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Hermit
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US still wagged by Israel. Canada no better.
« on: 2009-04-19 02:44:49 » |
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Final Durban II text omits references to Israel and Zionism
Source: Reuters
Authors: Not credited
Dated: 2009-04-18
| U.S. will boycott U.N. conference on racism
Source: Reuters North American News Service
Authors: Sue Pleming, Laura MacInnis (Writing);Paul Simao, Robert Woodward (editing); Kate Kelland (London), Holger Hansen (Berlin), Jan Strupczewski (Brussels) (Additional reporting)
Dated: 2009-04-18
| Diplomats reached agreement on Friday on a declaration for next week's politically-charged United Nations conference on racism, adding to the pressure on Washington and Brussels to decide whether to attend.
The 16-page text omits references to Israel, Zionism, the Middle East conflict and other divisive issues that have made Western powers shy away from the "Durban II" conference, which follows up on a 2001 racism conference in South Africa.
Israel and the United States, walked out of the Durban meeting after Arab and Muslim states tried to insert language defining Zionism as racist.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said she would be "very surprised" if the document meets resistance in the Geneva meeting, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will address on Monday.
"I feel very certain because this was so well deliberated by all groups that it will have an easy passage through the conference," she told a news briefing at the UN's Palais des Nations complex, where the April 20-24 conference will be held.
The European Union and United States have been waiting to see a final version of the text before deciding who, if anyone, to send. Canada and Israel are boycotting the meeting because they think hostility towards Israel could dominate the forum.
Asked about the latest text, State Department Robert Wood said that Washington was still weighing its options.
"The United States still has some concerns," Wood told Reuters. "No decision has been made yet whether to attend or participate. We need to have our concerns addressed."
The White House has been especially uneasy about efforts by Arab states to include a condemnation of "incitement to religious hatred" and to criminalize "defamation of religion".
It sees those efforts as an attempt to limit free expression in response to controversy over the Danish cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Mohammad in 2006.
U.S. diplomats distanced themselves from negotiations over the text in past months, a decision Pillay said was unfortunate.
"It is to my tremendous regret that they did not come and try to persuade the other states on amendments that would be acceptable to them," she told journalists.
There was no immediate comment from the European Union, whose member states are expected to meet on the weekend to seek a common decision about taking part.
Earlier on Friday a German government spokesman said that neither Germany nor the EU could tolerate participating in the conference if it becomes a platform for "one-sided comments on the Middle East conflict".
And a British source close to the Geneva conference had said recent versions of the document appeared "pretty good", adding: "It's still up in the air, but at this stage we remain intending to attend the conference."
But even if the declaration is seen as palatable to Israel's major allies, human rights campaigners said an address by Iran's president on Monday - Holocaust Remembrance Day - could upset the meeting and even lead to a walk-out like that in 2001.
Western diplomats said they would be prepared to leave the conference if Ahmadinejad makes "unacceptable" comments in line with his previous statements saying Israel should be "wiped off the map" and questioning whether the Holocaust happened. [ Hermit : Despite years of debunking these canards are still apparently alive and well at Reuters. ]
"His track record does not leave us feeling very comfortable about what he might say, given what he's said in the past on the Holocaust, on Israel and on anti-Semitism," one diplomat said.
"We don't normally walk out of conferences run by the United Nations and we'd rather avoid doing it. But that doesn't mean that there aren't red lines that if breached would prompt us to take action."
Pillay dismissed speculation that Ahmadinejad might disrupt the UN forum, reopen heated debates on the Middle East or call for a ban on "defamation of religion", as some human rights campaigners have suggested he may seek to do.
"I cannot prejudge what he will say," the South African said. "At the end of the day what is truly important about this conference is the outcome document and whether it takes us forward in the struggle against racism."
As of Friday evening there were only four heads of state officially expected to attend -- from Iran, Togo, East Timor and Montenegro - along with 32 ministers from countries including Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and Norway.
| - United States boycotts U.N. conference on racism
- U.S. says "objectionable" language in document
- European Union still undecided about attending
The United States will boycott a United Nations conference on racism next week, the U.S. State Department said Saturday, citing objectionable language in the meeting's draft declaration.
