Kurt Nimmo: 'Corporate media: Selling Dubya's oil war'
Posted on Monday, September 30 @ 09:44:40 EDT By Kurt Nimmo

On September 29 in London, 350,000 people marched against Dubya's oil war. Organized by the Stop The War Coalition and the Muslim Association of Great Britain, the protesters marched past the Houses of Parliament and through Piccadilly to Hyde Park. Speakers included former MP Tony Benn, London Mayor Ken Livingstone, former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and Tam Dalyell, the father of the House of Commons. "This is all about oil and there is nobody in this country so stupid that they don't realize that," said Livingstone. "We can't get involved in this war," film director Ken Loach told the BBC, "we can't consider murdering another 100,000 Iraqis simply to pursue America's interest in oil and their dominance in the region." All of this received limited news coverage in the US.

According to a recent Washington Post-ABC News Poll, three in five Americans favor using force to remove Saddam Hussein. The poll also found that nearly 70 percent of Americans believe Dubya is doing a good job. No doubt, with numbers such as these, Dubya will invade without fear of public recrimination -- not that this non-elected president particularly cares about public disapproval. The Dubya agenda moves forward irrespective of public opinion.



All the rabble need do is pay for Bush's war -- now estimated to likely cost a whopping $100 billion -- and donate the lives of their children to the military. Once the war is underway, of course, waving plastic flags and strapping yellow ribbons on every upright object in sight will be expected. Mandatory patriotism -- documented aplenty by the corporate media -- will trundle across the nation. Of course, it does not need to be that way.

"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject," wrote the Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius. So it is with an ill-informed American public. According to the results of a National Assessment of Educational Progress test conducted a while back, two out of three 17-year-olds did not know the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation, even less had heard of the War of 1812, the Marshall Plan, or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. In geography, most could not locate Southeast Asia on a map. As for politics, the widespread ignorance of the populace is even more alarming. In a poll conducted by the nonprofit Pew Research Center in 1999, 56 percent of Americans could not name a single Democratic candidate for president, and only 63 percent could recall the name "Bush."

A University of Massachusetts study found that people who relied most on television news coverage knew least about the Gulf War and its origins. Professor Michael Morgan, author of the study, wrote, "Many of them also had the strongest opinions, which not coincidentally echoed precisely what they had been hearing. Like the media they depended on, they were virtually of one mind in uncritically embracing the US government position."

In America, unchallenged chicken hawk militarism and flagrant chauvinism rule the corporate media roost. For instance, crypto-fascist media tycoon Rupert Murdoch apparently believes it is perfectly acceptable for his Fox News -- which boasts audaciously of "fair and balanced" news coverage -- to allow its commentators to classify starvation as foreign policy initiative. "The Afghans are responsible for the Taliban," deduced Bill O'Reilly during the bombing of Afghanistan. "We should not target civilians. But if they don't rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period." Chances are, as Dubya's Iraq war unfolds, O'Reilly will be grumbling the same about the children of Iraq.

Fox pundits are uniformly right-wing and unequivocally reactionary: Fred Barnes (an evangelical Christian supply-sider and editor of Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard), Mort Kondrake (reputedly a Democrat "disgusted with the Democratic Party"), Mara Liasson (a "liberal" who believes Dubya's reversal on carbon dioxide emissions "a small thing"), Bill Sammon (a "conservative" writer for the arch-conservative Washington Times), and Jeff Birnbaum (a "centrist" writer for the less than centrist Fortune magazine). This is considered diversity of opinion over at Fox.

Since Americans are continuously fed a steady diet of right-slanted news and opinion -- delivered in sustained fashion by a circulating roster of former government insiders, retired generals, CIA analysts, and various military and security experts -- is it any wonder large numbers of Americans believe dropping bunker-buster and cluster bombs on a nation already wracked by more than a decade of bombing and relentless sanctions is a viable alternative to diplomacy? Not only Fox News chants the far-right mantra -- which regards diplomacy as "weakness" -- but so does the vast majority of other corporate media outlets.

Reactionary and neoconservative think tanks are routinely asked to provide background information and guests for Fox, CNN, NBC, ABC, and the rest. These include the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), and the advisory boards of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and Empower America (EA). Practically all other voices -- even those mildly progressive -- are buried in the process.

For instance, Richard Perle -- a "resident fellow" at AEI and chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon think tank, and Donald Rumsfeld's boy friday -- is a regular fixture on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews and CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports. Perle is also a key academic analyst on security issues for JINSA, a hard right think tank claiming to have in mind "the security requirements of both the United States and the State of Israel" -- as if these two are inseparable.

The Center for Security Policy -- self-described as an "agile, durable and highly effective 'main battle tank' in the war of ideas on national security" -- provides a flurry "timely analyses" for "the executive branch, the Congress, the media." Dick Cheney is a former member of CSP's board of advisors. According to the CSP website, "Secretary Rumsfeld and his counterparts elsewhere in the government have invited an extraordinary number of members of the Center's National Security Advisory Council and others of the Center's colleagues to serve in top positions in the U.S. government." CSP president and founder Frank Gaffney -- a former Assistant Secretary for Defense in the Reagan White House and advocate of "regime-change" in Iraq -- is a regular guest on CNN's Crossfire, Wolf Blitzer Reports, TalkBack Live, and CNN International, as well as on MSNBC, and Fox News.

The Project for a New American Century embraces such neocon heavy-hitters as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis "Scooter" Libby (chief of staff for Cheney), and Elliott Abrams (convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra Affair, pardoned by Dubya's daddy, and now serves as director of the office for democracy, human rights, and international operations at the National Security Council). PNAC's deputy director, Tom Donnelly, was hired by death merchant Lockheed-Martin, which is also a major CSP and AEI sugar daddy. William Kristol is PNAC chairman. He is the editor of the Murdoch financed Weekly Standard, was paid $100,000 for serving on an Enron advisory board for over two years, and runs an inexhaustible circuit on a menagerie of news shows, including those broadcast on ABC, CBS, NPR, FOX, and CNN.

Finally, Empower America is probably the most obnoxious cheerleader -- granted ample media access -- for Dubya's oil war masquerading as an endless crusade against ill-defined terrorism. The directors of EA are former Reagan drug czar William Bennett and washed up Republican Jack Kemp. In addition to rooting for war, EA sponsors a rather draconic program entitled Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT). Wholly McCarthyistic in scope, AVOT is determined to "take to task those groups and individuals who fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the war we are facing." In other words, Americans opposed to Dubya's pointless and bloodthirsty war on the children of Iraq. On Sunday, March 10, AVOT placed a $128,000 full-page ad in The New York Time citing "Both [internal and external] threats [that] stem from either a hatred for the American ideals of freedom and equality or a misunderstanding of those ideals and their practice." In short, those who would exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of dissent -- and who may have the audacity to disagree with our unelected president -- and smear them as traitors and quislings in the process, especially if they are university professors. AVOT and EA front man and war-horse Bennett can be found on CNN and other corporate propaganda shows extolling the virtues of interminable war and questioning the motivations of people such as Noam Chomsky.

In the coming weeks and months, America will experience the sort of mass demonstrations recently held in London and Rome. The corporate media will not be able to ignore 150,000 or 300,000 people marching in the streets of Washington or New York. The corporate media -- as the official propaganda service of the US government -- will attempt to make anti-war demonstrators appear foolish and irrational, as they did recently with the G-7 protestors in Washington. By all accounts, the G-7 demonstrations in Washington were largely peaceful -- of an estimated 20,000 protesters, only five were arrested for property damage, while 644 were arrested for "disobeying police or parading without a permit," in other words, peaceful civil disobedience. Instead of focusing on the message brought to Washington by the protesters, the media concentrated on "demonstrators [who] danced in the street with mud and leaves smeared on their hair and clothes," or the dozen others who "stripped to their underwear." The anti-war movement in the US can expect more of the same.

The media did likewise during the Vietnam War, characterizing anti-war activists and supporters as ludicrous hippies. Nonetheless, Americans eventually accepted the anti-war message and Nixon was forced to begin the withdrawal of troops from Southeast Asia. Without political pressure -- hundreds of thousands of people turning out to demonstrate in cities across the nation -- the US government would not have responded and the result for millions of additional Vietnamese and US soldiers would have been vastly different. Dissent makes a difference -- from calling your senator to participating in an anti-war demonstration -- regardless of what the corporate media and its brood of chicken hawks have to say about it in the corporate press.

Kurt Nimmo's Another Day in the Empire:
http://nimmo.blogspot.com/

Read more!

New U.S. Doctrine Worries Europeans
Decades of Coalition-Building Seen at Risk

By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 30, 2002; Page A01

BRUSSELS -- Here in the capital of the new Europe, officials are expressing emotions ranging from concern to alarm to anger as they contemplate the growing gap between themselves and the Bush administration.

The immediate cause is the administration's newly declared preemption doctrine, reserving for the United States the right to attack potential enemies before they strike, and its determination to deal with Iraq with or without international support. One senior European official said the new U.S. message to Europe was: "You have become irrelevant, and unless you do something dramatic to raise your defense expenditure, this is the end. The phone is not ringing."

But officials and analysts here say their problems with Washington go much deeper than the current crisis. They fear that the Bush administration, in the name of countering threats from terrorists and from rogue states since the Sept. 11 attacks last year, is jettisoning the post-World War II system of multilateral institutions and coalitions -- such as the U.N. Security Council and the NATO alliance -- that the United States helped build, and which helped preserve peace and stability for nearly 60 years.

