Payoff time in Washington

Tom Delay (R-Texas)

THE fall of Tom DeLay, erstwhile leader of the Republican majority in the US House of Representatives, over charges of violating election financing laws coupled with criminal charges linked to money laundering, is a major blow to US President George W Bush.
The DeLay affair has sent tremors through the White House and the Republican establishment in Washington, raising fears that the party's 11-year grip on the House of Representatives could be ended by November 2006's Congressional mid-term elections.
Bush is already in serious trouble. The credibility of his administration has steadily plunged, depressed by revelations after revelations that many of its senior figures had plotted the war against Iraq even before they came to power and they engineered the invasion of Iraq and ouster of Saddam Hussein through lies and deceit.
The anti-war movement is gaining strength throughout the US.
The glaring shortcomings in the way the administration dealt with Hurricane Katrina have drawn such bitter criticism that Bush is the worst president that the US ever saw.
Add to that the controversies that surrounded Bush's nomination of John Bolton as the US ambassador to the UN, John Roberts as Supreme Court justice and Harriet Miers as associate chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Add to that the increasing talk among Americans that pro-Israelis are leading the Bush administration by the nose; and then take note that the first public appearance of DeLay after being indicted and forced to leave his leadership position was at a s dinner hosted by "Stand for Israel," a group of Israel-supporting evangelical Christians and Jews.
On Monday, a Texas grand jury indicted DeLay for alleged involvement in money laundering related to the 2002 Texas election, raising new and more serious allegations than the conspiracy charge lodged against the former House of Representatives majority leader last week.
The surprising new indictments followed by a matter of hours a motion by DeLay's lawyers to quash last week's charge on grounds that the Texas prosecutor in charge of the case lacked authority to bring it. The lawyers alleged that the crime of conspiracy was not covered by the state election law at the time of the alleged violation.
The new indictment accuses DeLay of illegally circumventing the state's law against corporate campaign contributions.
Specifically, DeLay, 58, is accused of conspiring with Jim Ellis of Washington, D.C., and John Colyandro of Austin to convert $190,000 in donations from several corporations into campaign contributions on behalf of seven Republican state House of Representatives candidates.
According to the district attorney's office, that corporate money was sent from Austin to Washington, and then sent back to Texas in the form of contributions to candidates for the state Legislature. Texas law makes it a felony for corporations and labor unions to contribute to political candidates.
If convicted on the money laundering charge, which is a first-degree felony, DeLay would face a sentence of up to five years' probation to life in prison, and a fine of up to $10,000. Conspiracy to commit money laundering is a second-degree felony punishable by to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
By contrast, the original conspiracy indictment carried a sentence of two years in a state jail and a fine of up to $10,000.
Delay is due to appear in a Travis County courtroom in Austin on Oct. 21 to formally hear the charges against him.
But then, the charges are only the tip of an iceberg. Critics accuse DeLay of massive influence peddling and assuming and even exercising political clout equivalent to that of the president itself.
Democratic politicians were quick to condemn both DeLay and the Republican leadership.
"The second criminal indictment of Congressman DeLay is yet another example that Republicans in Congress are plagued by a culture of corruption and cronyism at the expense of the American people," said Jennifer Crider, press secretary to House of Representatives Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.
DeLay's departure as majority leader in the House of Representatives deprives the Republicans of arguably its most powerful figure on Capitol Hill, an unmatched political organiser and enforcer who has done more than anyone to drive Bush's agenda through a divided and partisan Congress.
But not only on Capitol Hill has he ruled the Republican flock with a rod of iron. The 58-year old Texas Congressman has also been a prime architect of his party's so-called "K Street Project," using a combination of carrots and sticks to place Republicans at the head of the lobbying firms and business interest groups who play a central role in shaping legislation here.
Even Democratic opponents who detest him grudgingly admit there has been no more effective majority leader from either party in the last 20 years.
Congressional watchdogs sketch a different legacy: That of a man who repeatedly skirted the edges of ethics and campaign finance rules to consolidate power for his party, eventually pushing the envelope too far.
"DeLay's raw power grab has relied on a complex influence-peddling scheme designed to consolidate his own power and that of his party's while giving corporate interests private access to steer the wheels of government at the expense of citizens," said Joan Claybrook, head of Public Citizen, a watchdog group.
Commentator Rupert Corn wrote in the Independent of London:
"I make no bones about it. I cannot abide DeLay, his ruthless ways and narrow conservative views, all wrapped in the cloth of God. For me, he is emblem of much that is wrong with US politics. Arguably, though, he is the most powerful man in Washington apart from George Bush himself. A colleague once described DeLay as a cross between a concierge and a mafia don: "They can get you anything you want but it will cost you." How delicious it is that he seems to have received his comeuppance - those who live by the sword die by the sword, and all that."

Congressional Republican leaders have replaced DeLay with Missouri Congressman Roy Blunt on a "temporary" basis — on the assumption that the Texan's protestations of innocence are true, and that he will be speedily exonerated.
But Blunt is under a small ethics shadow of his own. Records on file with the Federal Election Commission show that Blunt's political action committee has paid some $88,000 in fees since 2003 to a consultant facing indictment in Texas in the DeLay case.
But for Republicans, the DeLay affair is only the latest in a series of ethics controversies involving major party figures, stretching from Capitol Hill and the lobbying industry into the White House itself.
Known as "The Hammer" for his ruthless style, DeLay helped create the current Republican golden age in Washington. He was a close lieutenant of former speaker Newt Gingrich, who led the party to victory in the 1994 mid-term elections, by seizing on public discontent with an entrenched, corrupt and complacent Democratic majority. The wheel may now be turning full circle.
The host of scandals now threatens to tar the Republicans in exactly the same fashion. Just like Republicans 11 years ago, Democrats scent blood. The DeLay affair, charges Pelosi, is "the latest example that Republicans in Congress are plagued by a culture of corruption." The pile of supporting evidence for that claim is growing almost by the day."
From a Republican perspective, the best hope is that DeLay himself will be sidelined for only a few weeks. At worst, however, he could find himself being handcuffed and photographed as an alleged felon.
Meanwhile Bill Frist, his counterpart in the Senate, is under separate federal probe for possible insider trading, in connection with the sale of shares in his family hospital company, shortly before the stock price fell sharply. Like DeLay, Mr Frist denies any wrongdoing, but the very fact of an investigation is embarrassment enough.
Related trouble is brewing on the lobbying front. Jack Abramoff, a disgraced top Republican lobbyist who once had close ties to DeLay, has been charged with fraud, and may be tempted to incriminate leading party figures as part of a plea bargain with FBI investigators.
The same goes for David Safavian, a former senior White House budget aide who resigned earlier this month — just days before he was indicted for perjury and obstructing the Abramoff probe.
That case has only escaped wider coverage because it has been overshadowed by greater disasters for Bush, in the most troubled spell of his Presidency. They include the seemingly intractable insurgency in Iraq , his inept response to Hurricane Katrina and public disgruntlement at soaring petrol and fuel prices, always an especially sensitive issue for a US leader.
In the meantime the White House is bracing for the conclusion of the investigation by an independent prosecutor into the leak of the name of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative Valerie Plame, which has already seen Karl Rove and other top administration officials testifying before a federal grand jury.
Many say that if the prosecutor does his job, then even Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney could be named as having been instrumental in "outing" Plame in retaliation for her husband's revelation that "evidence" Bush cited to support his charge that Iraq had a nuclear weapons programme was based on a false intelligence report.
It is time for payoff for the Bush administration, but one does not really know in what currency, at least not yet.

Compiled from wire agencies, newspapers and websites

'Disgusting and nauseating'

This is said to be a doctored photo of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. A US newspaper published it but then withdrew it explaining that someone had doctored an Associated Press photo to give Rice's eyes a sinister look.




