners, it could be a flashpoint between Israelis and the Palestinians.

MS. NULAND: No, I understand the question. Let me take it, okay?

QUESTION: Thank you.

If, or when, a hunger striker dies in an Israeli prison, the US State Department will have an answer ready to go. It will express regret at the death and urge “all parties involved” to resolve their differences.

One “party” involved is the IDF, shown in action at the pictures above and below. In this picture, smoke makes it difficult to determine if the IDF vehicle is a Caterpillar product. Perhaps not, since it is smaller than the Caterpillar tractors that built the Wall, and continues to demolish Palestinian homes.

But there is no question that the battle between the rock-throwing teen aged Palestinians and their IDF enemy serves as a metaphor for a US and church supported occupation force and a defiant civilian population.

Karl-John N. Stone and Thomas A. Prinz have just written an article for The Christian Century magazine, “Invest, Not Divest” which argues just what the title suggests it would argue, a misguided solution which embraces a market faith rather than a religious faith.

Stone is assistant to the bishop in the Upper Susquehanna Synod (ELCA) in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Prinz is pastor at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Leesburg, Virginia. They ask:

What better way for the church to act as peacemakers than to engage in actual investment, building up Palestinian society and infrastructure, thereby helping to ensure a sound and viable sovereign state when a political solution is found and potentially hastening that political solution?

Stone and Prinz close their argument for “hastening that political solution” with this bit of capitalist stock market cheer leading:

The New York Times reported in February that the Palestinian Stock Exchange has been one of the best-­performing markets in the Arab world in recent years. In 2011, a year marked by great political upheaval in the region, the Palestinian exchange was second only to that of Qatar, falling only 2.58 percent over the course of the year.

The Times quoted Fayez Husseini, manager of Abraaj Capital’s $50 million Pales­tine Growth Capital Fund, as saying: “Strong stock market performance proves that these Palestinian companies are well managed, resilient and adaptive.”

They conclude their market-driven argument:

Investment moves churches beyond a black-and-white concept of justice and a conflict model of advocacy toward a model of empowerment and reconciliation. This move represents the best hope for churches to contribute to long-term peace and justice for Israelis and Palestinians.

Give our Lutheran brothers credit, they do offer us a choice between “a black-and-white concept of justice”, and “a model of empowerment and reconciliation”.

Prinz and Stone may think they are channeling Reinhold Niebuhr with that division. I suspect they are really channeling the Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop quoted in their piece.

Speaking of quoting, there is no sign that Prinz and Stone discussed this matter with any Palestinians under occupation, unless you count the New York Times‘ quote from Fayez Husseini, manager of Abraaj Capital’s $50 million Pales­tine Growth Capital Fund.

Next time Prinz and Stone offer advice to Palestinians, they might want to talk with Palestinian Baptist pastor, Dr. Alex Awad, who told Methodists when they were debating their divestment resolution:

“We are asking for divestment for our freedom, not investment to improve our lives in prison.”

The picture at top is by Mussa Qawasma. It was used in a Mondoweiss article by Allison Deger. The picture of the teenagers confronting IDF fire power is by Jaafar Ashtiyeh. It is from Agence France Presse  (AFP).

Water & Salt Show of support for Prisoners, Ramallah

Editor's Note: **Sibel Edmonds is and has always been a reliable source.She was fired from the FBI and an attempt made to discredit and assassinate her character for whistle-blowing FBI intelligence cover-ups and destruction of pre- 9-11 information, post 9-11 coverups, and was targeted for prosecution for crimes which she did not commit.

Sibel Edmonds : US government needs to keep the fear factor alive

RT : The Obama administration has the worst track record when it comes to prosecuting whistleblowers. Obama once claimed he'd work hard to have a transparent government, but many have faced retaliation for revealing controversial government information. Sibel Edmonds, who is a whistleblower, waited 340 days for FBI clearance of her memoir but finally released it on her own. Edmonds, founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, joins us for more.