"The mixture of containment and establishing an international rule book by and large encouraged democracy, the rule of law and open markets throughout the world," Chris Patten, the European Union's external affairs minister, said in an interview Friday. "Why should anyone think that that approach was somehow less relevant after September 11th? I think it's more relevant."

Rallies by tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators in London and Rome on Saturday were reminiscent of the protests of the early 1980s in favor of nuclear disarmament and against President Ronald Reagan's tough stance on the Soviet Union. But here in Brussels, opposition to what is seen as the administration's emerging unilateralism comes not just from the left but from across the board, and includes the highest levels of the EU.

"There's a lot of concern, and it's growing and it's not just the usual suspects, it's across the spectrum," said John Palmer, director of the European Policy Center, a prominent Brussels research group.

Officials concede that one of their problems is that they do not speak with one voice. The views of European leaders range from British Prime Minister Tony Blair's spirited endorsement of the Bush administration's Iraq policy to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's equally spirited criticism, with French President Jacques Chirac somewhere in between. "It's our weakness, not America's strength, that is the problem," said Elmar Brok, chairman of the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee. "We have no influence because we have no common European approach."

Although the European Union is a baroque collection of institutions, regulations and formalism designed to transform narrow national interests into collective policies, feelings still count -- and European feelings have been badly bruised in recent months. The Europeans say the administration views them as "Euro wimps" who don't pull their weight militarily, and who prefer prevarication to plain-speaking and appeasement to action. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's recent appearance at a NATO meeting in Warsaw, during which he snubbed the German defense minister because of Schroeder's strong opposition to military action against Iraq, was the latest insult.

"There's a tone of contempt that people here deeply resent," said John Wyles, a journalist and policy strategist who works for GPlus Europe, a consulting firm.

Many officials regret that Schroeder took his stance, which helped him win a narrow reelection victory last week, without consulting his European partners. But they say that Schroeder was reflecting the views not just of the German electorate, but of people throughout the continent. "President Bush would not be able to walk the streets of Berlin shaking hands right now," a senior official said, "or the streets of Madrid."

Europeans also resent U.S. predictions that they will inevitably go along with military action against Iraq, whether it is sanctioned by the United Nations or not. "The consequences of allowing America to go in alone would be too severe," conceded another senior official. But not every European leader would go along, he said. "A lot of Europeans would feel they'd been put in an intolerable position." For those who would agree to participate militarily, "it would be less a coalition of the willing than of the dragooned."

Relations with the Bush administration were icy even before the Sept. 11 attacks. Washington's opposition to the Kyoto treaty on global warming, its demand to be exempted from the reach of the new International Criminal Court and its staunch support of Israel's hard-line prime minister, Ariel Sharon, have caused anger and consternation here. U.S. officials, in turn, complained that Europe thrived because it was nestled under a security umbrella provided and paid for by the United States, and that if it wanted more influence, it needed to contribute more to its own defense. The United States spends about twice as much on defense as do all of its 18 NATO partners combined.

The terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon momentarily overshadowed those disputes and created a wave of sympathy and support for the United States. "We're All Americans Now," declared the front page of Le Monde, the left-of-center Paris daily that usually takes pleasure in America-bashing.

But that sentiment quickly faded. European officials now concede that they were slow to recognize the depth of the wound and shock to Americans -- and the degree to which Americans would take literally the concept of a war on terrorism. "For you, it's not symbolic, it's a real term," one official said. "From that moment, you decided it's your problem and you have to solve it and the rest of the world can either help, or, if not, to hell with them."

Europeans, who have experienced terrorism in such places as Northern Ireland and the Basque region of Spain, resent being dictated to. Many people contend that the Americans have put too much emphasis on a military approach to attacking terrorism and not enough on dealing with what they identify as root causes, such as poverty and lack of freedoms. "None of this in any way justifies or explains what happened on September 11th," Patten said, "but perhaps it means we have a slightly more nuanced idea of how you deal with terrorism."

Worse, many believe that Washington has adopted a militarized foreign policy that divides the world too simply into friends and enemies. Bush's "axis of evil" characterization, lumping North Korea and Iran with Iraq, disturbed many here -- including Britain, the United States' most loyal European partner, which was engaged in trying to build bridges to moderates in Iran when Bush's rhetorical hammer fell.

The conflict over Iraq has crystallized many European fears. After the hawkish statements of Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld, many here concluded that the Bush administration had no genuine interest in seeking to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, but was using the issue as a ploy to topple Saddam Hussein under any circumstances. While they welcomed Bush's decision to seek a new U.N. Security Council resolution on weapons inspections -- and give Britain's Blair credit for helping guide Bush in that direction -- they fear that the administration is only using the council as justification for military action, and will go ahead even without U.N. assent.

"It was wholly legitimate for President Bush to go to the United Nations and to challenge the international community to make good on what it says it believes," said Patten. "But that's just not for one day. It's got to be for real."

Bush's new strategic doctrine formalizes some of the trends Europeans find most troubling. "Preemption says to us, 'This is an empire and we will not allow anybody to get close to our capabilities and we are ready to act to prevent that from happening,' " a senior official said.

Another official said the doctrine set a bad precedent -- if it is all right for the United States to attack another country preemptively for supporting terrorism, he asked, then what is to prevent India from dropping a nuclear bomb on Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, in retaliation for Pakistani support for separatists in Kashmir?

European officials search for signs that the American public is less hard-line than the administration. Every one of a half-dozen officials interviewed last week cited the recent opinion survey sponsored by the U.S. German Marshall Fund and Chicago Council of Foreign Relations indicating a convergence in views on security issues between Americans and Europeans and a solid American majority in favor of obtaining Security Council support for any attack on Iraq. Most cited with approval former vice president Al Gore's attack on administration policy last week, although one official added, "If we'd said that here, we'd be immediately branded as anti-American."

U.S. diplomats contend European fears are overwrought.

"Part of it [their fear] is European old-think -- the old balance of power instincts," said a senior U.S. diplomat, referring to the Cold War model in which strong nations balanced each other and effectively maintained world stability. "And I think part of it is that the Europeans see lots of reasons to interpret America's terrorism war as America trying to bend Europe to its own will."

Some Europeans agree that officials need to calm themselves and remember what they have in common with the United States. "There are so many areas where we have joint interests and so many similarities between us," said Pascal Lamy, the EU's trade commissioner. "Any good negotiator will tell you that Lesson One is having a clear view of each side's starting positions. Just getting there is a good start for living together because we have to live together."

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

Read more!

The 'Right' Way To Dominate The World
Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
Monday, September 30, 2002
©2002 SF Gate

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/sorensen/

If you like conspiracies, you'll love an article in the Sept . 15 Sunday Herald (Glascow, Scotland). In the article, author Neil Mackay reveals a plan by the Bush administration to take over the world.

Mackay doesn't say that Bush plans to take over the world, but the plan he cites gives that impression.

The plan was drawn up and published by a conservative think tank known as "The Project for the New American Century." It was published in September 2000, before Bush was elected president.

According to another report, this one in The Moscow Times, an outline of the plan was drawn up much earlier, in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was president and anticipating re-election.

The team that drew up the first version was headed by Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense and flushed with success over the Gulf War. Others involved included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad ("special envoy" to Afghanistan), John Ellis ("Jeb") Bush, and I. Lewis ("Scooter") Libby (Cheney's current chief of staff).

(In the strange, interconnected world of Washington, Lewis also was an attorney for Marc Rich, whose pardon by President Bill Clinton drew the ire of Republicans.)

What I'm calling the plan to take over the world was titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses -- Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century."

The think tank that wrote it is headed by William Kristol, often seen on television as a conservative commentator. According to a Sept. 17 editorial in The Charleston Gazette, Kristol was paid $100,000 a year by Enron, the troubled energy broker.

The think tank grew out of the New Citizenship Project, which was funded by the conservative Bradley Foundation, a part of Rockwell Automation, a former defense contractor.

These convoluted relationships remind me of the laughter and derision that greeted Hillary Clinton when she referred to "a vast right-wing conspiracy."

In any event, Hillary's husband gets mentioned often, and always derisively, in the "take over the world" plan. He is repeatedly accused of "degrading" America's defenses.

George W. Bush, when he was running for president, made the same accusations. Then, when elected, he submitted the same military budget that Clinton had previously submitted. It wasn't until after Sept. 11, 2001, that Bush asked Congress for more military spending.

Our military budget, by the way, is bigger than that of "the next eight spenders combined, and 22 times the combined military budgets of our fiercest enemies -- Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Iraq and Sudan," according to an article by Frida Berrigan, a research associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Policy Center, posted on commondreams.org.

According to the CIA, the U.S. military budget in 1999 was $276.7 billion. Compare that with the military spending plans of the United Kingdom ($36.9 billion), China ($12.6 billion), France ($39.8 billion) and Iceland ($0).

And, incidentally, we're told our service people now fighting in Afghanistan are part of the world's best-ever fighting machine, but that very same machine was said to be in dangerous disrepair by George W. Bush when he was running for office and by the authors of the "take over the world" plan.

In essence, the "take over the world" plan says we should be equipped to fight and win multiple simultaneous wars in widely separated parts of the world.

It suggests that we should move into the Gulf region and control the flow of oil, particularly in Iraq, even if Saddam Hussein ceases to exist.

The Moscow Times article on the plan compares it with "Mein Kampf."

I'd be the last person to compare anyone with Hitler, but I have to admit that the plan drawn up by the Cheney people -- for whichever Bush happened to be in power at the time -- reads in some respects remarkably like "Mein Kampf."