PV Vivekanand

"The government lied, and your kids died" This is the rallying cry of American anti-war movements and critics of the George Bush administration. But you would not find the slogan in the mainstream corporate media of the United States. For most of them, it is business as usual, with Republican President Bush and his people doing a great job of governing the country, fighting off terror threats to national security and stability and challenges to the very way of life in the US.
As far as the mainstream media are concerned, charges that the administration lied and used deceit to lead the country to war against Iraq in order to serve Israeli interests more than those of the US simply happen to be fabricated by the opposition Democrats and others who do not like the Republicans. Indeed, that is what emerges from the behaviour and utterances of Bush and senior officials in his administration. They don't seem to care a hoot about what many Americans have to say about how the country has fallen from its stature as the most respected nation in the world to that of an entity — not withstanding its sole superpower status — run by an autocratic regime that bulldozes its way in whatever direction it deems fit. But then, it is not surprising, given that those in power in the US believes only in military might and global dominance at whatever cost. Everything else is trivial and irrelevant.
It is indeed surprising to this part of the world that Bush himself and his people are blatantly ignoring well-established facts and substantiated allegations that they took the people of America and the rest of the world for a ride in the invasion of Iraq and continuing with a business-as-usual approach despite the death of nearly 1,900 American soldiers and the maiming of thousands of others (not to mention the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis and the untold suffering the people of that country are now living through).
I know at least half a dozen people who simply switch television channels when Bush and some of his close aides appear on screen.
Indeed, we feel like throwing up when we see and hear them belting out statements that have little relevance to the crises the US and the rest of the world face but serve the interests of the neoconservative camp in Washington.
We recognise them as lies, but we are unable to do anything about; it would appear that not even American voters could do anything about. They are stuck with this present administration and many of their elected representatives depend on the neoconservatives for not only their survival but also to make themselves wealthy and politically powerful.
It is disgusting to listen to Bush administration officials talking about the need for democracy and respect for human rights in the Arab World when the images from Abu Ghraib remain vivid in our mental screens (It does not mean that the Arab states are world models for democracy and human rights, but the point being made here has to do with American hypocrisy).
It is nauseating to listen to Bush administration officials talking about the need to fight "terrorist" groups around the world when we know that most of the "terrorists" are America's own direct or indirect creation (It does not mean that anyone is an apologist for "terrorists" and see their actions as just and fair, but we have to see the American administration's statements against the backdrop of fair evidence that someone high up in the Bush administration was deeply involved in the Sept.11 attacks that triggered the US-led war against terror).
It is ridiculing to listen to Bush administration officials talking about the "greatness" of the US when we know that whatever was indeed great about that country has been sacrified at the altar of Israeli interests and the quest for global dominance.
It is indeed alarming to listen to Bush administration officials levelling charges against countries like Syria and Iran when we know that those countries are being set up and framed into position for "regime changes" to suit American and Israeli interests.
It is sickening to listen to Bush administration officials talking about putting Saddam Hussein and others from the ousted regime on trial when we know that the most deserving candidates to be tried on charges of crimes against humanity are right there in Washington and are allowed to continue their crimes with immunity.
What is even more revolting is the realisation that Bush and his people are perfectly aware that they are giving us a pack of lies but they expect us to swallow it whether we like it or not if only because we are not in a position to do otherwise.
However, Bush and his people should not ignore the rising voice of ordinary Americans. The administration and its cronies might be able to shut them off the corporate media, but their voices are indeed being heard loud and clear — the indignant, furious denounciation of the administration's policies — in the Internet.

Here is an outstanding example (http://www.epluribusmedia.org):

10 Bad Reasons for “Staying the Course” in Iraq (and One Good One)
by Jeff Huber

03 October 2005

10. Democracy takes time. America needed 13 years to write its Constitution.
The American Revolution analogy is ludicrous. Britain did not invade the American colonies in order to liberate us, and we did not ask them to stick around for more than a decade to help us form our government.

9. If we leave now, we’ll embolden the terrorists.
They’re not exactly shrinking violets now. The longer we’ve stayed, the bolder they’ve become.

8. Withdrawing will show lack of American resolve.
Getting in a bar fight over a girl shows resolve. Waking up in jail with your nose broken shows how stupid you are.

7. We’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here.
If we don’t have to fight them over here, why do we spend around $40 billion a year for a Department of Homeland Security?

6. The spread of democracy in the Middle East will enhance America’s security.
"Free" elections in the Middle East have helped Afghanistan become the world’s leading exporter of narcotics and transformed terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah into "legitimate" political parties.

5. We need to support our troops.
I applaud and deeply respect our men and women in uniform for their magnificent service and sacrifice. These are my people, remember? However, comma….

In the first place, we are supporting our troops — to the tune of nearly half a trillion dollars a year.

Second, when we continue to commit those men and women in uniform to a struggle for which there is no military solution, we are abusing them, not supporting them.

Third — and most importantly — America does not exist for the purpose of supporting its military. Our military exists to support America. And if it’s not defending us at home or achieving our national aims overseas, it’s not supporting our country.

4. If we pull out now, we’ll look weak.
We’ve committed our national power to an ill-advised war and are losing. How much weaker can we look?

3. In times of crisis, we need to rally around the president and his policies.
America will not maintain or restore its power and prestige by behaving like a nation of lemmings. There is nothing noble, brave, or patriotic about following the leader over the cliff and into the sea.

2. "They tried to kill my dad."
Thanks to Mr. Bush’s policies and strategies, they’ve succeeded in killing a lot of dads, and moms, and aunts, and uncles, and brothers, and sisters ….
If we cut through the bunker mentality and frame the argument for staying in Iraq to reflect the neocons’ real purpose for the Iraq invasion, it might sound something like this:

1. We set out to establish a military base of operations from which we can control the Middle East and its oil, and we should persist until we "get the job done."
Even though it’s true, the argument’s still specious. Our "besttrained, bestequipped, bestfunded" military can’t get Iraq or Afghanistan under control. How can we possibly expect to lock down the entire Middle East?


+1. We owe something to the Iraqi people.
This is the only rationale that still holds water with me. We need to pay for the pottery we broke. But how much do we need to pay for it, and who exactly is this we we’re referring to, kemosabe?

We the people weren’t the honchos of the Project for a New American Century who made ousting Saddam Hussein the crown jewel of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. We did not cook the intelligence on Iraq. We did not ignore the advice of generals who warned against invading Iraq, then warned against invading with too few troops. And we did not fumble the counterinsurgency effort for two years.

Whatever the price of their bad policies, strategies, and decisions turns out to be, we will be the ones who pay for them. Really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes, remember?

How responsible are we for their deceptions and mistakes, and how much do we want to pay for them?

Tora Bora in Sinai?

PV Vivekanand

It would seem that Israel is steadily building up a case of Al Qaeda preparing to launch anti-Israeli attacks from across the border in Egypt's Sinai. If "leaked" Israeli "intelligence reports" are to be believed then Sinai is being turned into a new Tora Bora of Afghanistan by Al Qaeda, with disgruntled Egyptian bedouins and Palestinians from the Gaza Strip making up the bulk of its supporters in what Israel calls "Al Qaeda Sinai" and "Al Qaeda Palestine." A good faith report on the Israeli claims would read like this:


ISRAELI intelligence reports indicate that Al Qaeda has set up a formidable network in the area and is getting ready to strike at Israeli targets as well as at Jordan and Egypt.
According to intelligence reports, Al Qaeda has set up makeshift camps in the rough terrain and inaccessible peaks of the strategic desert peninsula like the group did in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains during the US-led war there. They are supported in Sinai by rebellious bedouin and Palestinian fighters, and some accounts say that Al Qaeda is better fortified in Sinai than it was in Tora Bora.
Egyptian security forces have failed to pinpoint the Al Qaeda camps let alone dislodge them from the moountain peaks of Egypt, particularly in the area called Jabal Hillal.
Israeli intelligence reports have been warning of Al Qaeda efforts to set up an infrastructure in Sinai area since last October's bomb blasts at Taba's Hilton Hotel followed by another spate of blasts at Egypt's Sharm Al Sheikh resort. Taba is in Egypt, but the area is open to Israelis who used to throng here to frequent the casinos there.
According to Israeli intelligence reports, Al Qaeda now control sroughly one-fifth of Sinai total area (61,000 square kilometres). "Egyptian forces of law and order have learned not to venture into these bastions or into the areas commanded by age-old smuggler clans who currently collaborate with Al Qaeda," says one report. "This leaves about half of the forbidding desert peninsula inaccessible to Egyptian security forces. Today, they can only claim to control the main roads routes fringing the vast desert expanse: from Ras Sudeir down to Sharm Al Sheikh along the Suez Canal and Suez Gulf shores; from the Suez Canal east to El Arish along the Mediterranean shore and from the Sharm el-Sheikh resort center north along the Gulf of Aqaba to Taba and the Israeli port of Eilat (see attached map).
"The spectacular, biblical landscape conceals terrorist bomb traps and roadside devices. Gunmen armed with RPG and anti-tank weapons lurk behind huge rocks in wait for any Egyptian police or security unit daring to step off a main road into one of the dry valleys dissecting the forbidding peaks."
"The paths leading up to peaks – some as tall as 7,500 feet - are barricaded by huge rocks under which explosive snares are concealed. Attempts to move the rocks would set off explosions and start an avalanche. Interspersed among the natural barriers are bomb traps and anti-personnel and anti-tank mines. The caves perforating the slopes are firing positions - some armed with mortars and heavy machine guns."
In view of such fortification, Egyptian securities forces have failed and retreated from their large-scale assaults on the suspected camps.
The only means to dislodge them is through a major aerial bombardment supported by precision landing of troops by helicopters.
However, there are several hurdles to such an assault, according to the Israeli analysis of the situation.
Egypt is not supposed to undertake any air force operations in the Sinai under the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. While Egypt could seek approval and co-ordination for an allout attack against Al Qaeda, the government of Hosni Mubarak is not seen ready to be the target for Muslim anger against it for for collaborating with the Jewish state against Al Qaeda, which is seen by many Arabs and Muslims as the symbol of their anti-Israeli struggle.
Another hurdle is Egypt's lack of information about the arsenal possessed by Al Qaeda, which is believed to have a fairly large number of anti-aircraft short-range missiles that could bring down helicopters.
According to Israeli intelligence, Al Qaeda’ has already set up several channels for smuggling fighters, supplies, arms and weapons into Sinai.
These routes exploit the peninsula’s exceptional geography to run between Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and the Gaza Strip after Israel withdrew from there in August and September.
"That al Qaeda has established a presence in the Gaza Strip is no longer a matter of speculation," says the Israeli intelligence report. "Today, Israeli military intelligence AMAN and the Shin Beit are taking the new manifestation of Al Qaeda-Palestine as an offshoot of Al Qaeda-Sinai with the utmost seriousness.
According to the report, foreign fighters have been detected entering the Gaza Strip, welcomed and integrated in to the logistical infrastructures of Palestinian groups and elements of Hizballah, Hamas and Jihad Islami have been heading out of Gaza into Sinai to join Al Qaeda.