Sibel Edmonds Finally Wins

by David Swanson

by Sharmine Narwani

A man wearing a black shirt bearing an Al-Qaeda flag (L) speaks with a UN observer as monitors meet with rebels and civilians in the village of Azzara in the province of Homs on 4 May 2012. (Photo: AFP- Joseph Eid)

We have arrived at a determining moment in the Syrian crisis. The choices are startlingly simple:

1) Cautious, incremental movement toward political reconciliation and reform spearheaded by the Syrian government and closely monitored by Kofi Annan’s UN mission, Moscow, Tehran and Beijing.

2) Dangerous escalation of violence and militarization that will increasingly include foreign jihadists and is likely spill over into the broader Middle East.

Major General Robert –Head of UN Mission in Syria

After only one week of observing events in Syria first-hand, United Nations Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS) commander Major-General Robert Mood spelled out the dwindling options:

The 600-pound gorilla in the room is the growing presence of al-Qaeda and other jihadists operating inside the Syria.

“I can tell you from my engagement that whomever I meet, they tell me that they want to move on the basis of Kofi Annan’s Six Point Plan, and that includes the Free Syrian Army locally, and that includes Local Coordination Committees. I am fully aware that there are others with a different agenda, that have other ideas, but I have yet to see a credible alternative to Kofi Annan’s Six Point Plan. So one way to put it is that it is, for now, the only game in town.”

Perhaps he should have said the only “sane” game in town.

Because there is that other “game” – the one that seeks forced regime-change at any cost, even if it means having dangerous Salafi militants fight the battle NATO cannot.

Those with “different agendas” and “other ideas” are a diverse group with goals distinctly opposed to demilitarization, reconciliation and reform along the Annan/Syrian/Russian track.

So far, we understand them to include countries and organizations still intent on materially assisting or weaponizing the armed opposition – in contravention of the spirit of UN Security Council Resolution 2043. After all, only days after Syria approved the Annan Plan, Friends of Syria member states committed millions of dollars in “non-lethal aid” to the rebels. Members Saudi Arabia and Qatar pledged to provide salaries for the fighters and financially reward defectors from the regular Syrian Army, while the Turkish, GCC and western-backed Syrian National Council (SNC) overtly went begging for funds to increase weapons supplies to armed groups inside Syria.

If Annan does things right, these nations and groups can be bullied and cajoled into compliance via a more robust set of UN Protocols, expressly drafted to change their behaviors.

No, the 600-pound gorilla in the room with “different agendas” and “other ideas” is not so much the GCC-NATO backed armed militias scattered throughout the country’s opposition strongholds. It is the growing presence of al-Qaeda and other jihadists operating inside the Syrian theater.

Militant Jihadists: Turning Point in Syria

In early February, unnamed US officials confirmed that al-Qaeda was responsible for the December 23 and January 6 bombings in Damascus and was also likely behind the double suicide blasts in Aleppo on February 10. This unexpected confirmation from Washington rang alarm bells, but not enough to slow down NATO-GCC efforts to incautiously promote regime change in Syria.

That changed slightly a few days later when al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri delivered his eight-minute internet speech “Onward, Oh Lions of Syria” urging fellow jihadists from neighboring Muslim countries to join the battle in Syria. Chat rooms on jihadist websites revealed that militants from Iraq, Libya, Lebanon and elsewhere were already engaged inside the country. Video clips circulated on the web showed gruesome violent crimes by militant Islamists against both Syrian security forces and other Islamists, while radical sheikhs were televised ordering acts of retribution against civilian members of Syria’s ruling Alawite sect.

Our problem today is that we don’t have control over who carries arms.

On Syria’s border with Lebanon, jihadist activities have skyrocketed. The Libya-origin arms shipment destined for Syria and intercepted by the Lebanese Army two weeks ago was no lone incident – it was the fourth such “capture.” And just ten days ago, a fellow reporter captured on film Jihadists transporting heavy weapons like Stinger shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles, Cobra anti-tank missiles and Sam-7 surface-to-air missiles into Syrian territory.