It has the same kind of arrogance, the sense that we are right and everyone else is wrong, the unquestioned belief that only our great nation is capable of leading all the lesser nations out of the wilderness.

It goes further than that, hinting broadly that only the conservative members of our government can be trusted to lead the world safely to an American-dominated planet.

The plan is very dry reading and 90 pages long, but I suggest you scan it if you have the time. If you read between the lines, you'll conclude -- as I have -- that we're going to invade Iraq no matter what.

Our leaders believe it's our destiny to control the world.

Read more!

Sunday Herald - 15 September 2002
Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President
By Neil Mackay

A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001.

The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'

The PNAC document supports a 'blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests'.

This 'American grand strategy' must be advanced for 'as far into the future as possible', the report says. It also calls for the US to 'fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars' as a 'core mission'.

The report describes American armed forces abroad as 'the cavalry on the new American frontier'. The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document written by Wolfowitz and Libby that said the US must 'discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'.

The PNAC report also:

l refers to key allies such as the UK as 'the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership';

l describes peace-keeping missions as 'demanding American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations';

l reveals worries in the administration that Europe could rival the USA;

l says 'even should Saddam pass from the scene' bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently -- despite domestic opposition in the Gulf regimes to the stationing of US troops -- as 'Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has';

l spotlights China for 'regime change' saying 'it is time to increase the presence of American forces in southeast Asia'. This, it says, may lead to 'American and allied power providing the spur to the process of democratisation in China';

l calls for the creation of 'US Space Forces', to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent 'enemies' using the internet against the US;

l hints that, despite threatening war against Iraq for developing weapons of mass destruction, the US may consider developing biological weapons -- which the nation has banned -- in decades to come. It says: 'New methods of attack -- electronic, 'non-lethal', biological -- will be more widely available ... combat likely will take place in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and perhaps the world of microbes ... advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool';

l and pinpoints North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes and says their existence justifies the creation of a 'world-wide command-and-control system'.

Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP, father of the House of Commons and one of the leading rebel voices against war with Iraq, said: 'This is garbage from right-wing think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks -- men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. Men like Cheney, who were draft-dodgers in the Vietnam war.

'This is a blueprint for US world domination -- a new world order of their making. These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world. I am appalled that a British Labour Prime Minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing.'

Read more!

Israel investigates killing of boy
BBC News

The Israeli army has appointed a major general to investigate the killing of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy in the West Bank city of Nablus on Sunday.
Two British human rights activists say they witnessed the unprovoked killing of Baha Albahsh.

According to the witnesses, the death occurred as Palestinian demonstrators were dispersing after protests against the siege at Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah.

The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) told BBC News Online that the investigation should be concluded by the end of Tuesday.

Military officials initially said Albahsh set himself on fire handling a fire bomb.

But medical officials in Nablus said the boy was killed by a gunshot to the chest.

The British witnesses are members of the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led organisation of locals and foreigners.

The organisation stages protests against the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza and its activists try to act as human shields for Palestinians.

Observers

The two Britons were observing IDF behaviour towards Palestinian youths breaking a military curfew.

One of the witnesses, 24-year-old Ewa Jasiewicz from London, told the Associated Press news agency: "A soldier popped up from inside [an armoured personnel carrier]. I saw him with his rifle and he aimed at some kids on the street. There was no stone throwing or shooting going on at the time."


Sahar Albahsh mourns over the body of her 13-year-old son

Ms Jasiewicz said that in her month in the West Bank and Gaza Strip she had often seen soldiers aim their rifles, but not fire.

"This time was different. The soldier fired. It was not accidental. The soldiers decided to kill him.

"I saw Baha lying on the ground, with blood coming out of his chest... I saw blood oozing from his mouth. We called an ambulance and the ambulance came and took him.

"Baha had nothing on him, he was just wearing jeans with his t-shirt tucked in to a belt," Ms Jasiewicz said.

The second British witness only gave his name as Al because of problems he says international activists face at the airport when leaving Israel.

He told the London-based Guardian newspaper: "There is no way Baha could have been a threat to a soldier 120 metres away in a flak jacket and helmet and sitting in an APC."

Nablus, the West Bank's most populous city, has been under almost constant curfew since 21 June when Israeli forces moved into the main cities and towns of the West Bank.

Read more!

Nothing doing
Brian Whitaker

A new Palestinian report on UN resolutions exposes the double standards at the heart of Bush's rationale for action against Iraq, says Brian Whitaker

Tuesday September 24, 2002

In his speech to the United Nations earlier this month, President George Bush emphasised the need for action rather than words.

"We created the United Nations security council, so that, unlike the League of Nations, our deliberations would be more than talk, our resolutions would be more than wishes," he said.

"All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment," he continued. "Are security council resolutions to be honoured and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? [...] Right now those resolutions are being unilaterally subverted by the Iraqi regime."

The same could be said of various other countries, but most notably Israel. Throughout its history, the security council has never once taken enforcement action over Israel's flouting of UN resolutions or its violations of international law.

Largely as a result of American pressure, criticisms of Israel in security council resolutions also tend to be softer than the criticisms of other countries for similar offences.

Not only that. Thirty-two draft resolutions criticising Israel since 1972 have never seen the light of day because the US used its security council veto to block them.

A report published today by the PLO's negotiations affairs department looks at a series of UN resolutions relating to Israel, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Rwanda and Iraq - and compares the follow-up action taken in each case.

The report discusses existing resolutions in four categories: grave human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law; colonies and demographic manipulation; the right of return for refugees and displaced persons; and the withdrawal of forces from territories under to armed occupation.

In the first category, action taken by the security council on human rights violations included tribunals for the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity (in Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda), an arms embargo (Kosovo), an international presence (Kosovo and East Timor), and "all necessary means" (ie military action) in the case of Iraq.

Not even the mildest of these remedies was adopted in the case of Israel, whose violations - assassinations, deportations, house demolitions, restrictions on freedom of movement, etc - are well documented.

In the second category - demographic manipulation - Israel has sought to consolidate its occupation of the Palestinian territories by changing the population balance in two ways.

One is to encourage Palestinian emigration through economic disruption and land expropriation, as well as direct expulsion in some cases. The other is through the establishment of illegal Jewish colonies whose population has risen, since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, from 200,000 to 400,000.

In 1980, the security council issued a resolution saying that these activities had "no legal validity" and constituted "a flagrant violation of the fourth Geneva convention". It decided to establish a commission "to examine the situation".

Israel refused to co-operate with the commission and the security council responded with another resolution "strongly deploring" Israel's refusal.

Elsewhere, it has been a different story. In Kosovo, for example, efforts to drive out the majority ethnic Albanian population and replace them with ethnic Serbs were denounced by the security council and backed up with international action.

Similarly in Bosnia and Rwanda, strong condemnation was followed by comprehensive sanctions and enforcement action.

In the third category - the right of refugees and displaced persons to return to their homes - there is no relevant security council resolution about Palestinian refugees, though there have been resolutions regarding Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Rwanda.

"In contrast with the compared cases where the right of return formed a key component of all peace settlements and was enforced by international operations", the PLO report says, "no attempts have been made to enforce the Palestinian right of return and there have been attempts [by Israel] to declare the Palestinian refugee return issue a 'non-negotiable' one."

In the fourth category - withdrawal of occupying forces - the strongest action taken by the security council was against Iraq, following its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Member states were authorised to "use all necessary means" to end the occupation.

In the case of Bosnia, which in 1992 was occupied by Yugoslav and Croatian army units, the security council ordered "a general and complete embargo on all deliveries of weapons and military equipment to Yugoslavia".

In Kosovo, the security council backed up its withdrawal demand with action to deploy an international security presence. Unlike these rather short-lived occupations, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has continued for 35 years.

The only specific action taken by the security council during this long period, according to the report, was in 1968 when it sent a special representative to the occupied territories and requested Israel "to co-operate with him and to facilitate his work".

The trouble with this pussy-footing approach is not simply that it lets favoured countries get away with things that others would be punished for. It also sends them a signal that in future they can act as they please.

"We cannot stand by and do nothing", Mr Bush told delegates to the UN. He was talking, of course, about Iraq. But in the case of Israel, we not only can do nothing - we do do nothing.

Read more!

September 20, 2002
Bush to Outline Doctrine of Striking Foes First
By DAVID E. SANGER


WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 — On Friday, the Bush administration will publish its first comprehensive rationale for shifting American military strategy toward pre-emptive action against hostile states and terrorist groups developing weapons of mass destruction. The strategy document will also state, for the first time, that the United States will never allow its military supremacy to be challenged the way it was during the cold war.
In the 33-page document, Mr. Bush also seeks to answer the critics of growing American muscle-flexing by insisting that the United States will exploit its military and economic power to encourage "free and open societies," rather than seek "unilateral advantage." It calls this union of values and national interests "a distinctly American internationalism."
The document, titled "The National Security Strategy of the United States," is one that every president is required to submit to Congress. It is the first comprehensive explanation of the administration's foreign policy, from defense strategy to global warming. A copy of the final draft was obtained by The New York Times.
It sketches out a far more muscular and sometimes aggressive approach to national security than any since the Reagan era. It includes the discounting of most nonproliferation treaties in favor of a doctrine of "counterproliferation," a reference to everything from missile defense to forcibly dismantling weapons or their components. It declares that the strategies of containment and deterrence — staples of American policy since the 1940's — are all but dead. There is no way in this changed world, the document states, to deter those who "hate the United States and everything for which it stands."

"America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones," the document states, sounding what amounts to a death knell for many of the key strategies of the cold war.