Now, why would Israel go the extent of highlighting such a scenario, which clearly questions the abilities of Egypt's security forces? Obviously, it does not want Egypt to have any particularly strong say in Palestinian security-linked issues, and the best way to do that is to show that Egyptian security forces are impotent against militant groups.
On the other hand, it is also possible that the Israeli-reported scenario is fairly accurate. Then that would raise the spectre of Al Qaeda hitting out at Israelis, "moderate" Palestinians, Jordanians and of course Egyptians.
At this point, we could only watch and see.

Judith Miller no Joan of Arc

PV Vivekanand


SO NOW Judith Miller of the New York Times is made out to be a heroine of the media. She is so highly principled a journalist committed to upholding the ethics of the profession that she had opted to spend 85 days in prison rather than reveal her sources. So much is her integrity that she waited until she received "a direct and uncoerced waiver" from her source before going before a grand jury and giving the name of Lewis Scott Libby, a close aide to Vice-President Dick Cheney, as the person who revealed to her that Valerie Palme was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) secret operative.
Well, one could rattle off the names of many who would spend more than 85 days in order to project themselves as models for international journalistic ethics and gain fame, but it subject to debate how many of them would survive a close scrutiny of their journalist record for ethics and unbiased, objective reporting. Of particular importance here is that Miller was in disgrace when she sprang up and went to jail in the name of professional ethics and integrity, now she has emerged to reap the fruit of spending time in jail.
It seems to be a combination of several factors that prompted her to choose to go to jail. It is difficult to cite them in terms of importance and priority since only she would know how she rated them.
From the day Miller opted d to spend time in jail, many commentators declared that her objective was to redeem herself from the disgrace and ostracism she suffered when the New York Times had to apologise for four of her articles that the paper ran in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Her reports spoke about Saddam Hussein's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and painted a picture as if Iraq was threatening the entire Middle Eastern neighbourhood and the US itself with WMDs.
It was easy for the American people — recovering from the trauma of the Sept.11 attacks and repeated warnings of further assaults against them —  to swallow those accounts as accurate.
Those reports also went a considerable way in convincing many sceptics in the US Congress into voting to authorise the Bush administration to wage war on Iraq.
And the NYT had no option but to offer the apology when it was established after the invasion of Iraq and ouster of Saddam that Iraq had no WMDs and the ousted president had destroyed whatever he had at least a decade before the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
It was a serious and unprecedented humiliation for the NYT, and perhaps that was one of the reasons it also tried to redeem itself by taking an open position against a second term for George W Bush in 2004.
How could a "journalistic icon" like Judith Miller make such a mistake? Wasn't she a veteran with decades of experience and followed the code of ethics of the profession to the letter and spirit that it was taken for granted that she would have independently verified the accuracy of the report before firing it off to the NYT foreign desk?
Well, that is where a comment written by Arianna Huffington, editor of the website The Huffington Post and appearing in the Los Angeles Times, has the most relevance.
According to Huffington, "a thorough and comprehensive look at Miller's career reveals repeated examples of egregious reporting, a startling lack of objectivity, too-close-for-comfort relationships with dubious sources … and a penchant for far-from-thorough and far-from-comprehensive coverage."
Startling, isn't it? That is not the way most Americans would have seen Miller, particularly that the NYT itself described her while she was prison as "an intrepid, principled and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has provided our readers with thorough and comprehensive reporting throughout her career."
That was definitely not the way the NYT would have described Miller when it had to eat crow and apologise to the readers for her WMD reports.
In its apology, the paper said a common feature of the "problematic articles" was their dependence at least in part on Iraqi exiles and defectors bent on "regime change".
It said it had found "a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been".
The paper said part of the blame was on editors for failing to challenge reporters.
Well, it had by then been known that Miller's main source was Ahmed Chalabi, who had a vested interest in coercing the US to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. Miller herself admitted that Chalabi was the source for "most of the front-page exclusives on WMD" in the New York Times.
Compare that affirmation with the assessment of David Kay, who led the post-war hunt for WMDs in Iraq. Kay said Chalabi's was brilliance was to provide information to different Western intelligence agencies, which then vied with each other to trumpet the insights of their intelligence, unaware that they were all from the same source.
But for Miller to have depended on Chalabi without verifying the accuracy of his dubious accounts of Iraq's non-existent WMDs was totally out of character for a NYT reporter.
As Huffington observes, "The inescapable fact is that Miller — intentionally or unintentionally — worked hand in glove in helping the White House propaganda machine sell the war in Iraq. And that includes Libby and his boss, Dick Cheney."
Author and commentator Justin Raimundo, who describes Libby as the man at the centre of the neoconservative seat of power in Washington, is more harsh.
"If any one source of government-generated disinformation could be pointed to as vitally important in the campaign to lie us into war with Iraq, then surely Miller – the New York Times reporter whose articles did so much to inflate the claims of Iraqi 'weapons of mass destruction' – deserves some sort of award," says Raimundo. "Thanks to her tireless efforts, there was hardly a tall tale told by Ahmed Chalabi's US-government-funded 'intelligence-gathering' operation that did not make it into the New York Times, often on the front page.
"From the aluminum tubes that had nothing to do with nukes or other 'weapons of mass destruction,' to the secret biolabs in the basements of Saddam's palaces, to the string of nuke factories allegedly working overtime from one end of Iraq to the other, it all turned out to be a tissue of lies."
Raimundo continues on www.antiwar.com: "When the US finally went into Iraq, and the search for those mythical WMD began, General Judy was in the forefront of the posse, personally accompanying the military team sent to conduct search operations – virtually 'hijacking' the mission, according to one officer on the scene – and even wearing a military uniform.
"Her imperious manner while in Iraq with META (the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha) aroused considerable resentment, particularly on account of her brazen attempts to intimidate military personnel by threatening to go to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or his deputy Douglas Feith if things did not go her way. And there is evidence that her relationship with the Pentagon was not all bluff and bluster."
Also punctured this week is Miller's claim that without an "uncoerced waiver" from her source, she would never had revealed the identity of the source who revealed that Palme was a CIA agent.
The Palme episode had to do with what has emerged as neoconservatives' way of getting back at her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who revealed that the Bush administration was depending on lies to justify the war against Iraq.
It was known that Libby was Miller's source when the Washington Post quoted Joseph Tate, Libby's lawyer, as saying that he had informed Miller's lawyer Floyd Abrams a year ago that Libby's waiver "was voluntary and that Miller was free to testify."
However, Miller and Abrams continue to insist that the earlier waiver was indeed coerced regardless of Libby's own affirmation that it was not coerced.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Miller had tried to a year ago to make a deal with the prosecutor investigating the leak of Palme's identity but the prosecutor would not agree then to limit her testimony to Libby.
Obviously, Miller's "connections and sources" go higher than Libby — not that there is not much room for too many up there — and that was she insisted in limiting the scope of her testimony to Libby.
Fitzgerald's investigation also involves President George W. Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove.
What exact role did Miller play in the Palme case, how and why?
Well, one thing is clear: Given that she was directly behind the "convincing" reports that Saddam had WMDs, Wilson's charge hit directly at her credibility or the lack of it. By implication, it meant she had an axe to grind against Wilson. But, she never wrote about Palme or Wilson, and there is no clear indication what she did with the information given to her or whether she was instrumental in others getting the information.
However, the Palme scandal hit Miller when she was already in disgrace following the NYT apology.
As Huffington notes, "Before her transformation into a journalistic Joan of Arc, Miller was in a tailspin, her work discredited, removed from the WMD beat and forced to deal with colleagues who refused to share a byline with her.
"She desperately needed to change the subject and cleanse herself of the stench left by her misleading coverage leading up to the war — coverage that makes the Jayson Blair scandal, by comparison, seem ludicrously insignificant (Jayson Blair was a New York Times reporter who resigned in May 2003 after plagiarising a story about a woman whose son died in Iraq, never talked to two other soldiers' parents he quoted in separate articles)."
Many in this part of the world seem not to have looked closely at Miller's record before glorifying her as the heroine of media freedoms and ethics.
The best story that emerges from her various episodes is that she sought to redeem herself back into grace by going to jail in the name of journalistic ethics. Indeed, she seems to have been at least partly successful, but a quick look at the way she conducted herself throughout the Palme affair would only create more sceptics.