In a recent BBC Arabic interview, National Coordination Committee (NCC) official Haytham Manna, a leading opposition figure, surprised many by acknowledging the role of “non-Syrians” in the armed groups: “Jihadist groups that fought from Afghanistan to Bosnia and therefore this third group for us constitutes a grave danger. For your information, I can share names of 3 members of the Free Syria Army who were killed at the hands of Arab fighters – non-Syrians.”

Says Manna: “Our problem today is that we don’t have control over who carries arms.”

So now it appears the jihadist element inside Syria is going to put the international community to a test.

Kofi Annan urges ‘one voice’ while he mediates Syrian crisis – The Nation

The shaky April 12 ceasefire under the Annan Plan has been rocked recently by a series of bombings and targeted assassinations, with both sides accusing the other of violations.

The fact is, even if the Syrian government were to withdraw all troops from populated areas, and Major-General Mood’s contacts within the main armed opposition groups agreed to lay down arms, there are parties on the ground in Syria that are currently operating outside of the UN’s reach.

The UN draft Protocol which lays out the terms for the “cessation of armed violence” between the two sides, only refers to the non-governmental party vaguely as “armed opposition groups and relevant elements.”

This is no longer sufficient.

There can be no cessation of hostilities in Syria unless all groups cease fighting. There can be no guarantees until there is clarity about who is in the fight.

This does not necessarily mean the end of Annan’s efforts. It does mean, however, that the final UN Protocol document needs to be revised to specify the various parties held accountable on the “armed opposition” side. And if there are groups that will not cooperate with the mission and will continue to carry out armed operations, there must be clear and precise provisions for how and when the Syrian security forces can deal with these armed entities.

Al-Qaeda: Syria, Then Where?

The fatal attacks come at a time when Moscow is working overtime to negotiate power-sharing roles in a new Syrian political environment with members of the Syrian domestic opposition.

Churkin to RT — The latest resolution on Syria, unanimously passed in the Security Council, may finally put things “on the right track” in the troubled country, …

On Tuesday, Syria’s representative at the United Nations Bashar al-Jafari provided the Security Council with a surprise CD containing confessions from more than two dozen jihadists, placing the UN body on notice. A well-connected intelligence source confirmed last week that among the documentation compiled on foreign fighters – some killed, some captured – are nationals of at least two European states.

The Russians have been spitting mad about the fact that the UN Protocol “ties the regime’s hands” in dealing with the Syrian jihadist element, and in the past week they have made little effort to hide this problem.

In a statement, the Russian foreign ministry slammed recent “terrorist attacks
…for escalating violence in the country to thwart the implementation of the peace plan.”

These fatal attacks come at a time when Moscow is working overtime to negotiate power-sharing roles in a new Syrian political environment with members of the Syrian domestic opposition.

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice went on the rhetorical offensive against Syria…

But Washington too has a big role to play in Syria in the next few weeks, and it needs to make its mind up fast. Geoffrey Aronson, director of research at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, points out that the Obama administration is rudderless on Syria – “unable to support a solution with the regime and its allies,” they “snipe at the Annan mission from the sidelines” with no real plan in mind:

Lacking a strategic compass, Washington finds itself not leading from behind but being dragged from behind in support of the policies and agendas of others — including in the Gulf and among the Syrian National Council — that promise at best to continue bleeding the regime, its opponents, and the long-suffering Syrian people, and that threaten the institutional and even the territorial integrity of the Syrian state.

Al-Qaeda is no longer a small hierarchical group – today, it is more of an “idea” whose informal “membership” consists of individual cells that are difficult to snuff out. This is an opportunistic and expansionist ideology that has at its very roots an axe to grind with the United States, Israel and the rulers of Saudi Arabia – the latter nation being the largest source of funding for this brand of militant jihadism in the world.