The United Nations organized the forum in Geneva to help heal the wounds from the last such meeting, in Durban, South Africa. The United States and Israel walked out of that 2001 conference when Arab states tried to define Zionism as racist.
The Obama administration, which kept its distance from preparations for the "Durban II" meeting, has come under strong pressure from Israel not to attend.
"With regret, the United States will not join the review conference," said State Department spokesman Robert Wood, ending weeks of deliberations inside the Obama administration over whether to attend.
Wood said significant improvements were made to the conference document, but the text still reaffirmed "in toto" a declaration that emerged from the Durban conference which the United States had opposed.
"The United States also has serious concerns with relatively new additions to the text regarding "incitement," that run counter to the U.S. commitment to unfettered free speech," he added.
The announced boycott came about three months after President Barack Obama became the first African-American to lead the United States.
Canada also has said it will not go next week because of fears of a repeat of the "Israel-bashing" that occurred at the last conference. The European Union is still deliberating.
The Czech Republic, which holds the rotating EU presidency, has called a meeting for Sunday evening to evaluate the bloc's stance on attending.
"There are still several member states of the EU that are not decided yet," Czech foreign ministry spokeswoman Zuzana Opletalova said. "We are in touch with them and there will be a decision on a common position before the conference starts."
Britain, however, confirmed that it would send a delegation to the conference, albeit without a high-level official.
RIGHTS GROUPS CONCERNED
Juliette de Rivero of Human Rights Watch said the meeting in Geneva would lack needed diplomatic gravitas without Washington's presence.
"For us it's extremely disappointing and it's a missed opportunity, really, for the United States," she said.
A draft declaration prepared for the conference removed all references to Israel, the Middle East conflict and a call to bar "defamation of religion" -- an Arab-backed response to a 2006 controversy over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that Western states see as a way to quash free expression.
Wood conceded there had been improvements to the document, but he said it was not enough.
"The United States will work with all people and nations to build greater resolve and enduring political will to halt racism and discrimination wherever it occurs," he said. [ Hermit : Except if it occurs in Apartheid Israel where the US apparently approves of both racism and discrimination. ]
Diplomats said the high-profile presence of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the forum made it probable that touchy subjects would still dominate the proceedings.
Ahmadinejad, who has previously said Israel should be "wiped off the map" and questioned whether the Nazi Holocaust happened, will address the plenary and hold a news conference on Monday -- coinciding with Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Iran's sentencing of U.S.-Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi to eight years in prison Saturday may also have dampened White House enthusiasm about the chance of direct diplomatic contact with Tehran at the conference.
Ahmadinejad is one of only a handful of heads of state who have confirmed they will attend the conference at the U.N's Palais des Nations.
Iranian dissidents on Saturday expressed dismay about his taking center stage, saying his participation "would only serve to discredit the conference."
Western officials have said they are preparing for a response if Ahmadinejad were to make "unacceptable" comments in his Monday remarks. Some said they would respond with rebuttals on the spot, and others signaled they could leave the forum.
One diplomat said: "We don't normally walk out of conferences run by the United Nations and we'd rather avoid doing it. But that doesn't mean that there aren't red lines that if breached would prompt us to take action." |
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:US still wagged by Israel. Canada no better.
« Reply #1 on: 2009-04-19 06:11:04 » |
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Quote from: Hermit on 2009-04-19 02:44:49
<snip from article quoted>
"Earlier on Friday a German government spokesman said that neither Germany nor the EU could tolerate participating in the conference if it becomes a platform for "one-sided* comments on the Middle East conflict".</snip from article quoted>
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*[Blunderov] (my emphasis) An interesting specimen of the famous doublethink. Apparently when the consensus is against you it is "one-sided" but when the consensus is with you it is known instead as "democracy".
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Hermit
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Re:US still wagged by Israel. Canada no better.
« Reply #2 on: 2009-04-19 17:05:54 » |
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[Blunderov] (my emphasis) An interesting specimen of the famous doublethink. Apparently when the consensus is against you it is "one-sided" but when the consensus is with you it is known instead as "democracy".