9/11 and Israel: Cover-up of century

PV Vivekanand

AMERICANS should be shocked. Fresh evidence gathered through meticulous research by a respected American lawyer shows that Israeli intelligence had been following most of the people named as the suicide hijackers of 9/11 for more than one year throughout the US. They always stayed with a stone's throw from the houses rented by the would-be hijackers, both on the east and west coasts of the US, and it was clear that they were spying on them. The implication is clear: Israelis knew in advance of the plan to stage the Sept.11 attacks. The Israeli secret agency, Mossad, had made a pretense of tipping off its US counterpart that an attack was coming, but the warning was at best vague and Mossad is seen to have deliberately held back specifics. After all, Israel stood to benefit best from the 9/11 air assaults, as subsequent events have proved.
IT was indeed reported that US intelligence and law enforcement agencies had come across nearly 140 Israelis who were masquerading as arts students but actually spying on top officials of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) shortly before the Sept.11 attacks. It was also found that some of them were staying in the same area as at least four of the 9/11 suicide hijackers were staying. On the day of the attacks, four Israelis were found to have positioned themselves with a video-camera at a spot what offered the best view of New York's World Trade Center towers shortly before the attacks took place and then started dancing when the first plane slammed into the South Tower. A woman who thought the four were Arabs informed police and they were arrested subsequently. The world does not know what the four told American security agencies, but they were freed and allowed to leave the US after a few weeks.
People in the Middle East could immediately put two and two together and come up with the conclusion that Israelis had played a major role in the attacks. The assumption was that Israeli agents with Yemeni, Iraqi and Moroccan origins posed themselves as Arab Muslims, penetrated Al Qaeda, learnt about plans to stage anti-US attacks or even instigated the attacks, provided logistical and technical support from within the American communications and aviation system (which Al Qaeda operatives would never have been able to obtain on their own) and stood back after setting the ground and applauded and danced when the assaults were carried out.
However, the meticulous memorandum prepared by Gerald Shea, a retired corporate lawyer, an alumnus of Phillips Academy, Yale , and Columbia Law School and an associate for many years with one of New York's most prominent law firms, does not suggest a direct or indirect Israeli role in the attacks, but it clearly establishes that Mossad had prior information but kept it away from the US.
Shea has sent the memorandum to the the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission), the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
He notes that the 9/11 Commission conducted an investigation and has already published its findings.
The central theme of the document is "Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers and FBI Suspects in the September 11 Attacks and Their
Failure to Give Us Adequate Warning: The Need for a Public Inquiry."
Constructed like a desertaton thesis, the memorandum includes direct quotes and references to DEA reports, documents of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and four maps of various states of the US as well as an overall map showing where the would-be suicide hijackers as well as the Israelis spying on them stayed between December 2001 and September 2001.

Its preamble says: "I do not know whether the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks or the Senate and House Committees on Intelligence have had the opportunity to consider these issues carefully. If so, I hope this memorandum will be helpful. If not, I respectfully urge them, in accordance with the mandate of the commission’s charter and in the exercise of the committees’ responsibilities, to investigate the facts and resolve the questions presented."
"I emphasiSe at the outset that the purpose of this memorandum is not to accuse any individual or individuals (excluding the hijackers themselves), or any company, of any unlawful act or any other act harmful to the United States.
"That will be the task of others only after, and solely if justified by, the determination of all the relevant facts in the course of the public inquiry."
In summary, he submits that the months leading up to Sept 11, 2001, Israeli intelligence agents were spying on the United States and also keeping Arab groups in the under surveillance, including the future hijackers and other FBI suspects
The base of operations for both the Israelis and the would-be hijackers was in and around Hollywood, Florida. Israeli agents were also keeping under surveillance Arab groups in Bergen and Hudson Counties, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, including the would-be hijackers of the plane that slammed into the Pentago.
"The Israeli New Jersey group appears to have been aware, before they occurred, that hijackings had been planned by Arab terrorists, as evidenced by their jubilation when the World Trade Center was first struck," he says.
He also points out that the leader of the Israeli New Jersey group, who has fled the United States for Israel, is included, along with the names of the hijackers and FBI suspects in a list drawn up by the FBI in May 2002.
He says the Mossad warnings given to the FBI in August 2001 "were too vague and too late to have enabled the United States to take any action to prevent the imminent attacks at unspecified locations."
" Why the Israeli government decided not to share with us all the critical information they had, and the extent of that information, is a subject for the public inquiry," he affirms. "They may have thought some sort of warning prudent in the event their surveillance activities later became a matter of public knowledge. But any energetic Israeli effort to assist the United States in preventing the attacks would not have served their strategic interest, in view of the disastrous effect those attacks were likely to have on the relationships between the United States and the Arab World."
What Shea stops short of saying is something that people in the Middle East have always suspected.
From the very beginning there were suggestions that Mossad was behind the attacks, which led to a series of events that greatly benefited
Israeli interests. This included a big strain in relations between the US and Arab and Muslim worlds — whom Israel considers as its worst enemies. Equally important was the US invasion of Iraq that resulted in eliminating the reign of Saddam Hussein, who, among the Arabs, posed the
greatest challenge to Israel's expansionist ambitions and its quest for regional domination.
Today, the US is going after Syria and Iran, the two other countries
which pose a challenge to Israel's objectives in the
Middle East.
The US is waging a self-styled war on terrorism, and the obvious targets are Arabs and Muslims.
Israel did not have to send a single soldier or fire a single bullet to
remove Saddam from power and render Iraq as a crippled, devastated country which would take decades to get on its own feet let alone rebuild its military capabilities to a level that it had under the reign of
Saddam Hussein.
Shea suggest that also subject the public inquiry should be how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) handled the information given to it whether the agency condoned the Israeli groups’ surveillance of Arab groups generally in the United States prior to Sept. 11.
Justin Raimundo, an expert who had been following up post-9/11 development and gathering information on pre-9/11 events and who has come up with conclusions similar to those of Shea, observes:

"There are significant new details unearthed by Shea's research and his thoroughness, particularly in tracing the parallel movements of the 9/11 hijackers (and their known associates) and the Israelis. Shea shows the Israelis had the means, the motive, and the physical proximity to track the hijackers' movements and intercept the details of their plans. Of particular interest is how some of the hijackers came to be put on the FBI's watch list — too late to do any good, but in time to provide the Israelis with a cover story if their shadowing activities came to light — which suggests a cover-up of major proportions."
A chart accompanying the Shea memorandum shows the various would-be hijackers according to their geographical locations in one column and the Israeli agents detained and deported or otherwise identified in the other.
"The maps show this correlation in graphic terms: the effect is shocking," says Raimundo. "Whether shocking enough to shake the 9/11 Commission and our government officials out of their torpor remains to be seen."

In June 2001, the Office of Security of the DEA issued a long report describing in precise detail the attempts of approximately 125 or more nationals of a foreign country, most posing as art students, “to penetrate several DEA field offices in the continental United States.” Many of these individuals also visited the residences of numerous DEA officials and “other agencies’ facilities and the residences of their employees.” The DEA report states that “these incidents have occurred since at least the beginning of 2000, and have continued to the present," Shea memorandum says.
It was subseqently discovered that that DEA agents’ communications have been penetrated by the Israelis and suspicion fell on two companies, AMDOCS and Comverse Infosys, both owned by Israelis.
AMDOCS generates billing data for most US phone companies and is able to provide detailed logs of who is talking to whom, and Comverse Infosys builds the tapping equipment used by law enforcement to eavesdrop on all American telephone calls.
By inference, Comverse, which gets half of its research and development budget from the Israeli government, had allowed Mossad access to intelligence and that the secret agency was passing on information to narcotic smugglers on American efforts to fight drug trafficking. If Mossad was able to get access to such information, then it went without saying that it had similar access to the communications of the would-be hijackers.
Most experts agree that the investigation by the FBI into the Israeli spying againt DEA agents actually exposed the largest foreign spy ring ever uncovered inside the United States, operated by Israel, but no action was taken.
The experts noted that half of the suspected spies were arrested before Sept. 11.
On 9/11 five Israelis are arrested for dancing and cheering while the World Trade Towers collapse.
A summary of the incident shows that:
Supposedly employed by Urban Moving Systems, the Israelis caught with multiple passports and a lot of cash. Two of them were later revealed to be Mossad.
As witness reports tracked the activity of the Israelis, it emerged that they were seen at Liberty Park at the time of the first impact, suggesting a foreknowledge of what was to come. The Israelis were interrogated, and then eventually sent back to Israel.
The owner of the moving company used as a cover by the Mossad agents abandoned his business and fled to Israel.
The United States government then classified all of the evidence related to the Israeli agents and their connections to 9-11.
All of this was reported to the public via a four part story on Fox News by reporter Carl Cameron. Pressure from Jewish groups, primarily the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful lobbying group in Washington, forced Fox News to remove the story from their website.
Two hours prior to the 9-11 attacks, Odigo, an Israeli company with offices just a few blocks from the World Trade Towers, received an advance warning via the internet. The manager of the New York Office provided the FBI with the IP address of the sender of the message, but the FBI did not follow up.
Shea's memorandum names the hijackers as well as the Israeli agents who were keeping them under surveillance.
He notes that all the Israelis had, at one point or another, had works with Israeli security agencies as well as the military (Mossad does not release any record of its operatives anyway), and they were indeed proved to be Israeli spies during the DEA investigations.
It was an Israeli diplomat who intervened and secured the release of some of those detained prior to Sept.11, thus indicating that the detainees had links with the Israeli government.
In any event, most of them actually admitted during FBI questioning that they were Mossad agents.
Shea has established — based on FBI investigations as well as other inquiries —  that just two or three months the 9/11 attacks, 15 of the 19 would-be hijackers were also living in Hollywood, Florida, nine in the town itself and six in surrounding towns.
More than 30 of the identified Israeli agents lived in the Hollywood area, 10 in Hollywood itself, according to Shea, who names most of them as well as the would-be hijackers as listed by the FBI.
Similar evidence is cited about all other areas where the would-be hijackers were sighted and known to have visited and stayed, as post-9/11 FBI investigations established.
These included several states (see maps).