If “spoiler” groups inside Syria continue to receive funding and support from external parties – unchecked and ignored by the UN Security Council – and ongoing violence threatens to sidetrack political reform and reconciliation, there are likely to be repercussions against regional states participating in these provocations.

Parties opposed to western hegemony in the Middle East see the battle in Syria as an existential one, and sources say that if all cards are exhausted, the fight can opportunistically be moved to vulnerable bordering states – and even into the Persian Gulf where jihadists have their own axe to grind with pro-US, pro-Israel monarchies.

Parties opposed to western hegemony in the Middle East see the battle in Syria as an existential one.

A single major explosion in Riyadh or World Cup-intent Doha can fundamentally rock the internal dynamics and external outlook of those countries.

On Tuesday, Kofi Annan briefed the Security Council on his Plan in Syria: “If it fails, as the Secretary-General has warned, it will affect the whole region.” He added that he was not just speaking of the Syrian government or armed groups “but also the governments which have influence on the opposition.”

It is crunch time in Syria. Allow the jihadist battle to take flight there, and there is no telling how far and wide this fight will spread. The Annan Plan is the “only game in town,” and the Syrian Army the only military force that can take action against these militants.

Define this common enemy in a revised UN Protocol – and draft a Security Council-approved plan to target these foreign fighters. Or else stop complaining about Al Qaeda explosives smuggled onto flights destined for the United States and beyond.

Original Source: Al-Akhbar English

You can follow Sharmine on twitter @snarwani.

Security Council changed prerogatives in Syrian crisis – Churkin to RT

by Stephen M Walt

Foreign Policy – I did a brief interview for All Things Considered last Friday, on the topic of media handling of the current war scare over Iran. Here's a link to the story, which ran over the weekend.

The interview got me thinking about the issue of media coverage of this whole business, and I'm sorry to say that most mainstream news organizations have let us down again.

Although failures haven't been as egregious as the New York Times and Washington Post's wholesale swallowing of the Bush administration's sales pitch for war in 2002, on the whole the high-end media coverage has been disappointing.

Here are my Top Ten Media Failures in the 2012 Iran War Scare.

#1: Mainstreaming the war. As I've written before, when prominent media organizations keep publishing alarmist pieces about how war is imminent, likely, inevitable, etc., this may convince the public that it is going to happen sooner or later and it discourages people from looking for better alternatives. Exhibits A and B for this problem are Jeffrey Goldberg's September 2010 article inThe Atlantic Monthly and Ronan Bergman's February 2012 article in the New York Times Magazine. Both articles reported that top Israeli leaders believed time was running out and suggested that an attack might come soon.

#2: Loose talk about Iran's "nuclear [weapons] program." A recurring feature of Iran war coverage has been tendency to refer to Iran's "nuclear weapons program" as if its existence were an established fact. U.S. intelligence services still believe that Iran does not have an active program, and the IAEA has also declined to render that judgment either. Interestingly, both theTimes' public editor Arthur Brisbane and Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton have recently chided their own organizations for muddying this issue.

#3: Obsessing about Ahmadinejad. A typical insertion into discussions of Iran is to make various references to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, usually including an obligatory reference to his penchant for Holocaust denial and his famously mis-translated statement about Israel "vanishing from the page of time." This feature is often linked to the issue of whether Iran's leaders are rational or not. But the obsession with Ahmadinejad is misleading in several ways: he has little or no influence over Iran's national security policy, his power has been declining sharply in recent months, and Supreme Leader Ali Khameini — who does make the key decisions — has repeatedly said that nuclear weapons are contrary to Islam. And while we're on the subject of Iranian "rationality," it is perhaps worth noting that its leaders weren't goofy enough to invade Iraq on a pretext and then spend trillions of dollars fighting an unnecessary war there.