[Hermit] Not to mention that when it is a ceaseless barrage of bigotry against "Islamofascism" it is nothing more than sensible "criticism", but even the mildest criticism of apartheid Israel's brutality, or condemnation of the USA's willingness to breach its own laws to support the Zionists' ongoing genocide of the Palestinians is apparently "one-sided."
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:US still wagged by Israel. Canada no better.
« Reply #3 on: 2009-04-22 22:09:56 » |
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Harmanic Convergence - Jane Harman, AIPAC, and the Rosen-Weissman spy case
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Justin Raimondo
Dated: 2009-04-22
Quite aside from the wonderful irony of Jane Harman’s transformation from prominent Democratic defender of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping into a civil libertarian par excellence – which has been definitively celebrated by Glenn Greenwald over at Salon – the story of how this leading "national security Democrat" sold out her nation’s security on behalf of a foreign power underscores the all-pervasive and corrupting influence of Israel’s lobby in the U.S. Harman was caught on tape with a "suspected Israeli agent," according to Congressional Quarterly, agreeing to intervene with the U.S. Justice Department and the White House to get the espionage charges against two AIPAC employees reduced. In return, the Israeli agent promised AIPAC would put pressure on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to get Harman appointed head of the House intelligence committee. This pressure included having Haim Saban – whose largesse underwrites the Saban Center at Brookings, as well as a number of Democratic Party organizations – threatening to cut off the funding unless Pelosi caved.
AIPAC, of course, is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest and most effective of the country-based Washington lobbies, generally rated up there with the NRA and AARP as one of the lobbying behemoths. Like many other commentators, I have often noted the distorting effect the Lobby has had on policymaking decisions and pointed out its deleterious effect on our national interests. However, Antiwar.com, and this columnist in particular, have gone where others have feared to tread, shining a spotlight on the dim area where lobbying activities overlap with espionage.
It should be noted that this was not a warrantless wiretap, of the sort Harman championed, but one approved by a special FISA court. Naturally, Harman issued a statement immediately denying the charges, averring that this "canard" is nothing new. It’s true that some of this story leaked out in 2006, but, as CQ reporter Jeff Stein put it in his piece, "What is new is that Harman is said to have been picked up on a court-approved NSA tap directed at alleged Israel covert action operations in Washington."
This is very similar to what happened to Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, the two AIPAC officials (since unceremoniously dumped by their employer), and their fellow conspirator, former Pentagon Iran desk chief Larry Franklin. There they were, Rosen and Weissman, sitting with Naor Gilon in a restaurant in Arlington, Va., shooting the breeze, when in walks Franklin with an offer to unload classified material. Was it just serendipitous that the FBI’s counterintelligence unit had the place bugged and was listening in as Franklin volunteered to engage in espionage on behalf of Israel?
Gilon, chief of political affairs at the Israeli embassy, had been under surveillance at least since 2001, when, as Richard Sale reported, "the FBI discovered new, ‘massive’ Israeli spying operations in the East Coast, including New York and New Jersey," according to "one former senior U.S. government official." ( I reported on some of the activities of these operations in my short book, The Terror Enigma.)
Sale continues:"The FBI began intensive surveillance on certain Israeli diplomats and other suspects and was videotaping Naor Gilon, chief of political affairs at the Israeli embassy in Washington, who was having lunch at a Washington hotel with two lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby group. Federal law enforcement officials said they were floored when Franklin came up to their table and sat down.” Was a connection to Gilon Harman’s undoing? He pops up yet again amid widespread speculation that the former diplomat and undoubted intelligence officer was the "Israeli agent" on the line with Harman.
Gilon, by the way, has just been appointed to a top position in Avigdor Lieberman’s foreign ministry. As Richard Silverstein points out, the awkwardness this inserts into U.S.-Israeli relations may be quite deliberate:"In Israel, if you successfully spy on the U.S. you’re rewarded with plum assignments and cabinet jobs. I’m fairly certain that this is also Lieberman’s way of tweaking Obama, saying, ‘you think you’re going to isolate me? I’ll show you. I’ll make my right hand man someone who has made a fool out of your government.’" With the appointment of Uzi Arad, another Israeli spook involved in the Rosen-Weissman case, to a top spot on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security staff, we can count this as a doubly insulting provocation.