One thing is clear: Shea's memorandum proves that Israeli intelligence knew that the 9/11 attacks were coming and did nothing to prevent it.
Beyond that, however, is the reality that Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda could not have carried out the attacks without help from people who had not only deep intelligence connections in the US but also the opportunity and
ability to create the right conditions to stage the
attacks. Those people could not be Al Qaeda
operatives. They had to be people with high connections within the American security and aviation systems with deep knowledge of how the systems worked and what are the best means to set up misleading
information and signs that pointed in the direction
that Arab Muslims were behind the attacks.
The most obvious names that come up is: Israel and Mossad.
For all technical purposes, Mossad told its American counterparts that its agents were keeping an eye on Al Qaeda agents and were in touch with them only to help foil the group's plans, but in actually the Mossad operatives co-operated closely with the hijackers and helped them with hard information (gained through Mossad intelligence operations) on the American aviation security system and other logistic support.
It is worth recalling that Bin Laden himself did not explictly claim responsibility for the 9/11 attacks until October 2004, when he released a video tape two days before American presidential elections.
However, there is no clear answer to why Bin Laden initially disclaimed responsibility, and then only gave vague hints — as if he himself was unsure — before claiming responsibility three years later.
His initial statement was categorical: Bin Laden strongly denied any role in the attacks.
"I was not involved in the Sept.11 attacks in the United States nor did I have knowledge of the attacks," he said shortly after the assaults. "There exists a government within a government within the United
States. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; to the people who want to make the present century a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity. That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks. The American system is totally in control of the Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States."

Did Bush steal the elections?

PV Vivekanand
NEARLY one year after George W Bush won re-election for another four years at the White House, questions are getting stronger whether he was legitimately elected or won his second term through rigging the elections. Such questions are not expected to lead to anywhere in real terms because there is no provision for challenging the results now. However, there is a heated debate going on in cyberspace and the mainstream corporate media organisations of the US are keeping away from touching it.
We have to recall that Bush's victory in the 2000 elections was not convincing either. Al Gore was almost declared the winner and it took the Supreme Court to declare Bush as winner despite lingering questions about uncounted votes that could have seen Gore entering the White House.
The Washington Post reported in November 2000 that at 10 pm on election night , Al Gore was leading Bush in Volusia County, Florida, by 83,000 to 62,000 votes. One-half hour later, Gore's vote total had been reduced by 16,000 to 67,000 and an obscure Socialist candidate saw a sudden surge to 10,000 votes in a precinct with only 600 voters. The information on the Volusia optical scanner voting anomalies came from a leaked internal memorandum of the company which supplied the electronic voting machines. In the end, Bush won Florida and the White House by a mere 537 votes in the most controversial US presidential election in history.
Rigging the elections in the US? Sheer nonsense, many of us might say, but the evidence there, according to thousands of Americans, including top-notch experts, who have opted to place their opinion on the Internet substantiated by research and key findings of investigations in the months that followed the 2004 November elections.
There are charges that problems — like missing names and logistical problems — distruped voting in many areas where Republican Bush was predicted to do badly and Democrat John Kerry; ballot boxes were opened behind the scenes before counting; some were stuffed with predetermined number of votes in favour of Bush. Not many experts support the stuffing theory though.
Other "problems" included voting machine shortages, ballots counted and recounted in secret, lost, discarded, and improperly rejected registration forms and absentee ballots, precincts in which there were more votes recorded than registered voters, precincts in which the reported participation rate was less than 10 per cent, and high rates of “spoiled” ballots and under-votes in which no choice for president was recorded. Most of these problems occurred in states where Kerry was tipped to win. There were only few such problems where Bush was supposed to have won.
A study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Steven F. Freeman and Temple University’s Josh Mittledorf clearly leaves the impression that the authors believe that Bush stole the elections.
National opinion poll results had projected a Kerry victory by three per cent, whereas the official count had Bush winning by 2.5 per cent. The probability of such a mistake, in strict mathematics-based logical terms, was put at one in 100,000. No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to chance.
The worst charge — which is not limited the Freeman-Mittledorf study — is that there was a massive conspiracy and tampering with electronic voting.
In summary, the scenario the experts are outlining is simple: In several states, notably Ohio, California, Wisconsin, South Carolina and Florida, Bush scored surprisingly high number of votes against Kerry. In all these states, opinion polls had predicted Kerry's victory but the actual results went in favour of Bush.
How could the votes be tampered?
Not all states of the US have adopted electronic voting. Voters there use paper ballots.
Experts point out that in most states where there was no electronic voting, the predictions of pre-election opinion polls were very accurate — plus or minus two per cent — when votes were counted. The physical ballot papers were there and there could have been no fraud there, whether in favour of Bush or Kerry.
That was not at all the case in states with mostly electronic balloting. Here, the results contradicted opinion polls which favoured Kelly. Obviously, computers leave little trace of fraud and there is no physical evidence to show that the votes of those who voted through machines in favour of Kerry were registered automatically as in favour of Bush; that is where the key fraud took place.
According to those who argue Bush stole the elections, the very company which produced the electronic voting machines conspired to make sure he was re-elected. The owners of the company, Diebold Election Systems, are known to have close links with the Republican camp.
Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold and a top fundraiser for the Bush campaign, wrote in a fund-raising letter in 2003 that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”
Experts point out that software manipulations involving the system can change results. Since the majority of touch screens in the United States do not produce paper records, the machines could alter ballots without anyone noticing, says David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
An investigation by California's secretary of state has revealed that Diebold Election Systems placed uncertified software on electronic voting machines during the Nov.4, 2004 elections. But the matter was not followed up because someone in authority suppressed the investigation result.
Under US law, before a state can use an electronic voting system, the software and hardware must be audited by an independent testing authority that examines the code according to certification standards set by the Federal Election Commission.
Once the independent authority certifies the system, states can then test and certify the systems for their polling places.
California election law requires voting companies to notify state officials when they make changes to software after certification has been completed. Diebold did not do this when it applied a "software upgrade" to its systems and this meant foul play.
"Diebold system is one of the greatest threats democracy has ever known," according to an engineer who worked for the company. He affirmed that votes can be "modified remotely" via "undocumented backdoor' in central software and that he had worked on "changing the software" prior to the elections.
Now, based on these findings, it is widely accepted by many Americans that Bush is not their legitimate president. But they are unable to do anything about it because those behind the conspiracy occupy most powerful positions in Washington. More importantly, they are all Jewish and have Israeli interests in mind more than American interests.
And, mind you, the owners of Diebold Inc., are also Jews.

9/11 - a deep inside look

The mysterious cross that appeared in the rubbles of 9/11. It was actually a building beam welded together



These are the 9/11 suicide hijackers identified by the US government. Some of them are alive, and the US has not been able to explain how it identified living people as dead.






Bush being told of the attack in New York on 9/11






This was written in one year ago. The subject is still fresh and hence I have opted to keep it on top