One of the most striking elements of the new strategy document is its insistence "that the president has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago."

"Our forces will be strong enough," Mr. Bush's document states, "to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." With Russia so financially hobbled that it can no longer come close to matching American military spending, the doctrine seemed aimed at rising powers like China, which is expanding its conventional and nuclear forces.

Administration officials who worked on the strategy for months say it amounts to both a maturation and an explanation of Mr. Bush's vision for the exercise of America power after 20 months in office, integrating the military, economic and moral levers he holds.

Much of the document focuses on how public diplomacy, the use of foreign aid, and changes in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank can be used to win what it describes as a battle of competing values and ideas — including "a battle for the future of the Muslim world."

The president put the final touches on the new strategy last weekend at Camp David after working on it for months with his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and with other members of the national security team. In its military hawkishness, its expressions of concern that Russian reforms could be undermined by the country's elite, and its focus on bolstering foreign aid — especially for literacy training and AIDS — it particularly bears the stamp of Ms. Rice's thinking.

A senior White House official said Mr. Bush had edited the document heavily "because he thought there were sections where we sounded overbearing or arrogant." But at the same time, the official said, it is important to foreclose the option that other nations could aspire to challenge the United States militarily, because "once you cut off the challenge of military competition, you open up the possibility of cooperation in a number of other areas."

Still, the administration's critics at home and abroad will almost certainly find ammunition in the document for their argument that Mr. Bush is only interested in a multilateral approach as long as it does not frustrate his will. At several points, the document states clearly that when important American interests are at stake there will be no compromise.

The document argues that while the United States will seek allies in the battle against terrorism, "we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting pre-emptively." That includes "convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities" not to aid terrorists, the essence of the doctrine Mr. Bush declared on the night of Sept. 11, 2001.

The White House delayed releasing the document this week so that its lengthy discussion of conditions under which the United States might take unilateral, pre-emptive action would not dominate delicate negotiations in the United Nations or the testimony of administration officials who appeared at Congressional hearings to discuss Iraq.

The new strategy departs significantly from the last one published by President Clinton, at the end of 1999.

Mr. Clinton's strategy dealt at length with tactics to prevent the kind of financial meltdowns that threatened economies in Asia and Russia. The Bush strategy urges other nations to adopt Mr. Bush's own economic philosophy, starting with low marginal tax rates. While Mr. Clinton's strategy relied heavily on enforcing or amending a series of international treaties, from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to Kyoto protocols on the environment, Mr. Bush's strategy dismisses most of those efforts.

In fact, the new document — which Mr. Bush told his staff had to be written in plain English because "the boys in Lubbock ought to be able to read it" — celebrates his decision last year to abandon the ABM treaty because it impeded American efforts to build a missile defense system. It recites the dangers of nonproliferation agreements that have failed to prevent Iran, North Korea, Iraq and other countries from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and says that the United States will never subject its citizens to the newly created International Criminal Court, "whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans."

The document makes no reference to the Kyoto accord, but sets an "overall objective" of cutting American greenhouse gas emissions "per unit of economic activity by 18 percent over the next 10 years." The administration says that is a reasonable goal given its view of the current state of environmental science. Its critics, however, point out that the objective is voluntary, and allows enormous room for American emissions to increase as the American economy expands.

The doctrine also describes at great length the administration's commitment to bolstering American foreign aid by 50 percent in the next few years in "countries whose governments rule justly, invest in their people and encourage economic freedom." It insists that the programs must have "measurable results" to assure that the money is actually going to the poor, especially for schools, health care and clean water.

Read more!

ZNet | Mideast

Killings Of Dozens Once Again Called Period Of Calm By US Media

by Michael Brown and Ali Abunimah; The Electronic Intifada; September 20, 2002

Many US media reports were quick to declare that two suicide bombings in Israel on September 18 and 19, in which eight Israelis were killed, had brought an end to a period of "calm" simply because there had been no similar attacks for six weeks and few Israelis had been victims of Palestinian violence. In fact, the bombings came at the end of a particularly bloody period in which dozens of Palestinians, most of them unarmed civilians, and a large number of them children, had been killed and injured by Israeli occupation forces. In effect, the definition of "calm" or a "lull in violence" inherent in these reports is 'only Palestinians are being killed.'

The Chicago Tribune ran a prominent headline above a report about the September 18 bombing in which one Israeli police officer was killed, declaring "Bomb breaks 6-week calm" (September 19). The Washington Post called the bombings a "flare-up in violence" which broke the "relative calm in the Middle East." ("Violent reminder of a simmering issue," September 20).

The Baltimore Sun ran a continuation headline reading "Bombs shatter 6 weeks of relative calm" and asserted "a six-week lull in violence had given both Israelis and palestinians hope that two years of violence might be ending." ("Tel Aviv bus bomb kills five, injures 50," September 20).

NBC news anchor Brian Williams told viewers that,
"After six weeks of relative calm today, a second straight day of violence in the Middle East. Another suicide bombing, this time on a crowded Tel Aviv bus, that killed five people, injured more than 50. As a result, Israeli tanks are once again surrounding Yasir Arafat's compound in Ramallah in the West Bank."

Following that introduction, NBC reporter in Tel Aviv, Jim Maceda, declared,

"Well, after those six weeks with no suicide bombings either in Israel proper or the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, some observers here believed that they actually saw Palestinians and Israelis inching towards a truce, even a peace. But all that was shattered today." (The News with Brian Williams, CNBC, September 19, 2002)

In other words, according to NBC, only suicide bombings, and nothing else, fit the definition of violence and if there are no suicide bombings, then peace may be at hand. Similarly, on CNN's morning news on September 19, Mike Hanna informed viewers that the bombings had ended a period of "comparative calm."

The Los Angeles Times declared that the September 19 bomb in Tel Aviv "seemed to burst any illusion that the relative calm of the last six weeks was a precursor to peace." Contradicting and making a nonsense of its own characterization of the situation, while revealing the underlying reality, the same report stated later

"Not that the lull has been without violence. Several dozen people - soldiers and civilians - have died on both sides, with the heavier toll falling on the Palestinians. Most of the violence has been in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Palestinians are living under Israeli military authority." ("Blast kills Israeli, Ends a lull in suicide bombings," September 19, 2002)

The last few weeks have been anything but a period of "calm" relative or otherwise for Palestinians. On September 19, Abdul Salam Sumerin, a 9-year-old Palestinian school boy was shot dead when, according to Haaretz, Israeli occupation forces "used live fire to disperse a crowd of school children challenging the army's attempt to impose a curfew on the El Amari refugee camp, in El-Bireh" near Ramallah. (IDF kills 9-year old boy in El-Bireh, September 20, 2002). According to other reports Israeli forces fired at the children using heavy machine guns mounted on armored vehicles.

Khalid Amayreh writing in the September 13 issue of Middle East International reported the following recent attacks against Palestinians which would seemingly refute the notion of "comparative" or "relative" calm":

Just after midnight on August 28 four sleeping Palestinian civilians -- a mother, her two sons, and a cousin -- were killed in Gaza by an Israeli tank firing flechettes, a grisly American-made weapon which tears human bodies into unrecognizable fragments of flesh. Eight other civilians were injured in that attack. Shortly thereafter an Israeli armored vehicle opened fire with heavy machine guns, killing a 10-year-old boy and injuring eight other people in Rafah, Gaza.

Two children aged 8 and 10, two teenagers and a 29-year-old Fatah activist were killed in an Israeli missile strike on a civilian car and a nearby house in Tubas, near Jenin, on August 31 -- an area under full Israeli military occupation. CNN persisted for weeks in calling the teens, aged 16 and 17, "bodyguards" despite the fact that no credible news agency made the same claim.

Four Palestinian quarry workers were killed by Israeli soldiers near the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba on September 1. A witness, who survived by hiding in a latrine, said that the soldiers shot his co-workers dead one by one. On September 3 in the village of Burin two more young men, reportedly uninvolved in resistance activity, were killed by Israeli shells.

Between September 6 and 10 five more Palestinians, three of them civilians, being killed by Israeli forces.

On September 3 an Israeli army bulldozer almost crushed an entire family in Rafah in their home. Several homes were bulldozed there on September 1 and hundreds of palm and fruit trees in central Gaza were bulldozed between September 8 and 9. Just a day before the apparent resumption of suicide bombings, eight Palestinian children were injured when a bomb, that Israeli authorities suspect was planted by Jewish settlers, exploded in their West Bank school.

Amayreh cites Haaretz's Amira Hass reporting on September 2 that at least 39 Palestinian civilians were killed from Aug. 1 to Sept. 1, including seven children, 15 teenagers, and two women.

In addition to dozens of killings and injuries of Palestinians, Israeli occupation forces have carried out countless invasions of towns and villages, often with columns of twenty tanks or more. These invasions leave widespread destruction and terror in their wake. Such attacks can hardly be characterized as being an aspect of "calm." According to Amayreh, Israeli journalist Danny Rubinstein wrote in Haaretz on September 2:

"The Palestinian media is full of horrific photos of children wounded or killed by IDF fire. Hundreds of photos of the dead and wounded, elderly and women, beside tank tracks, fill their pages, as do pictures of disabled people in wheelchairs trying to make their way over hills, and houses, sometimes entire neighborhoods, reduced to rubble."