Thanks, Jane – you’re a real patriot, and you’ve certainly advanced the national security of the United States – in Bizarro World, that is.
Stein cites "a recently retired longtime national security official who was closely involved in the AIPAC investigation" as saying: "It’s the deepest kind of corruption, which was years in the making. It’s a story about the corruption of government — not legal corruption necessarily, but ethical corruption."
This ethical corruption is what allowed Harman to believe she could bulldoze her way into a House committee chair by playing the AIPAC card. The same corruption led her, a canny politician, to assume that Naor Gilon, rather than any American, had the decisive say when it came to committee appointments in the Congress of the United States. Isn’t that taking the "special relationship" just a little too far?
What’s apparent, in any case, is that the counterintelligence community has long taken an interest in the widening scope and increasing scale of Israel’s covert operations in the US, even if our mainstream media has shied away from the subject. They’ve been watching this crowd 24/7 for years, as is apparent from the indictment of Rosen, Weissman, and Franklin, which details acts that go back to 1999. That’s how they got Franklin and finally caught up with Ben Ami Kadish, who shared an Israeli handler with the infamous Jonathan Pollard. Kadish was picked up the day after his Israeli handler called [.pdf] him to tell him to lie: another NSA intercept approved by a FISA court, another Israeli spy snared. Which just goes to show that Jane Harman, AIPAC, and the IngSoc faction of the GOP were wrong: we don’t need warrantless wiretapping – the legal kind works fine.
This story has legs, if only because it illustrates a prime example of Bush-era corruption. Alberto Gonzales reportedly scotched the investigation into Harman – which was widely and erroneously reported as having found nothing – because he needed her help on the warrantless wiretaps issue. Did she make a deal with him, or was the quid pro quo implicit? It’s a sad day when we have to wiretap our own government officials to dig out the truth and protect our own security, but better them than the rest of us. They, after all, are the source of the corruption: indeed, it might not be a bad idea to allow warrantless wiretaps only of government officials, both elected and appointed. Now that would put a real crimp in the culture of corruption.
The Harman corruption-of-justice case illuminates a subject that has long been simmering on the back burner, hardly ever covered by the mainstream news media, and that is the upcoming trial of the AIPAC defendants, which is so underreported that I can’t even find a reference to the trial date, except that it is "upcoming" and scheduled to occur sometime in June. On trial are Steve Rosen, longtime spark plug behind AIPAC’s successful – some would say too successful – lobbying strategy, and Keith Weissman, AIPAC’s top Iran specialist. It is a trial that has had so many cancellations that a timeline of them all would take up a good part of this column. Suffice to say that the AIPAC defendants have put up quite a fight, delaying the trial for years, demanding that the government allow the introduction of classified material into the court record, and compelling high-profile figures such as Condi Rice and Steve Hadley to appear as witnesses. A sympathetic judge has granted them a good deal of leeway, and they have just about graymailed government prosecutors into a corner.
Will the case be dropped before it ever comes to trial? The clock is ticking, and we’ll soon know the answer to that question. (As I put this column to bed, the Washington Post reports prosecutors may very well drop the case.) As relations between the U.S. and Israel continue to sour, however, the Rosen-Weissman affair is a fairly accurate barometer of the rising mutual hostility between Washington and Tel Aviv. Israel’s new right-wing government is preparing for a showdown with the Obama administration over the Palestinian question, the Iranian issue, and the ongoing expansion of the settlements. If Obama is seeking a deal, there is widespread speculation that he could use the Iran issue as a bargaining chip: promising to take a harder line toward Tehran in exchange for a semblance of Israeli reasonableness on Palestinian statehood. The Rosen-Weissman trial could well be another such bargaining chip: a tradeoff that will make us less secure while advancing the career of an ambitious politician – a politician, in that sense, not unlike Rep. Harman.
What’s significant about the Harman case is that all the elements that have given the Israel Lobby such power in Washington – political heft, lots of money, and the exception-making requirements of the "special relationship" – have come together in a kind of Harmanic convergence, if you will, to illustrate why and how the Lobby’s influence is corrupting.
The sooner the public gets this message, the sooner our lawmakers will respond. And the proper response, to start with, is to make AIPAC do what every foreign lobbyist has to do, and that is comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act by registering as an agent of a foreign power. This would put legal restrictions in place that would cut the Lobby down to its proper size and help correct the Israel-centric distortion of American foreign policy, which has been so skewed in the wrong direction for so long chiefly because of domestic political pressures. It’s long past time to cut off that pressure at its source.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:US still wagged by Israel. Canada no better.
« Reply #4 on: 2009-05-01 15:42:52 » |
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Feds dropping charges against pro-Israel lobbyists
Feds move to dismiss espionage-related charges against former pro-Israel lobbyists[b]
[ Hermit : AIPAC wins again. ]
[b]Source: AP News
Authors: Matthew Barakat
Dated: 2009-05-01
Federal prosecutors moved Friday to dismiss espionage-related charges against two former pro-Israel lobbyists accused of disclosing classified U.S. defense information, ending a tortuous inside-the-Beltway legal battle rife with national security intrigue.
Critics of the prosecution of Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee accused the federal government of trying to criminalize the sort of back-channel discussions between government officials, lobbyists and reporters that are commonplace in the nation's capital. AIPAC is an influential pro-Israel lobbying group.
Acting U.S. Attorney Dana Boente said the government moved to dismiss the charges in the drawn-out case after concluding that pretrial rulings would make it too difficult for the government to prove its case.
Boente also said he was worried that classified information would be disclosed at trial.
U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III had made several legal rulings that prosecutors worried would make it almost impossible to obtain a guilty verdict. Among them was a requirement that the government would have to prove that Rosen and Weissman knew they were harming the United States by trading in sensitive national defense information.
The defense had also been prepared to put on a strong case that the information obtained by Rosen and Weissman, while technically classified, was not truly secret and that its disclosure was irrelevant to the nation's security.
The federal government's former arbiter of classification, J. William Leonard, was prepared to testify for the defense that the government overuses classification and applies the label to information that by any practical measure does not need to be secret. The government had sought to bar Leonard's testimony.
The trial had been scheduled to start June 2 in a case first brought in 2005.
Rosen and Weissman had not been charged with actual espionage, although the charges did fall under provisions of the 1917 Espionage Act, a rarely used World War I-era law that had never before been applied to lobbyists.
Weissman's lawyer, Baruch Weiss, called the dismissal a "huge victory for the First Amendment." Had Rosen and Weissman been convicted, he said it would have set a precedent for prosecuting reporters any time they obtained information from government officials that was later deemed too sensitive to be disclosed.
While Weissman was overjoyed to learn the charges will be dismissed, Weiss said that the four-year prosecution "has been a tremendous hardship for both Rosen and Weissman," who have been unable to work while the charges have hung over their head and they faced the prospect of a lengthy jail term.
A former Defense Department official, Lawrence A. Franklin, previously pleaded guilty to providing Rosen and Weissman classified defense information and was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison.
Had the case gone to trial, Rosen and Weissman had won the right to subpoena former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other top Bush administration officials. The defense believed their testimony would support the claim that the United States regularly uses AIPAC to send back-channel communications to Israel. Prosecutors had sought unsuccessfully to quash the subpoenas.
The indictment had alleged that Rosen and Weissman conspired to obtain and then disclosed classified information on U.S. policy toward Iran, as well as information on the al-Qaida terror network and the bombing of the Khobar Towers dormitory in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. Air Force personnel.
It will be up to Ellis to formally dismiss the charges, but it would be highly unlikely that he would refuse the government's request for dismissal.
AIPAC spokesman Patrick Dorton said the organization is "pleased that the Justice Department has dismissed the charges. This is a great day for Steve Rosen, Keith Weissman and their families."
AIPAC fired Rosen and Weissman in April 2005, when they were under investigation but had not yet been charged. Dorton declined to comment on whether AIPAC still thinks Rosen and Weissman acted improperly.
The government's decision also won praise from the American Jewish Committee.
"The Department of Justice has now reaffirmed that the law of the United States protects citizens who engage in the everyday and essential work of political advocacy," said AJC Executive Director David Harris.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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