THERE is a sudden surge in contentions that the
official US government version of the Sept.11, 2001
attacks was the "biggest lie" ever told. The whole
scenario explanations provided by various
investigating agencies do not fit in with each other.
The Bush administration has been very secretive about
the affair, often giving contradictions and illogical
explanations.
From the very beginning there were suggestions that
Israel's Mossad secret agency was behind the attacks,
which led to a series of events that greatly benefited
Israeli interests. This included a big strain in
relations between the US and Arab and Muslim worlds —
whom Israel considers as its worst enemies. In
addition, and equally important, was the US invasion
of Iraq that resulted in eliminating the reign of
Saddam Hussein, who, among the Arabs, posed the
greatest challenge to Israel's expansionist ambitions
and its quest for regional domination. Today, the US
is going after Syria and Iran, the two other countries
which pose a challenge to Israel's objectives in the
Middle East.
The US is waging a self-styled war on terrorism, and
the obvious targets are Arabs and Muslims.
Let us also not forget that Israel did not have to
send a single soldier or fire a single bullet to
remove Saddam from power and render Iraq as a
crippled, devastated country which would take decades
to get on its own feet let alone rebuild its military
capabilities to a level that it had under the reign of
Saddam Hussein.
It might be shocking for some people to read the
theory that it was Mossad and not Al Qaeda which
pulled the strings from behind the scenes. Some might
even be indignant to hear suggestions that it was not
Osama Bin Laden but Mossad planners who plotted and at
least partially executed the Sept.11 attacks. To such
indignant people - some of whom even take pride that a
Muslim like Bin Laden managed to strike such a big
blow like the Sept.11 attacks against the world's sole
superpower, I say this: Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda
operatives could not have carried out the attacks
without meticulous planning months in advance with
help from people who had not only deep intelligence
connections in the US but also the opportunity and
ability to create the right conditions to stage the
attacks. Those people could not be Al Qaeda
operatives. They had to be people with high
connections within the American security and aviation
systems with deep knowledge of how the systems worked
and what are the best means to set up misleading
information and signs that pointed in the direction
that Arab Muslims were behind the attacks.
The most obvious names that come up is: Israel and
Mossad.
Intelligence information now clearly indicates that
Mossad knew in advance about the Sept.11 attacks in
the US because its agents, Jews pretending to be Arab
militants with an anti-American agenda, had penetrated
the ranks of Al Qaeda months before the attacks and
were closely involved in planning the assaults,
according to highly informed intelligence sources.
Mossad actually helped Al Qaeda carry out the attacks
by providing logistics and then stepped back to allow
the Arab hijackers go ahead with the plans for the
attacks.
American intelligence agencies sensed the Mossad
agent's contacts with the Sept.11 hijackers and this
prompted the Israeli spy network to inform the CIA and
other US agencies that attacks were being planned but
without giving any specific information. Today, the
passing on of the information that attacks were being
planned is cited as Mossad's "good faith" relations
with the CIA and the US.
However, intelligence sources say that Mossad had
deliberately misled the CIA in order to save itself
from the accusation that it was helping the hijackers.
For all technical purposes, Mossad told its American
counterparts that its agents were keeping an eye on Al
Qaeda agents and were in touch with them only to help
foil the group's plans, but in actually the Mossad
operatives co-operated closely with the hijackers and
helped them with hard information (gained through
Mossad intelligence operations) on the American
aviation security system and other logistic support.
Intelligence agencies now have definite and proven
information that two Mossad cells of six Egyptian and
Yemeni born Jews were given training at a secret base
in Israel's Naqeeb desert in early 2001, months before
the Sept.11 attacks, on how to penetrate Al Qaeda. All
of them spoke fluent Arabic and knew how to behave as
pious Muslims, offering regular prayers and were given
close training to act as devoted to the Arab and
Muslim causes. One of the cells went to Amsterdam
and worked under the control of Mossad's Europe
station, which based at Schipol airport within the El
Al (Israeli airline) complex there. They later made
contact in Hamburg with Mohammed Atta, the lead
hijacker on Sept.11, and offered their help to carry
out sabotage attacks against the US. At that point,
Atta is believed to have been planning the Sept.11
attacks and therefore he readily accepted the offer
from the Mossad team without any idea that they were
from the enemy camp.
Another Mossad cell went to New York and then to
Florida, where they contacted several of the would-be
hijackers based in information provided by Atta in
good faith to the Mossad group in Hamburg. In August
2001, a month before the attacks, the Mossad team in
Europe flew to Boston, the US, with some of the
would-be hijackers who were living in Hamburg.
Parallel to the secret operations with Atta in Europe
and the US, dozens of Mossad agents were also active
securing information on "loopholes" in the American
security system to help execute the Sept.11 attacks.
American intelligence agencies had grown suspicious of
some of the Mossad agents, some of whom pretended to
be art students, and this left Mossad with no choice
but to admit to the CIA that they were its agents who
were keeping an eye on Bin Laden's group and they had
come across information that the group was planning
attacks in the US.
Between mid-August 2001 and early September, the then
Mossad chief Efraim Halevy sent two "warnings" to the
CIA of the possibility of such attacks. The CIA noted
the warnings and acknowledged them, but the agency
found the warning as "too non-specific." The FBI was
also informed.
Mossad did not give any specifics about the expected
date of the attack or targets although it knew these
details in advance, according to the sources. Mossad
wanted not only to escape from American suspicions
raised by the Israeli agents' involvement with the
Atta group but also to ensure that the Sept.11 attacks
went ahead. That is why it deliberately withheld
detailed information about the date and target.
American intelligence agents were sceptical of the
Mossad version, but they had no concrete evidence of a
direct Mossad involvement in the attacks and hence the
silence so far in the intelligence circles across the
Atlantic.
Now, there are classified documents available with
European and American intelligence agents which offer
indicators that Mossad agents were not simply spying
on the Al Qaeda hijackers but were also actually
deeply involved in the planning and supporting the
execution of the plans with logistics.
However, Mossad places the blame squarely at the door
of American intelligence agencies saying the CIA did
not take the warnings of the attacks seriously. Mossad
also claims that it had such difficulty getting the
CIA to heed the warnings that it even used the Russian
intelligence agency and and the German BND
intellegence agency to repeat the warnings to the CIA,
but that the American agency failed to take proper
note.
Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron reported in
December 2001 after months of investigations that,
since Sept.11, "more than 60 Israelis have been
arrested or detained, either under the new patriot
anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations. A
handful of active Israeli military personnel were
among those detained, according to investigators, who
say some of the detainees also failed polygraph
questions when asked about alleged surveillance
activities against and in the United States.
"There is no indication that the Israelis were
involved in the 9/11 attacks, but investigators
suspect that they Israelis may have gathered
intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not
shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are
'tie-ins.' But when asked for details, he flatly
refused to describe them, saying, 'evidence linking
these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell
you about evidence that has been gathered. It's
classified information.'
"Numerous classified documents obtained by Fox News
indicate that even prior to Sept.11, as many as 140
other Israelis had been detained or arrested in a
secretive and sprawling investigation into suspected
espionage by Israelis in the United States, " said
Cameron.
Interestingly, Cameron was immediately told to halt
his investigations. His reports which were put on the
Foxnews website were removed from the site.
How did Mossad gain inside information about Al
Qaeda's communications?
Again, the Mossad team played yet another deception.
Mossad had obtained a US-developed powerful
case-management software through dubious means and
provided it to Al Qaeda, which used it to spy on
American agencies which could have detected and
prevented the Sept.11, 2001 attacks.
At the same time, the software also allowed Mossad
itself to monitor Al Qaeda communications using
computers and also access Al Qaeda databases.
The software, called PROMIS and developed by Inslaw
Inc, an American company, was not
supposed to have been available to any non-US
government, agency, individual or commercial entity or
organisation, was passed on to Mossad by American
officials in the Pentagon recruited by the Israeli spy
agency.
Israeli experts, who are known to lead the global
scene in military and intelligence software, modified
the programme and passed it on to Al Qaeda through
Mossad agents posing as Palestinian supporters of Al
Qaeda.
While Al Qaeda could use that programme to hack into
the most defended and protected databases, Mossad also
planted another programme — described as a 'trap door'
—  in Al Qaeda computers that allowed the Israelis to
monitor Osama Bin Laden's follower's activities in
cyberspace. Simply put, Mossad agents could access and
monitor the computers using the Israeli-modified
version of PROMIS and thus keep themselves abreast of
Al Qaeda operatives' communications and database.
It is like having a powerful long-range microphone
planted right under the nose of your
adversary.
There is no way Mossad would not have known how Al
Qaeda operatives used the software in facilitating
preparations for the Sept.11 attacks since Mossad
itself was using the trap door in the software to
monitor Al Qaeda computers.
The FBI discovered the indirect Mossad-Qaeda link
while investigating an Israeli spy, Lawrence Franklin,
a top Pentagon analyst on Iran, who passed on
sensitive and top-secret documents about US plans for
regime change in Tehran.
It has been proved that nearly 130 Israeli
intelligence agents were arrested in the days
immediately after Sept.11. All of them were allowed to
leave the US after a few months after questioning,
but the world never knew what they had "confessed" to
their Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) questioners.
Here comes the clinch: Five of the Israelis were
arrested when they were seen filming the attacks from
a point which offered the best view of the World Trade
Centre towers which were hit. They were seen
congratulating each other and dancing and this aroused
the suspicion of a woman who notified New York police
because they looked Middle Eastern and possibly Arabs.
Witnesses saw them jumping for joy in Liberty State
Park after the initial impact. Later on, other
witnesses saw them celebrating on a roof in and still
more witnesses later saw them celebrating with
shaking hands and congratulating each other in a
Jersey City parking area.
"It looked like they're hooked in with this. It
looked like they knew what was going to happen when
they were at Liberty State Park," said a witness.
One anonymous phone call to the authorities actually
led police to close down all of New York's bridges and
tunnels. The mystery caller told police a group of
Palestinians were mixing a bomb inside of a white van
headed for the Holland Tunnel.
Police then issued a “Be-on-the-Lookout” alert for a
white mini-van heading for the city's bridges and
tunnels from New Jersey. When a van fitting that
exact description was stopped just before crossing
into New York, the suspicious “Middle-Easterners”
were apprehended. And they turned out be Israelis.
However, the van was nowhere near Holland Tunnel as
the mystery call told police.
It appeared that the caller wanted police to focus on
Holland Tunnel while the actual van was somewhere
else. In the van, police found maps of the city with
certain places highlighted, box cutters (the same
items that the hijackers supposedly used), $4,700
cash stuffed in a sock, and foreign passports. Bomb
sniffing dogs were brought to the van and that they
reacted as if they had smelled explosives.
The FBI seized and developed their photos, one of
which shows one of the four flicking a cigarette
lighter in front of the smouldering ruins in an
apparently celebratory gesture.
The FBI found that the Israelis worked for a moving
company known as Urban Moving Systems. An American
employee of Urban Moving Systems said a majority of
his co-workers were Israelis and they were all joking
about the attacks. Urban Moving System's Israeli
owner, Dominick Suter, was questioned and released
with instructions that he should report to police
whenever asked to do so. But a few days later, he
abandoned his business and fled the US for Israel.
Obviously, he was in such a hurry to leave the US that
s ome of Urban Moving System's customers were left
with their furniture stranded in storage facilities.
The FBI was established that the five detained
Israelis were in fact Mossad agents. The agency
released them after 71 days in custody. No detail of
their statement was ever released to the media.
In the meantime, American mainstream media was told,
implictly or explictly, to focus on Bin Laden and soon
thousands reports started appearing suggesting that
the Yemeni origin Saudi was behind the attacks.
The propaganda machinery told readers, listeners and
viewers that Muslims were “medieval” and wanted to
destroy the because they envied American wealth and
way of life.
Bin Laden strongly denied any role in the attacks.
"I was not involved in the September 11 attacks in
the United States nor did I have knowledge of the
attacks," he said in a statement. "There exists a
government within a government within the United
States. The United States should try to trace the
perpetrators of these attacks within itself; to the
people who want to make the present century a century
of conflict between Islam and Christianity. That
secret government must be asked as to who carried out
the attacks. The American system is totally in
control of the Jews, whose first priority is Israel,
not the United States."
There is no evidence, be it hard or circumstantial,
to link the Al Qaeda was involved in the attacks. On
the other hand, there is enough evidence suggesting
Israelis were very busy framing Arabs for terror
plots against America.