Even Israel's president, Moshe Katsav, suggested on September 1 that Israeli soldiers had become "trigger-happy," after a weekend in which Israeli soldiers killed eleven Palestinians, including six unarmed adults and two children. ("Israelis becoming 'trigger happy,' President questions army's tactics as 11 die," Daily Telegraph, September 2, 2002)

An Israeli commission looking into three incidents in Gaza, Tubas, and Hebron in which Palestinian civilians had been killed determined on September 6 that Israeli soldiers had "acted properly in accordance with standing orders." CNN's domestic network gave significant attention in its coverage to official Israeli expressions of regret about killing civilians, but passed over the results of the investigation almost entirely.

These numerous examples demonstrate that there is a widespread tendency in the US media to simply ignore or severely underplay violence when its victims are Palestinians, while focusing intensely on incidents when the victims are Israeli. One of the reasons for the disturbing and persistent phenomenon of devaluing Palestinian life and death, is a structural geographic bias - most US news organizations who have reporters on the ground base them in Tel Aviv or west Jerusalem, very far from the places where Palestinians are being killed and bombarded on a daily basis.

But these geographical basing decisions in themselves may reflect an underlying calculation that what happens to Israelis is inherently more important and newsworthy than anything else in the conflict. What it boils down to is that from the perspective of many in the US media, Israeli lives are just worth more than those of Palestinians.

Read more!

FEATURE STORY | September 2, 2002 The Nation
The Men From JINSA and CSP
Printed from http://www.thenation.com
© 2002 The Nation Company, L.P.

by JASON VEST

Almost thirty years ago, a prominent group of neoconservative hawks found an effective vehicle for advocating their views via the Committee on the Present Danger, a group that fervently believed the United States was a hair away from being militarily surpassed by the Soviet Union, and whose raison d'être was strident advocacy of bigger military budgets, near-fanatical opposition to any form of arms control and zealous championing of a Likudnik Israel. Considered a marginal group in its nascent days during the Carter Administration, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 CPD went from the margins to the center of power.

Just as the right-wing defense intellectuals made CPD a cornerstone of a shadow defense establishment during the Carter Administration, so, too, did the right during the Clinton years, in part through two organizations: the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP). And just as was the case two decades ago, dozens of their members have ascended to powerful government posts, where their advocacy in support of the same agenda continues, abetted by the out-of-government adjuncts from which they came. Industrious and persistent, they've managed to weave a number of issues--support for national missile defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general--into a hard line, with support for the Israeli right at its core.

On no issue is the JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war--not just with Iraq, but "total war," as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSAns in Washington, put it last year. For this crew, "regime change" by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative. Anyone who dissents--be it Colin Powell's State Department, the CIA or career military officers--is committing heresy against articles of faith that effectively hold there is no difference between US and Israeli national security interests, and that the only way to assure continued safety and prosperity for both countries is through hegemony in the Middle East--a hegemony achieved with the traditional cold war recipe of feints, force, clientism and covert action.

For example, the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board--chaired by JINSA/CSP adviser and former Reagan Administration Defense Department official Richard Perle, and stacked with advisers from both groups--recently made news by listening to a briefing that cast Saudi Arabia as an enemy to be brought to heel through a number of potential mechanisms, many of which mirror JINSA's recommendations, and which reflect the JINSA/CSP crowd's preoccupation with Egypt. (The final slide of the Defense Policy Board presentation proposed that "Grand Strategy for the Middle East" should concentrate on "Iraq as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot [and] Egypt as the prize.") Ledeen has been leading the charge for regime change in Iran, while old comrades like Andrew Marshall and Harold Rhode in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment actively tinker with ways to re-engineer both the Iranian and Saudi governments. JINSA is also cheering the US military on as it tries to secure basing rights in the strategic Red Sea country of Eritrea, happily failing to mention that the once-promising secular regime of President Isaiais Afewerki continues to slide into the kind of repressive authoritarianism practiced by the "axis of evil" and its adjuncts.

Indeed, there are some in military and intelligence circles who have taken to using "axis of evil" in reference to JINSA and CSP, along with venerable repositories of hawkish thinking like the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute, as well as defense contractors, conservative foundations and public relations entities underwritten by far-right American Zionists (all of which help to underwrite JINSA and CSP). It's a milieu where ideology and money seamlessly blend: "Whenever you see someone identified in print or on TV as being with the Center for Security Policy or JINSA championing a position on the grounds of ideology or principle--which they are unquestionably doing with conviction--you are, nonetheless, not informed that they're also providing a sort of cover for other ideologues who just happen to stand to profit from hewing to the Likudnik and Pax Americana lines," says a veteran intelligence officer. He notes that while the United States has begun a phaseout of civilian aid to Israel that will end by 2007, government policy is to increase military aid by half the amount of civilian aid that's cut each year--which is not only a boon to both the US and Israeli weapons industries but is also crucial to realizing the far right's vision for missile defense and the Middle East.

Founded in 1976 by neoconservatives concerned that the United States might not be able to provide Israel with adequate military supplies in the event of another Arab-Israeli war, over the past twenty-five years JINSA has gone from a loose-knit proto-group to a $1.4-million-a-year operation with a formidable array of Washington power players on its rolls. Until the beginning of the current Bush Administration, JINSA's board of advisers included such heavy hitters as Dick Cheney, John Bolton (now Under Secretary of State for Arms Control) and Douglas Feith, the third-highest-ranking executive in the Pentagon. Both Perle and former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey, two of the loudest voices in the attack-Iraq chorus, are still on the board, as are such Reagan-era relics as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Eugene Rostow and Ledeen--Oliver North's Iran/ contra liaison with the Israelis.

According to its website, JINSA exists to "educate the American public about the importance of an effective US defense capability so that our vital interests as Americans can be safeguarded" and to "inform the American defense and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East." In practice, this translates into its members producing a steady stream of op-eds and reports that have been good indicators of what the Pentagon's civilian leadership is thinking.

JINSA relishes denouncing virtually any type of contact between the US government and Syria and finding new ways to demonize the Palestinians. To give but one example (and one that kills two birds with one stone): According to JINSA, not only is Yasir Arafat in control of all violence in the occupied territories, but he orchestrates the violence solely "to protect Saddam.... Saddam is at the moment Arafat's only real financial supporter.... [Arafat] has no incentive to stop the violence against Israel and allow the West to turn its attention to his mentor and paymaster." And if there's a way to advance other aspects of the far-right agenda by intertwining them with Israeli interests, JINSA doesn't hesitate there, either. A recent report contends that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge must be tapped because "the Arab oil-producing states" are countries "with interests inimical to ours," but Israel "stand[s] with us when we need [Israel]," and a US policy of tapping oil under ANWR will "limit [the Arabs'] ability to do damage to either of us."

The bulk of JINSA's modest annual budget is spent on taking a bevy of retired US generals and admirals to Israel, where JINSA facilitates meetings between Israeli officials and the still-influential US flag officers, who, upon their return to the States, happily write op-eds and sign letters and advertisements championing the Likudnik line. (Sowing seeds for the future, JINSA also takes US service academy cadets to Israel each summer and sponsors a lecture series at the Army, Navy and Air Force academies.) In one such statement, issued soon after the outbreak of the latest intifada, twenty-six JINSAns of retired flag rank, including many from the advisory board, struck a moralizing tone, characterizing Palestinian violence as a "perversion of military ethics" and holding that "America's role as facilitator in this process should never yield to America's responsibility as a friend to Israel," as "friends don't leave friends on the battlefield."

However high-minded this might sound, the postservice associations of the letter's signatories--which are almost always left off the organization's website and communiqués--ought to require that the phrase be amended to say "friends don't leave friends on the battlefield, especially when there's business to be done and bucks to be made." Almost every retired officer who sits on JINSA's board of advisers or has participated in its Israel trips or signed a JINSA letter works or has worked with military contractors who do business with the Pentagon and Israel. While some keep a low profile as self-employed "consultants" and avoid mention of their clients, others are less shy about their associations, including with the private mercenary firm Military Professional Resources International, weapons broker and military consultancy Cypress International and SY Technology, whose main clients include the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, which oversees several ongoing joint projects with Israel.

The behemoths of military contracting are also well represented in JINSA's ranks. For example, JINSA advisory board members Adm. Leon Edney, Adm. David Jeremiah and Lieut. Gen. Charles May, all retired, have served Northrop Grumman or its subsidiaries as either consultants or board members. Northrop Grumman has built ships for the Israeli Navy and sold F-16 avionics and E-2C Hawkeye planes to the Israeli Air Force (as well as the Longbow radar system to the Israeli army for use in its attack helicopters). It also works with Tamam, a subsidiary of Israeli Aircraft Industries, to produce an unmanned aerial vehicle. Lockheed Martin has sold more than $2 billion worth of F-16s to Israel since 1999, as well as flight simulators, multiple-launch rocket systems and Seahawk heavyweight torpedoes. At one time or another, General May, retired Lieut. Gen. Paul Cerjan and retired Adm. Carlisle Trost have labored in LockMart's vineyards. Trost has also sat on the board of General Dynamics, whose Gulfstream subsidiary has a $206 million contract to supply planes to Israel to be used for "special electronics missions."

By far the most profitably diversified of the JINSAns is retired Adm. David Jeremiah. President and partner of Technology Strategies & Alliances Corporation (described as a "strategic advisory firm and investment banking firm engaged primarily in the aerospace, defense, telecommunications and electronics industries"), Jeremiah also sits on the boards of Northrop Grumman's Litton subsidiary and of defense giant Alliant Techsystems, which--in partnership with Israel's TAAS--does a brisk business in rubber bullets. And he has a seat on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, chaired by Perle.