#4: Ignoring Iranian weakness. As I've noted before, Iran is not a very powerful country at present, though it does have considerable potential and could exert far more international influence if its leaders were more competent. But its defense budget is perhaps 1/50^th the size of U.S. defense spending, and it has no meaningful power-projection capabilities. It could not mount a serious invasion of any of its neighbors, and could not block the Strait of Hormuz for long, if at all. Among other things, that is why it has to rely on marriages of convenience with groups like Hezbollah or Hamas (who aren't that powerful either). Yet as Glenn Greenwald argues here, U.S. media coverage often portrays Iran as a looming threat, without offering any serious military analysis of its very limited capabilities.

#5: Failing to ask why Iran might want a bomb. Discussions of a possible war also tend to assume that if Iran does in fact intend to get a nuclear weapon, it is for some nefarious purpose. But the world's nine nuclear powers all obtained these weapons first and foremost for deterrent purposes (i.e., because they faced significant external threats and wanted a way to guarantee their own survival). Iran has good reason to worry: It has nuclear-armed states on two sides, a very bad relationship with the world's only superpower, and more than three dozen U.S. military facilities in its neighborhood. Prominent U.S. politicians repeatedly call for "regime change" there, and a covert action campaign against Iran has been underway for some time, including the assassination of Iranian civilian scientists.

#6: Failing to consider why Iran might NOT want a bomb. At the same time, discussions of Iran's nuclear ambitions often fail to consider the possibility that Iran might be better off without a nuclearweapons capability. As noted above, Supreme Leader Khameini has repeatedly said that nuclear weapons are contrary to Islam, and he may very well mean it. He could be lying, but that sort of lie would be risky for a regime whose primary basis for legitimacy is its devotion to Islam. For another, Iran has the greatest power potential of any state in the Gulf, and if it had better leadership it would probably be the strongest power in the region. If it gets nuclear weapons some of its neighbors may follow suit, which would partly negate Iran's conventional advantages down the road. Furthermore, staying on this side of the nuclear weapons threshold keeps Iran from being suspected of complicity should a nuclear terrorist attack occur somewhere. For all these reasons, I'd bet Iran wants a latent nuclear option, but not an actual nuclear weapon. But there's been relatively little discussion of that possibility in recent media coverage.

#7: Exaggerating Israel's capabilities. In a very real sense, this whole war scare has been driven by the possibility that Israel might feel so endangered that they would launch a preventive war on their own, even if U.S. leaders warned them not to. But the IDF doesn't have the capacity to take out Iran's new facility at Fordow, because they don't have any aircraft that can carry a bomb big enough to penetrate the layers of rock that protect the facilities. And if they can't take out Fordow, then they can't do much to delay Iran's program at all and the only reason they might strike is to try to get the United States dragged in. In short, the recent war scare-whose taproot is the belief that Israel might strike on its own-may be based on a mirage.

#8: Letting spinmeisters play fast and loose with facts. Journalists have to let officials and experts express their views, but they shouldn't let them spout falsehoods without pushing back. Unfortunately, there have been some egregious cases where prominent journalists allowed politicians or government officials to utter howlers without being called on it. When Rick Santorum announced on Meet the Press that "there were no inspectors" in Iran, for example, host David Gregory didn't challenge this obvious error. (In fact, Iran may be the most heavily inspected country in the history of the IAEA).

Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren

Even worse, when Israeli ambassador Michael Oren appeared on MSNBC last week, he offered the following set of dubious claims, without challenge:

"[Iran] has built an underground nuclear facility trying to hide its activities from the world. It has been enriching uranium to a high rate [sic.] that has no explanation other than a military nuclear program – that has been confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency now several times. It is advancing very quickly on an intercontinental ballistic missile system that's capable of carrying nuclear warheads."