Remote control?

Then there is the "mystery" of frozen/jammed
communications between the hijacked 9/11 airplaes and
ground control and the accuracy with which they hit
the two World Trade Centre towers as if by remote
control.
An interesting revelation is that a US-based company,
System Planning Corporation (SPC) designs,
manufactures and distributes highly sophisticated
technology that enables an operator to fly by remote
control as many as eight different airborne vehicles
at the same time from one position either on the
ground or airborne (www.sysplan.com/Radar/CTS).
More importantly, SPC, which is headquartered in
Arlington, Virginia, has the technology to take over
the controls of an airborne plane already in flight
and could "hijack hijackers" and bring the plane down
safely.
The catch here is: Dov Zakheim, an American Jewish
rabbi, served as the head of SPC's international
division until Bush appointed him under-secretary of
defence and comptroller of the Pentagon (Zakheim
resigned from the Pentagon job in March last year
saying that his duties were exhausting).
Zakheim co-authored an article, "Rebuilding America's
Defences: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New
Century," published by The Project for a New American
Century in September 2000.
A segment in the books says that "the process of
transformation, even if it brings revolutionary
change, is likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalysing — like a new Pearl
Harbour."
Implicit in Rabbi Dov Zakheim's argument is the theory
that a false flag intelligence operation would
trigger a response by the USA that would be good for
Israe.
The means consisted of the aforementioned remote
control of airborne vehicle technologies as well as
the nurturing, creative accounting at the Pentagon to
pay for such an operation.
The opportunity was Zakheim's closeness to the
Command/Control/Communications in Washington and its
Zionist neo-conservatives determined to provoke a war
with Saddam Hussein.
Aassinations and leaving red herrings that point at
Arabs as culprits. These actions started even before
Israel was created in 1948. An outstanding example is
a series of bombings at Jewish businesses and
community centres as well as at least one synagogue in
Iraq in the 40s and 50s that were blamed on Arabs
seeking to kill Jews and the government running a
pogom against Jews. The bombings terrified thousands
of the Iraqi Jews into migrating to Israel; that was
the very objective of the Israeli agents who carried
out the blasts. This has been admitted by several
prominent Iraqi Jews who migrated to Israel made
themselves successful politicians in the Jewish state.
It is also documents in the book, Ben Gurion's
Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated
Jews, written by Naem Giladi, an Iraqi Jew. The book
says one of the Israeli aims behind the action was to
import raw Jewish labour to work in newly-vacated
farmlands and to fill in the military ranks.
"About 125,000 Jews left Iraq for Israel in the late
1940s and into 1952, most because they had been lied
to and put into a panic by what I came to learn were
Zionist bombs," Giladi said in an interview in 1998.
He said he had documents, "including some that I
illegally copied from the archives at Yad Vashem (war
memorial in occupied Jerusalem)," which "confirm what
I saw myself, what I was told by other witnesses, and
what reputable historians and others have written
concerning the Zionist bombings in Iraq, Arab peace
overtures that were rebuffed, and incidents of
violence and death inflicted by Jews on Jews in the
cause of creating Israel."
Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former senior officer in the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), writes in his book,
Ropes of Sand:
"In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American
and to terrorise the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs
in the US Information Service library and in
synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews
to flee to Israel. . . .
"Although the Iraqi police later provided (the US)
embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and
library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and
anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of
an underground Zionist organisation, most of the world
believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the
flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had
'rescued' really just in order to increase Israel's
Jewish population."
In the early 1950s, a book was published in Iraq, in
Arabic, titled Venom of the Zionist Viper, written by
one of the Iraqi investigators of the 1950-51
bombings. The author implicates the Israelis,
specifically one of the emissaries sent by Israel,
Mordechai Ben-Porat. As soon as the book came out, all
copies just disappeared, even from libraries. The word
was that agents of the Israeli Mossad, working through
the US embassy, bought up all the books and destroyed
them.
Other examples of such Israeli deceptive operations
are:
In 1954, Israeli agents working in Egypt planted bombs
in several buildings, mostly targeting American and
British interests, in Cairo and Alexandria. They
planted evidence implicating Arabs as the culprits
with a view to alienating the US and UK from Egypt.
However, the plot blew up on Israel's face when one
of the bombs exploded prematurely and allowed.
Egyptian police to capture one bombers who in turn led
them to the Israeli spy ring.
Some of them were Israeli nationals and others were
Egyptian Jews.
They were put on trial and sentenced to prison terms
of upto 15 years.
Veteran British journalist David Hirst wrote in his
book The Gun and the Olive Branch:
"The trial established that the bombings had indeed
been carried out by an Israeli espionage and terrorist
network. This was headed by Colonel Avraharn Dar
--alias John Darling-- and a core of professionals who
had set themselves up in Egypt under various guises.
They had recruited a number of Egyptian Jews; one of
them was a young woman, Marcelle Ninio, who worked in
the offices of a British company.
"Naturally, the eventual exposure of such an
organizsation was not going to improve the lot of the
vast majority of Egyptian Jews who wanted no-thing to
do with Zionism. There were still at least 50,000 Jews
in Egypt; there had been something over 60,000 in
1947, more than half of whom were actually foreign
nationals. During the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948,
the populace had some times vented its frustration
against them, and some were killed in mob violence or
by terrorist bombs. In spite of this, and of the
revolutionary upheaval which followed four years
later, few Jews-including the foreign nationals-left
the country, and fewer still went to Israel. A Jewish
journalist insisted: 'We, Egyptian Jews, feel secure
in our homeland, Egypt'."
Despite irrefutable evidence that it was behind
"Operation Susannah" — which later came to be known as
the Lavon affair —  Israel maintained that the whole
episode was stage-managed by "anti-Semites."
As the trial progressed in Egypt, Israel opted to turn
its then defence minister Pinhas Lavon as the
scapegoat. Lavon was brought down by the scandal and
the real intelligence operatives behind the plot were
never brought to light.
In 1967, Israel warplanes attacked the American spy
ship USS Liberty and killed 35 American sailors and
crippled the vessels in what it said was a mistake
despite all indications that it knew it was an
American ship. Captain Ward Boston, who served as
adviser for the Navy's Court of Inquiry into the
attack, has revealed that the Court of Inquiry was
ordered by the then president Lyndon Johnson to
conclude that the attack was an accident,
Military experts have found that Israel had used
unmarked aircraft and boats in the actual attack,
indicating that Israel intended to sink the US ship
and frame Egypt for the attack, tricking the US into
the war against Egypt.
In 1986, Mossad tricked the then president, Ronald
Reagan, into bombing Libya by means of a radio
transmitter planted in the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
The secret broadcasting device, known was Trojan,
sent out Israeli-engineered false messages to American
and British listening stations, according to a former
Mossad agent.
The misinformation transmitted through the device
led to framing Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi in the
April 1986 bombing of a disco in Berlin frequented by
American servicemen. A court in Germany tried the case
and ruled that Libya was behind the bombing in which
two Americans were killed and nearly 80 people were
injured..
Prominent among the evidence produced in court against
Libya were "secret communications in Arabic" picked up
American intelligence and which were said to be
"instructions" to Libyan agents to carry out the
bombing.
This revelation has come from Vctor Ostrovsky, 60, a
Canadian-born Jew who emigrated to Israel in 1950, who
says he became an agent of the Mossad in 1984 but quit
the agency in 1998 in "disgust." According to
Ostrovsky, he was among a Mossad team which sneaked
into Tripoli, Libya, on the night of Feb. 17, 1986,
from the Mediterranean in mini-submarines and planted
the "trojan" in an apartment rented by a Mossad agent
there.
The planted "trojan" was used by Mossad to transmit
messages in Arabic that were then rebroadcast from
Tripoli, to make it look as if Qadhati had been
communicating with his agents about upcoming militant
attacks, among them the 1986 Berlin bombing.
How does this Israeli record fit into the 9/11
scenario.
Until now, it has not been established who was on the
four hijacked planes. The Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) admits that the only hard
evidence are the names used by the hijackers on
forged identification documents. At least seven of
the men whose names were on those IDs have been found
to be alive. One of them died bin 1999. None of the
names of the alleged hijackers were on the passenger
lists of the four hijacked planes. Yet, the net (false
or true) impression is that all of them were Arab
Muslims.
Some of these men behaved strangely on the night
before 9/11/2001. They visited bars and strip
night-clubs and behaved as if they wanted to be
noticed and remembered by all they met.
This behaviour in itself is unseemingly of any devout
Muslim willing to commit suicide would spend the night
before his death violating the tenets of their faith.
Intelligence experts believe that a false trail was
being ahead of the hijackings.
It has now been established that only two Israelis —
both aboard the hijacked planes — were killed in the
9/11 attacks although reports claim that upto 130
Israelis were killed.
Some reports suggest that Israelis were given an
advance warning not to go to work at the World Trade
Center towers on 9-11. I don't think the reports are that credible.
Two employees of Odigo, an Israeli company with
offices located near the World Trade Centre towers,
received warning messages sent before the four planes
had even left the ground, thus establishing that that
someone in Israel knew of the attacks ahead of time.

US owes it to the world

PV Vivekanand

NONE of the findings of various investigations, official and unofficial, into the Sept.11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington has satisfactorily and logically provided answers to the multitude of questions that were raised immediately after the unprecedented terrorist attack against the US. Washington has not released the full report of the findings of the official investigation.
The key question had always been: How could a group of Middle Eastern Arab Muslims penetrate the high-security American aviation system, mislead the country's air defences into inaction despite reported hijackings and then slam the aircraft into landmarks in New York and Washington?
There had to help from within. Who provided that help, why and how?
It had to someone or an organisation or group that stood to benefit from the fallout of the attacks. There is no doubt that Israel was the sole beneficiary of the attacks, which resulted in a deep schism between the Arab/Muslim worlds and the US and were used as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq and ouster of a regime which was deemed to be a hurdle in Israel's quest for regional domination. Next targets in the US-led war against terror that was launched post-9/11 are two other sworn enemies of Israel — Iran and Syria. It is only a matter of time and method before the US destabilises both countries and thus remove them as potential threats or challenges to Israel.
As such, it is only natural that one would look a bit closer at the scenario and realise that the Israelis possess the cunningness, intelligence, technology, and expertise and, above all, the right connections in the corridors of power in Washington to have carried out of a false flag operation and ensured that Arabs and Muslims were blamed for it.
It would not be the first of last time Israel carried out such an operation.
The meticulously recorded facts — supported by American official documents and intelligence findings accepted as accurate by the US establishment — presented in the memorandum drawn up by respected lawyer Gerald Shea give a massive boost to the suspicion — indeed conviction of many — that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks.
The Bush administration owes it not only to the Americans but also the entire international community to conduct a public inquiry into the issues raised in the Shea memorandum and let is findings be known to the world if only because the 9/11 attacks changed the face of the world forever, with the developing world paying the highest price.

Divine retribution?

pv vivekanand
Christian evangelists and many ordinary Americans say Katrina and Rita are divine retribution to the aggressive US policies, particularly the invasion of Iraq, and Washington's almost unlimited support for Israel's brutality, arrogance, intrasigence and stubbornness against the Palestinian independence struggle. This is the impression one gets from the thousands of messages flying across the Internet.
Anti-war activists agree and assert that the Bush administration was damaged badly as a result of Katrina and Rita because it had lied through its teeth to justify the invasion of Iraq, produced false witnesses and testimonies and broke God's commandments for the sake of global dominance, control of oil and Israeli interests.
Other say Hurricane Katrina particularly targeted New Orleans because of what they see as the debauchery of life there, including the free-wheeling gay and lesbian movements as well as the abortionists there.
Hardline Jews contend that God punished the US for pressuring Israel into withdrawing from the Gaza Strip, and there is more to come.
Many others say that the real targets of God's wrath are the neoconservatives behind President George W Bush. Their political and bureaucratic careers are poised to collapse when the nation takes account of Katrina and Rita sooner or later, and few would be able to escape the net.
Critics note that Katrina and Rita targeted some of the most economically sensitive areas of the US; the Gulf Coast which has America's largest seaport and is the country's key route for imports and exports, and Texas, which houses the country's oil resources. Some 20 oil refineries are located in the path of Rita, and if they are damaged, then the cost of a gallon of patrol would rise to upto $5, thus fuelling public resentment against the government.
The argument of divine retribution becomes all the more significant beause Texas is Bush's homestate.
Salon magazine took particular pleasure in pointing out that Bush himself used the pulpit at a national prayer service to shed personal responsibility for New Orleans by pointing his finger at God. 
However, it all falls back into politics, and particularly the Middle East.
British Member of Parliament George Galloway, who was targeted by the neocons for political elimination because of his criticism of the war against Iraq, seemed to have summarised the feeling of many when he said after hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans:
"The scenes from the stricken city almost defy belief. Many, many thousands of people left to die in what is the richest, most powerful country on Earth. This obscenity is as far from a natural disaster as George Bush and the US elite are from the suffering masses of New Orleans. The images of Bush luxuriating at his ranch and of his secretary of state shopping for $7,000 shoes while disaster swamped the US Gulf Coast will haunt this administration.
"In the most terrible way imaginable they show to the whole world that it is not only the lives of people in Baghdad, Fallujah and Palestine that Bush holds cheap. It is also his own citizens — the black and poor people left behind with no food, water or shelter. This is not simply manslaughter through incompetence, though the White House's incompetence abounds. It is murder — for Bush was warned four years ago of the threat to New Orleans, as surely as he was warned of the disaster that would come of his war on Iraq. ...
"His is the America of Halliburton, the M-16 rifle, the cluster bomb, the gated communities of the rich and of the billionaires he grew up with in Texas. There is another America. It is the land of the poor of Louisiana, it is the land of the young men and women economically conscripted into the military. It is the land of the glorious multiethnic mix that was New Orleans, it is the land of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and of great struggles for justice."
It might indeed be rhetoric, but it is the kind of language most Americans understand without difficulty, particularly now that the shortcomings of the Bush administration in handling the hurricane crisis have been exposed to the American public.
Adding fuel to the fire was an assertion by a tabloid quoting a doctor that raised questions about the president's personal life.
The National Inquirer, a tabloid better known for devoting its front pages to gossip about celebrity divorces, quoed Dr. Justin Frank, a Washington D.C. psychiatrist and author of Bush On The Couch: Inside The Mind Of The President, as saying that Bush is drinking again.
“I do think that Bush is drinking again. Alcoholics who are not in any programme, like the president, have a hard time when stress gets to be great," Dr Frank was quoted as saying. "I think it's a concern that Bush disappears during times of stress. He spends so much time on his ranch. It's very frightening.”
Frank is described as a highly-respected psychiatrist at George Washington University and his book about the president’s problems has been praised by other psychiatric experts.
White House rumours about the president’s drinking began circulating last year in the West Wing along with questions about possible abuse of prescription drugs. They report wide mood swings, cancelled meetings and an ever-decreasing number of aides with direct access to Bush.
Bush had admitted to be an alcoholic earlier but he said he quit drinking without help from any organised programme.
The president's problems do not end there.
A massive anti-war demonstration was taking place in Washington on Saturday with organisers expecting more than 100,000 marchers amid growing public concern about the course of the Iraq war.
Cindy Sheehan, who lost her 24-year old son in Iraq and whose protests have galvanised the anti-war movement, was leading the protesters.
Sheehan, who camped outside Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas for 25 days demanding a meeting with the president that was never granted, organised peace caravans driving through the US before converging on Washington on Saturday.
The movement has triggered intense debate across the US about the war and how the administration misled the US Congress and people that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the US and therefore he had to be ousted through invasion and occupation of Iraq.
It is not simply Sheehan who motivated the anti-war movement into taking the cause against war to the streets of America. There has been a marked change in the approach of many (non-corporate) television channels, radios and newspapers in their coverage of the Iraq war and vivid images from Iraq are now brought home to the Americans unlike the first year of the war when only "positive" news were broadcast by most channels.
Whether Americans are now concerned about the deception of the administration that set the ground for the war, they are now asking for a timetable for calling the American troops home from Iraq, something the administration is unable or is not willing to provide (mainly because ending the US military presence in Iraq is not in the schedule during the Bush administration's term in office).
The anti-administration build-up is growing, and it would only gather strength, given the almost impossible situations facing Bush at home and in Iraq. The president could do with a major diversion somewhere and his critics are speculating what it would be.