About the only major defense contractor without a presence on JINSA's advisory board is Boeing, which has had a relationship with Israeli Aircraft Industries for thirty years. (Boeing also sells F-15s to Israel and, in partnership with Lockheed Martin, Apache attack helicopters, a ubiquitous weapon in the occupied territories.) But take a look at JINSA's kindred spirit in things pro-Likud and pro-Star Wars, the Center for Security Policy, and there on its national security advisory council are Stanley Ebner, a former Boeing executive; Andrew Ellis, vice president for government relations; and Carl Smith, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee who, as a lawyer in private practice, has counted Boeing among his clients. "JINSA and CSP," says a veteran Pentagon analyst, "may as well be one and the same."

Not a hard sell: There's always been considerable overlap beween the JINSA and CSP rosters--JINSA advisers Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle and Phyllis Kaminsky also serve on CSP's advisory council; current JINSA advisory board chairman David Steinmann sits on CSP's board of directors; and before returning to the Pentagon Douglas Feith served as the board's chair. At this writing, twenty-two CSP advisers--including additional Reagan-era remnants like Elliott Abrams, Ken deGraffenreid, Paula Dobriansky, Sven Kraemer, Robert Joseph, Robert Andrews and J.D. Crouch--have reoccupied key positions in the national security establishment, as have other true believers of more recent vintage.

While CSP boasts an impressive advisory list of hawkish luminaries, its star is Frank Gaffney, its founder, president and CEO. A protégé of Perle going back to their days as staffers for the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (a k a the Senator from Boeing, and the Senate's most zealous champion of Israel in his day), Gaffney later joined Perle at the Pentagon, only to be shown the door by Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci in 1987, not long after Perle left. Gaffney then reconstituted the latest incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger. Beyond compiling an A-list of influential conservative hawks, Gaffney has been prolific over the past fifteen years, churning out a constant stream of reports (as well as regular columns for the Washington Times) making the case that the gravest threats to US national security are China, Iraq, still-undeveloped ballistic missiles launched by rogue states, and the passage of or adherence to virtually any form of arms control treaty.

Gaffney and CSP's prescriptions for national security have been fairly simple: Gut all arms control treaties, push ahead with weapons systems virtually everyone agrees should be killed (such as the V-22 Osprey), give no quarter to the Palestinians and, most important, go full steam ahead on just about every national missile defense program. (CSP was heavily represented on the late-1990s Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, which was instrumental in keeping the program alive during the Clinton years.)

Looking at the center's affiliates, it's not hard to see why: Not only are makers of the Osprey (Boeing) well represented on the CSP's board of advisers but so too is Lockheed Martin (by vice president for space and strategic missiles Charles Kupperman and director of defense systems Douglas Graham). Former TRW executive Amoretta Hoeber is also a CSP adviser, as is former Congressman and Raytheon lobbyist Robert Livingston. Ball Aerospace & Technologies--a major manufacturer of NASA and Pentagon satellites--is represented by former Navy Secretary John Lehman, while missile-defense computer systems maker Hewlett-Packard is represented by George Keyworth, who is on its board of directors. And the Congressional Missile Defense Caucus and Osprey (or "tilt rotor") caucus are represented by Representative Curt Weldon and Senator Jon Kyl.

CSP was instrumental in developing the arguments against the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Largely ignored or derided at the time, a 1995 CSP memo co-written by Douglas Feith holding that the United States should withdraw from the ABM treaty has essentially become policy, as have other CSP reports opposing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the International Criminal Court. But perhaps the most insightful window on the JINSA/CSP policy worldview comes in the form of a paper Perle and Feith collaborated on in 1996 with six others under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Essentially an advice letter to ascendant Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" makes for insightful reading as a kind of US-Israeli neoconservative manifesto.

The paper's first prescription was for an Israeli rightward economic shift, with tax cuts and a selloff of public lands and enterprises--moves that would also engender support from a "broad bipartisan spectrum of key pro-Israeli Congressional leaders." But beyond economics, the paper essentially reads like a blueprint for a mini-cold war in the Middle East, advocating the use of proxy armies for regime changes, destabilization and containment. Indeed, it even goes so far as to articulate a way to advance right-wing Zionism by melding it with missile-defense advocacy. "Mr. Netanyahu can highlight his desire to cooperate more closely with the United States on anti-missile defense in order to remove the threat of blackmail which even a weak and distant army can pose to either state," it reads. "Not only would such cooperation on missile defense counter a tangible physical threat to Israel's survival, but it would broaden Israel's base of support among many in the United States Congress who may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile defense"--something that has the added benefit of being "helpful in the effort to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem."

Recent months in Washington have shown just how influential the notions propagated by JINSA and CSP are--and how disturbingly zealous their advocates are. In early March Feith vainly attempted to get the CIA to keep former intelligence officers Milt Bearden and Frank Anderson from accepting an invitation to an Afghanistan-related meeting with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld at the Pentagon--not because of what the two might say about Afghanistan, according to sources familiar with the incident, but likely out of fear that Anderson, a veteran Arabist and former chief of the CIA's Near East division, would proffer his views on Iraq (opposed to invading) and Israel-Palestine (a fan of neither Arafat nor Sharon). In late June, after United Press International reported on a US Muslim civil liberties group's lambasting of Gaffney for his attacks on the American Muslim Council, Gaffney, according to a fellow traveler, "went berserk," launching a stream of invective about the UPI scribe who reported the item.

It's incidents like this, say knowledgeable observers and participants, that highlight an interesting dynamic among right-wing hawks at the moment. Though the general agenda put forth by JINSA and CSP continues to be reflected in councils of war, even some of the hawks (including Rumsfeld deputy Paul Wolfowitz) are growing increasingly leery of Israel's settlements policy and Gaffney's relentless support for it. Indeed, his personal stock in Bush Administration circles is low. "Gaffney has worn out his welcome by being an overbearing gadfly rather than a serious contributor to policy," says a senior Pentagon political official. Since earlier this year, White House political adviser Karl Rove has been casting about for someone to start a new, more mainstream defense group that would counter the influence of CSP. According to those who have communicated with Rove on the matter, his quiet efforts are in response to complaints from many conservative activists who feel let down by Gaffney, or feel he's too hard on President Bush. "A lot of us have taken [Gaffney] at face value over the years," one influential conservative says. "Yet we now know he's pushed for some of the most flawed missile defense and conventional systems. He considered Cuba a 'classic asymmetric threat' but not Al Qaeda. And since 9/11, he's been less concerned with the threat to America than to Israel."

Gaffney's operation has always been a small one, about $1 million annually--funded largely by a series of grants from the conservative Olin, Bradley and various Scaife foundations, as well as some defense contractor money--but he's recently been able to underwrite a TV and print ad campaign holding that the Palestinians should be Enemy Number One in the War on Terror, still obsessed with the destruction of Israel. It's here that one sees the influence not of defense contractor money but of far-right Zionist dollars, including some from Irving Moskowitz, the California bingo magnate. A donor to both CSP and JINSA (as well as a JINSA director), Moskowitz not only sends millions of dollars a year to far-right Israeli settler groups like Ateret Cohanim but he has also funded the construction of settlements, having bought land for development in key Arab areas around Jerusalem. Moskowitz ponied up the money that enabled the 1996 reopening of a tunnel under the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, which resulted in seventy deaths due to rioting.

Also financing Gaffney's efforts is New York investment banker Lawrence Kadish. A valued and valuable patron of both the Republican National Committee and George W. Bush, Kadish helps underwrite CSP as well as Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, an offshoot of conservative activist William Bennett's Empower America, on which he and Gaffney serve as "senior advisers" in the service of identifying "external" and "internal" post-9/11 threats to America. (The "internal" threats, as articulated by AVOT, include former President Jimmy Carter, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham and Representative Maxine Waters.) Another of Gaffney's backers is Poju Zabludowicz, heir to a formidable diversified international empire that includes arms manufacturer Soltam--which once employed Perle--and benefactor of the recently established Britain Israel Communication and Research Centre, a London-based group that appears to equate reportage or commentary uncomplimentary to Zionism with anti-Semitism.

While a small but growing number of conservatives are voicing concerns about various aspects of foreign and defense policy--ranging from fear of overreach to lack of Congressional debate--the hawks seem to be ruling the roost. Beginning in October, hard-line American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin (to Rubin, outgoing UN human rights chief Mary Robinson is an abettor of terrorism) arrives at the Pentagon to take over the Defense Department's Iran-Iraq account, adding another voice to the Pentagon section of Ledeen's "total war" chorus. Colin Powell's State Department continues to take a beating from outside and inside--including Bolton and his special assistant David Wurmser. (An AEI scholar and far-right Zionist who's married to Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research Institute--recently the subject of a critical investigation by London Guardian Middle East editor Brian Whitaker--Wurmser played a key role in crafting the "Arafat must go" policy that many career specialists see as a problematic sop to Ariel Sharon.)

As for Rumsfeld, based on comments made at a Pentagon "town hall" meeting on August 6, there seems to be little doubt as to whose comments are resonating most with him--and not just on missile defense and overseas adventures: After fielding a question about Israeli-Palestinian issues, he repeatedly referred to the "so-called occupied territories" and casually characterized the Israeli policy of building Jewish-only enclaves on Palestinian land as "mak[ing] some settlement in various parts of the so-called occupied area," with which Israel can do whatever it wants, as it has "won" all its wars with various Arab entities--essentially an echo of JINSA's stated position that "there is no Israeli occupation." Ominously, Rumsfeld's riff gave a ranking Administration official something of a chill: "I realized at that point," he said, "that on settlements--where there are cleavages on the right--Wolfowitz may be to the left of Rumsfeld."