Unfortunately, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell apparently didn't know that Oren's claims were either false or misleading. 1) Iran's underground facility was built to make it hard to destroy, not to "hide its activities," and IAEA inspectors have already been inside it. 2) Iran is not enriching at a "high rate" (i.e., to weapons-grade); it is currently enriching to only 20% (which is not high enough to build a bomb). 3) Lastly, Western intelligence experts do not think Iran is anywhere near to having an ICBM capability.

In another interview on NPR, Oren falsely accused Iran of "killing hundreds, if not thousands of American troops," a claim that NPR host Robert Siegel did not challenge. Then we got the following exchange:

Oren: "Imagine Iran which today has a bunch of speedboats trying to close the Strait of Hormuz. Imagine if Iran has a nuclear weapon. Imagine if they could hold the entire world oil market blackmailed. Imagine if Iran is conducting terrorist organizations through its terrorist proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah. Now we know there's a connection with al-Qaida. You can't respond to them because they have an atomic weapon."

Siegel: Yes. You're saying the consequences of Iran going nuclear are potentially global, and the consequences of a U.S. strike on Iran might also be further such attacks against the United States…"

Never mind the fact that we have been living in the nuclear age for some 60 years now, and no nuclear state has even been able to conduct the sort of aggressive blackmail that Oren suggests Iran would be able to do. Nuclear weapons are good for deterrence, and not much else, but the news media keep repeating alarmist fantasies without asking if they make sense or not.

Politicians and government officials are bound to use media moments to sell whatever story they are trying to spin; that's their job. But It is up to journalists to make this hard, and both Mitchell and Siegel didn't. (For another example of sloppy fact-checking, go here).

9. What about the human beings? One of the more bizarre failures of reporting on the war debate has been the dearth of discussion of what an attack might mean for Iranian civilians. If you take out some of Iran's nuclear facilities from the air, for example, there's a very real risk of spreading radioactive material or other poisonous chemicals in populated areas, thereby threatening the lives of lots of civilians. Yet when discussing the potentially dangerous consequences of a war, most discussions emphasize the dangers of Iranian retaliation, or the impact on oil prices, instead of asking how many innocent Iranian civilians might die in the attack. You know: the same civilians we supposedly want to liberate from a despotic clerical regime.

10. Could diplomacy work? Lastly, an underlying theme in a lot of the coverage is the suggestion that diplomacy is unlikely to work, because it's been tried before and failed. But the United States has had very little contact with Iranian officials over the past thirty years, and only one brief set of direct talks in the past three years. Moreover, we've insisted all along that Iran has to give up all nuclear enrichment, which is almost certainly a deal-breaker from Tehran's perspective. The bottom line is that diplomacy has yet to succeed-and it might not in any case-but it's also never been seriously tried.

I'm sure you can find exceptions to the various points I've made here, especially if you move outside major media outlets and focus on online publications and the blogosphere. Which may be why more people are inclined to get their news and analysis there, instead of from the usual outlets. But on the whole, Americans haven't been well-served by media coverage of the Iran debate. As the president said last week, "loose talk" about an issue like this isn't helpful.

Source: Foreign Policy

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where he served as academic dean from 2002-2006. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as master of the social science collegiate division and deputy dean of social sciences.

He has been a resident associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, and he has also been a consultant for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

 

Professor Walt is the author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (W. W. Norton, 2005), and, with coauthor J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

He presently serves as faculty chair of the international security program at the Belfer Center for Science and international affairs and as co-chair of the editorial board of the journal International Security. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies, and coeditor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, published by Cornell University Press. He was elected as a fellow in the American academy of arts and sciences in May 2005.

by Jacque Fresco

“Freedom is popular” – Ron Paul

His message of individual liberty and freedom to all is growing a worldwide following.
People are taking heed to the liberty movement as Ron Paul and others expose the criminality of our governments and institutions that have enslaved us for so long.

He has the #1 support from not only the troops who no longer wish to be at war, he also has the support of the youth. The intellectual revolution has begun…

Ron Paul Rallies Feb-Apr 2012: