Calling For Investigations

On the floor of the Senate yesterday (3/30/09), Senator Byron Dorgan called for a select committee in the Senate to investigate the current financial crisis in which individuals made billions while the taxpayer was left funding a bailout in the trillions. He pointed out that in order to prevent this from happening again, we must understand its core and root cause. There could well be financial crimes involved which should be prosecuted.

The same can be said of the activities which led us into the $3 trillion unnecessary war with Iraq. An investigation is crucial to prevent this from happening again. Even as we speak, The Economist (3/28/09) reports, President Obama "is being badgered by fiercely pro-Israeli groups" to give the green light for an Israeli attack against Iran.

Yet Defense Secretary Gates, appearing 3/29/09 on Fox News Sunday, stated that there is no evidence that Iran can make a nuclear bomb, which requires highly enriched uranium. They do have enough low-enriched uranium (suitable for fuel), which could be further enriched, but there is no evidence that they are able to do this. The IAEA is there, and "we do not believe they are enriching beyond a low level."

Due to our biased support for Israel, her heinous actions invariably boomerang back on us, as in 9/11. Speaking of core and root causes, Israel's illegal oppressive occupations are the underlying cause of anti-American terrorism. Also, the vast sums of money and manpower necessary to combat this terrorism has resulted in the diversion of funds and resources of the FBI, etc., from other important activities such as the investigation of financial crime, as reported in The New York Times 3/26/09. This means a a decrease in our ability to combat corporate and financial fraud, including money laundering, bank, mortgage and securities fraud, etc. All this has been very convenient for the looters of the financial system.

The robber barons who looted our financial system and the Israel Lobby neocons who concocted the false intelligence to lie us into war have one important thing in common. They couldn't care less about the United States of America, its values or its future. We desperately need these investigations now.

Absolute Power

A certain Lord Acton famously wrote that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This well characterizes the Israel Lobby. As Charles Freeman, whose appointment as intelligence chief was derailed by the Lobby, wrote on 3/10/09, "The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth."

An a example of this is The Wall Street Journal (3/11/09) which reported "Critics also attacked a comment in which Mr. Freeman said the Chinese government was too slow to crack down on protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989." Fareed Zakaria, in interviewing Freeman on CNN's GPS (3/15/09) put up this quote attributed to Freeman: "the response to the mob scene at Tiananmen Square stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership." Freeman then explained that the Lobby had deviously left out the first part of the sentence, which was in fact the subject of the sentence, which makes it clear that Freeman was describing the dominant Chinese views and not his own views.

Freeman told Zakaria that the Israel Lobby, which he prefers to call the Likud Lobby, since it represents the hard right wing views, has a "hammerlock on both public discussion and policy. The objective of their campaign against me was to reinforce that hammerlock, to enforce the taboo against any critical discussion of Israeli policies and what they might mean for Israel's future or the future of the US......" The Lobby acted "to reinforce their veto power over appointments to the government, to ensure that analysis was not value free but pro-Israeli in orientation, and to some extent anti-Arab....."

As Freeman wrote on 3/10/09, he has been under attack "by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction of a foreign country." "It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country..." The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views..." This Lobby is "intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government."

Freeman and the Lobby

Recently, the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, appointed former ambassador Charles Freeman to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which oversees the writing of the National Intelligence Estimates, etc. The Israel Lobby then threw a hysterical fit because for a moment it looked as if these Israel-firsters would not be able to fix the intelligence around their war-mongering policies so as to drag us into war with Iran as they had so easily been able to do with regard to Iraq, based on their manipulated faulty intelligence.

You see, Charles Freeman is one of the few who sees the big picture. He has even bravely stated the big truth, namely that it is our unwavering support of Israel's occupation and brutal oppression of the Palestinians which is the primary reason for America's terrorism problem. Americans are not supposed to know this, of course.

On February 19, Steve Rosen, who is awaiting trial on charges of spying for Israel while working for AIPAC, began to campaign against Freeman. Then other Israel Lobby members jumped on his bandwagon: Senator Charles Schumer and Representative Steve Israel telephoned Rahm Emanuel at the White House, Senator Joe Lieberman, The Zionist Organization of America, The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, etc., all joined in.

As pointed out by Walter Pincus in The Washington Post (3/12)/09), a lot of lobbying was done in the dark. As an example, he notes that although AIPAC officially claimed it was not involved, AIPAC's spokesman Josh Block had spoken to multiple journalists and "provided critical material about Freeman, albeit always on background, meaning his comments could not be attributed to him, according to three journalists who spoke to him."

Seventeen former ambassadors wrote of their support for Freeman in The Wall Street Journal on March 3, 2009. At a Senate hearing March 10, Admiral Blair strongly supported Freeman but subsequently, Freeman withdrew and posted an explanatory statement.

Freeman wrote that "there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East." "I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States."