Read more!

US thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy

Brian Whitaker reports on the network of research institutes whose views and TV appearances are supplanting all other experts on Middle Eastern issues

Guardian Unlimited

Monday August 19, 2002

A little-known fact about Richard Perle, the leading advocate of hardline policies at the Pentagon, is that he once wrote a political thriller. The book, appropriately called Hard Line, is set in the days of the cold war with the Soviet Union. Its hero is a male senior official at the Pentagon, working late into the night and battling almost single-handedly to rescue the US from liberal wimps at the state department who want to sign away America's nuclear deterrent in a disarmament deal with the Russians.

Ten years on Mr Perle finds himself cast in the real-life role of his fictional hero - except that the Russians are no longer a threat, so he has to make do with the Iraqis, the Saudis and terrorism in general.

In real life too, Mr Perle is not fighting his battle single-handed. Around him there is a cosy and cleverly-constructed network of Middle East "experts" who share his neo-conservative outlook and who pop up as talking heads on US television, in newspapers, books, testimonies to congressional committees, and at lunchtime gatherings in Washington.

The network centres on research institutes - thinktanks that attempt to influence government policy and are funded by tax-deductible gifts from unidentified donors.

When he is not too busy at the Pentagon, or too busy running Hollinger Digital - part of the group that publishes the Daily Telegraph in Britain - or at board meetings of the Jerusalem Post, Mr Perle is "resident fellow" at one of the thinktanks - the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Mr Perle's close friend and political ally at AEI is David Wurmser, head of its Middle East studies department. Mr Perle helpfully wrote the introduction to Mr Wurmser's book, Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein.

Mr Wurmser's wife, Meyrav, is co-founder, along with Colonel Yigal Carmon, formerly of Israeli military intelligence - of the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), which specialises in translating and distributing articles that show Arabs in a bad light.

She also holds strong views on leftwing Israeli intellectuals, whom she regards as a threat to Israel (see "Selective Memri", Guardian Unlimited, August 12, 2002).

Ms Wurmser currently runs the Middle East section at another thinktank - the Hudson Institute, where Mr Perle recently joined the board of trustees. In addition, Ms Wurmser belongs to an organisation called the Middle East Forum.

Michael Rubin, a specialist on Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, who recently arrived from yet another thinktank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, assists Mr Perle and Mr Wurmser at AEI. Mr Rubin also belongs to the Middle East Forum.

Another Middle East scholar at AEI is Laurie Mylroie, author of Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, which expounds a rather daft theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.

When the book was published by the AEI, Mr Perle hailed it as "splendid and wholly convincing".

An earlier book on Iraq Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf which Ms Mylroie co-authored with Judith Miller, a New York Times journalist, became the New York Times's No 1 bestseller.

Ms Mylroie and Ms Miller both have connections with the Middle East Forum. Mr Perle, Mr Rubin, Ms Wurmser, Ms Mylroie and Ms Miller are all clients of Eleana Benador, a Peruvian-born linguist who acts as a sort of theatrical agent for experts on the Middle East and terrorism, organising their TV appearances and speaking engagements.

Of the 28 clients on Ms Benador's books, at least nine are connected with the AEI, the Washington Institute and the Middle East Forum.

Although these three privately-funded organisations promote views from only one end of the political spectrum, the amount of exposure that they get with their books, articles and TV appearances is extraordinary.

The Washington Institute, for example, takes the credit for placing up to 90 articles written by its members - mainly "op-ed" pieces - in newspapers during the last year.

Fourteen of those appeared in the Los Angeles Times, nine in New Republic, eight in the Wall Street Journal, eight in the Jerusalem Post, seven in the National Review Online, six in the Daily Telegraph, six in the Washington Post, four in the New York Times and four in the Baltimore Sun. Of the total, 50 were written by Michael Rubin.

Anyone who has tried offering op-ed articles to a major newspaper will appreciate the scale of this achievement.

The media attention bestowed on these thinktanks is not for want of other experts in the field. American universities have about 1,400 full-time faculty members specialising in the Middle East.

Of those, an estimated 400-500 are experts on some aspect of contemporary politics in the region, but their views are rarely sought or heard, either by the media or government.

"I see a parade of people from these institutes coming through as talking heads [on cable TV]. I very seldom see a professor from a university on those shows," says Juan Cole, professor of history at Michigan University, who is a critic of the private institutes.

"Academics [at universities] are involved in analysing what's going on but they're not advocates, so they don't have the same impetus," he said.

"The expertise on the Middle East that exists in the universities is not being utilised, even for basic information."

Of course, very few academics have agents like Eleana Benador to promote their work and very few are based in Washington - which can make arranging TV appearances , or rubbing shoulders with state department officials a bit difficult.

Those who work for US thinktanks are often given university-style titles such as "senior fellow", or "adjunct scholar", but their research is very different from that of universities - it is entirely directed towards shaping government policy.

What nobody outside the thinktanks knows, however, is who pays for this policy-shaping research.

Under US law, large donations given to non-profit, "non-partisan" organisations such as thinktanks must be itemised in their annual "form 990" returns to the tax authorities. But the identity of donors does not need to be made public.

The AEI, which deals with many other issues besides the Middle East, had assets of $35.8m (£23.2m) and an income of $24.5m in 2000, according to its most recent tax return.

It received seven donations of $1m or above in cash or shares, the highest being $3.35m.

The Washington Institute, which deals only with Middle East policy, had assets of $11.2m and an income of $4.1m in 2000. The institute says its donors are identifiable because they are also its trustees, but the list of trustees contains 239 names which makes it impossible to distinguish large benefactors from small ones.

The smaller Middle East Forum had an income of less than $1.5m in 2000, with the largest single donation amounting to $355,000.

In terms of their ability to influence policy, thinktanks have several advantages over universities. To begin with they can hire staff without committee procedures, which allows them to build up teams of researchers that share a similar political orientation.

They can also publish books themselves without going through the academic refereeing processes required by university publishers. And they usually site themselves in Washington, close to government and the media.

Apart from influencing policy on the Middle East, the Washington Institute and the Middle East Forum recently launched a campaign to discredit university departments that specialise in the region.

After September 11, when various government agencies realised there was a shortage of Americans who could speak Arabic, there were moves to beef up the relevant university departments.

But Martin Kramer, of the Washington Institute, Middle East Forum and former director of the Moshe Dayan Centre at Tel Aviv university, had other ideas.

He produced a vitriolic book Ivory Towers on Sand, which criticised Middle East departments of universities in the US.

His book was published by the Washington Institute and warmly reviewed in the Weekly Standard, whose editor, William Kristol, was a member of the Middle East Forum along with Mr Kramer.

"Kramer has performed a crucial service by exposing intellectual rot in a scholarly field of capital importance to national wellbeing," the review said.

The Washington Institute is considered the most influential of the Middle East thinktanks, and the one that the state department takes most seriously. Its director is the former US diplomat, Dennis Ross.

Besides publishing books and placing newspaper articles, the institute has a number of other activities that for legal purposes do not constitute lobbying, since this would change its tax status.

It holds lunches and seminars, typically about three times a week, where ideas are exchanged and political networking takes place. It has also given testimony to congressional committees nine times in the last five years.

Every four years, it convenes a "bipartisan blue-ribbon commission" known as the Presidential study group, which presents a blueprint for Middle East policy to the newly-elected president.

The institute makes no secret of its extensive links with Israel, which currently include the presence of two scholars from the Israeli armed forces.

Israel is an ally and the connection is so well known that officials and politicians take it into account when dealing with the institute. But it would surely be a different matter if the ally concerned were a country such as Egypt, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

Apart from occasional lapses, such as the publication of Mr Kramer's book, the Washington Institute typically represents the considered, sober voice of American-Israeli conservatism.

The Middle East Forum is its strident voice - two different tones, but mostly the same people.

Three prominent figures from the Washington Institute - Robert Satloff (director of policy), Patrick Clawson (director of research) and Mr Rubin (prolific writer, currently at AEI) - also belong to the forum.

Daniel Pipes, the bearded $100,000-a-year head of the forum is listed as an "associate" at the institute, while Mr Kramer, editor of the forum's journal, is a "visiting fellow".

Mr Pipes became the bete noire of US Muslim organisations after writing an article for the National Review in 1990 that referred to "massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene".

Since he usually complains vigorously when the words are quoted outside their original context, readers are invited to view the full article at www.danielpipes.org. He is also noted for his combative performances on the Fox News channel, where he has an interesting business relationship. Search for his name on the Fox News website and, along with transcripts of his TV interviews, an advert appears saying "Daniel Pipes is available thru Barber & Associates, America's leading resource for business, international and technology speakers since 1977".

The Middle East Forum issues two regular publications, the Middle East Quarterly and the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, the latter published jointly with the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon.

The Middle East Quarterly describes itself as "a bold, insightful, and controversial publication".

Among the insights in its latest issue is an article on weapons of mass destruction that says Syria "has more destructive capabilities" than Iraq, or Iran.

The Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, which is sent out by email free of charge - but can never-the-less afford to pay its contributors - specialises in covering the seamy side of Lebanese and Syrian politics. The ever-active Mr Rubin is on its editorial board.

The Middle East Forum also targets universities through its campus speakers Bureau - that in adopting the line of Mr Kramer's book, seeks to correct "inaccurate Middle Eastern curricula in American education", by addressing "biases" and "basic errors" and providing "better information" than students can get from the many "irresponsible" professors that it believes lurk in US universities.

At a time when much of the world is confused by what it sees as an increasingly bizarre set of policies on the Middle East coming from Washington, to understand the neat little network outlined above may make such policies a little more explicable.

Of course these people and organisations are not the only ones trying to influence US policy on the Middle East. There are others who try to influence it too - in different directions.

However, this particular network is operating in a political climate that is currently especially receptive to its ideas.

It is also well funded by its anonymous benefactors and is well organised. Ideas sown by one element are watered and nurtured by the others.

Whatever outsiders may think about this, worldly-wise Americans see no cause for disquiet. It's just a coterie of like-minded chums going about their normal business, and an everyday story of political life in Washington.

Read more!

Selective Memri

Brian Whitaker investigates whether the 'independent' media institute that translates the Arabic newspapers is quite what it seems

Brian Whitaker
Monday August 12, 2002
The Guardian

For some time now, I have been receiving small gifts from a generous institute in the United States. The gifts are high-quality translations of articles from Arabic newspapers which the institute sends to me by email every few days, entirely free-of-charge.

The emails also go to politicians and academics, as well as to lots of other journalists. The stories they contain are usually interesting.

Whenever I get an email from the institute, several of my Guardian colleagues receive one too and regularly forward their copies to me - sometimes with a note suggesting that I might like to check out the story and write about it.

If the note happens to come from a more senior colleague, I'm left feeling that I really ought to write about it. One example last week was a couple of paragraphs translated by the institute, in which a former doctor in the Iraqi army claimed that Saddam Hussein had personally given orders to amputate the ears of military deserters.

The organisation that makes these translations and sends them out is the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), based in Washington but with recently-opened offices in London, Berlin and Jerusalem.

Its work is subsidised by US taxpayers because as an "independent, non-partisan, non-profit" organisation, it has tax-deductible status under American law.

Memri's purpose, according to its website, is to bridge the language gap between the west - where few speak Arabic - and the Middle East, by "providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew media".

Despite these high-minded statements, several things make me uneasy whenever I'm asked to look at a story circulated by Memri. First of all, it's a rather mysterious organisation. Its website does not give the names of any people to contact, not even an office address.

The reason for this secrecy, according to a former employee, is that "they don't want suicide bombers walking through the door on Monday morning" (Washington Times, June 20).

This strikes me as a somewhat over-the-top precaution for an institute that simply wants to break down east-west language barriers.

The second thing that makes me uneasy is that the stories selected by Memri for translation follow a familiar pattern: either they reflect badly on the character of Arabs or they in some way further the political agenda of Israel. I am not alone in this unease.

Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Washington Times: "Memri's intent is to find the worst possible quotes from the Muslim world and disseminate them as widely as possible."

Memri might, of course, argue that it is seeking to encourage moderation by highlighting the blatant examples of intolerance and extremism. But if so, one would expect it - for the sake of non-partisanship - t o publicise extremist articles in the Hebrew media too.

Although Memri claims that it does provide translations from Hebrew media, I can't recall receiving any.

Evidence from Memri's website also casts doubt on its non-partisan status. Besides supporting liberal democracy, civil society, and the free market, the institute also emphasises "the continuing relevance of Zionism to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel".

That is what its website used to say, but the words about Zionism have now been deleted. The original page, however, can still be found in internet archives.

The reason for Memri's air of secrecy becomes clearer when we look at the people behind it. The co-founder and president of Memri, and the registered owner of its website, is an Israeli called Yigal Carmon.

Mr - or rather, Colonel - Carmon spent 22 years in Israeli military intelligence and later served as counter-terrorism adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin.

Retrieving another now-deleted page from the archives of Memri's website also throws up a list of its staff. Of the six people named, three - including Col Carmon - are described as having worked for Israeli intelligence.

Among the other three, one served in the Israeli army's Northern Command Ordnance Corps, one has an academic background, and the sixth is a former stand-up comedian.

Col Carmon's co-founder at Memri is Meyrav Wurmser, who is also director of the centre for Middle East policy at the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute, which bills itself as "America's premier source of applied research on enduring policy challenges".

The ubiquitous Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's defence policy board, recently joined Hudson's board of trustees.

Ms Wurmser is the author of an academic paper entitled Can Israel Survive Post-Zionism? in which she argues that leftwing Israeli intellectuals pose "more than a passing threat" to the state of Israel, undermining its soul and reducing its will for self-defence.

In addition, Ms Wurmser is a highly qualified, internationally recognised, inspiring and knowledgeable speaker on the Middle East whose presence would make any "event, radio or television show a unique one" - according to Benador Associates, a public relations company which touts her services.

Nobody, so far as I know, disputes the general accuracy of Memri's translations but there are other reasons to be concerned about its output.

The email it circulated last week about Saddam Hussein ordering people's ears to be cut off was an extract from a longer article in the pan-Arab newspaper, al-Hayat, by Adil Awadh who claimed to have first-hand knowledge of it.

It was the sort of tale about Iraqi brutality that newspapers would happily reprint without checking, especially in the current atmosphere of war fever. It may well be true, but it needs to be treated with a little circumspection.

Mr Awadh is not exactly an independent figure. He is, or at least was, a member of the Iraqi National Accord, an exiled Iraqi opposition group backed by the US - and neither al-Hayat nor Memri mentioned this.

Also, Mr Awadh's allegation first came to light some four years ago, when he had a strong personal reason for making it. According to a Washington Post report in 1998, the amputation claim formed part of his application for political asylum in the United States.

At the time, he was one of six Iraqis under arrest in the US as suspected terrorists or Iraqi intelligence agents, and he was trying to show that the Americans had made a mistake.

Earlier this year, Memri scored two significant propaganda successes against Saudi Arabia. The first was its translation of an article from al-Riyadh newspaper in which a columnist wrote that Jews use the blood of Christian or Muslim children in pastries for the Purim religious festival.

The writer, a university teacher, was apparently relying on an anti-semitic myth that dates back to the middle ages. What this demonstrated, more than anything, was the ignorance of many Arabs - even those highly educated - about Judaism and Israel, and their readiness to believe such ridiculous stories.

But Memri claimed al-Riyadh was a Saudi "government newspaper" - in fact it's privately owned - implying that the article had some form of official approval.

Al-Riyadh's editor said he had not seen the article before publication because he had been abroad. He apologised without hesitation and sacked his columnist, but by then the damage had been done.

Memri's next success came a month later when Saudi Arabia's ambassador to London wrote a poem entitled The Martyrs - about a young woman suicide bomber - which was published in al-Hayat newspaper.

Memri sent out translated extracts from the poem, which it described as "praising suicide bombers". Whether that was the poem's real message is a matter of interpretation. It could, perhaps more plausibly, be read as condemning the political ineffectiveness of Arab leaders, but Memri's interpretation was reported, almost without question, by the western media.

These incidents involving Saudi Arabia should not be viewed in isolation. They are part of building a case against the kingdom and persuading the United States to treat it as an enemy, rather than an ally.

It's a campaign that the Israeli government and American neo-conservatives have been pushing since early this year - one aspect of which was the bizarre anti-Saudi briefing at the Pentagon, hosted last month by Richard Perle.

To anyone who reads Arabic newspapers regularly, it should be obvious that the items highlighted by Memri are those that suit its agenda and are not representative of the newspapers' content as a whole.

The danger is that many of the senators, congressmen and "opinion formers" who don't read Arabic but receive Memri's emails may get the idea that these extreme examples are not only truly representative but also reflect the policies of Arab governments.

Memri's Col Carmon seems eager to encourage them in that belief. In Washington last April, in testimony to the House committee on international relations, he portrayed the Arab media as part of a wide-scale system of government-sponsored indoctrination.

"The controlled media of the Arab governments conveys hatred of the west, and in particular, of the United States," he said. "Prior to September 11, one could frequently find articles which openly supported, or even called for, terrorist attacks against the United States ...

"The United States is sometimes compared to Nazi Germany, President Bush to Hitler, Guantanamo to Auschwitz," he said.

In the case of the al-Jazeera satellite channel, he added, "the overwhelming majority of guests and callers are typically anti-American and anti-semitic".

Unfortunately, it is on the basis of such sweeping generalisations that much of American foreign policy is built these days.

As far as relations between the west and the Arab world are concerned, language is a barrier that perpetuates ignorance and can easily foster misunderstanding.

All it takes is a small but active group of Israelis to exploit that barrier for their own ends and start changing western perceptions of Arabs for the worse.

It is not difficult to see what Arabs might do to counter that. A group of Arab media companies could get together and publish translations of articles that more accurately reflect the content of their newspapers.

It would certainly not be beyond their means. But, as usual, they may prefer to sit back and grumble about the machinations of Israeli intelligence veterans.

· Join Middle East editor Brian Whitaker and Washington correspondent Julian Borger at 1pm on Tuesday August 13 for an online chat to discuss the growing threat of a US military attack on Iraq.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Wednesday August 21 2002

In an article headed Atrocity stories regain currency, page 13, August 8, and in an article headed Selective Memri on the Guardian website, we referred to Dr Adil Awadh, an Iraqi doctor who alleged that Saddam Hussein had ordered doctors to amputate the ears of soldiers who deserted. Dr Awadh has asked us to make it clear that he has no connection with Memri (Middle East Media Research Institute), and that he did not authorise its translation of parts of an article by him. He is no longer a member of the Iraqi National Accord (INA). He is an independent member of the Iraqi National Congress (INC). His reference to orders by Saddam Hussein to cut off the ears of deserters has been supported by evidence from other sources.

Read more!