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THE INSIDE HISTORY OF THE ISRAEL LOBBY Former top CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison give CounterPunchers the real scoop on the Israel lobby and precisely how powerful it is. Read how US presidents from Wilson, through FDR to Truman were manipulated by the Zionist lobby; how Israel bent LBJ, Reagan and Clinton to its purpose; how Bush's White House has been the West Wing of the Israeli government; how Washington's revolving doors send full-time Israel lobbyists from think-tanks to the National Security Council and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. For all who want a true measure of the Lobby's power, the Christisons' 8-page dossier, exclusive to CounterPunch newsletter subscribers, is a MUST read. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! |
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Today's Stories June 10 / 11,
2006 Robert Fisk June 9, 2006 Alexander Cockburn Paul Craig Roberts Gary Leupp Eric Ruder Evelyn Pringle Mickey Z. Michael J. Smith Patrick Cockburn Website of the
Day
June 8, 2006 Chris Floyd Michael Dickinson Ron Jacobs William S. Lind Joshua Frank Missy Comley Beattie Lloyd Williams Bill Christison Website of the Day
June 7, 2006 Dave Lindorff Sunsara Taylor John Walsh David MacMichael Mickey Z. Evelyn Pringle Myles Palmer Laura Ribeiro Website of the Day
June 6, 2006 Diane Christian Paul Craig Roberts Ralph Nader Norman Solomon Darmont / Genovali Manuel Garcia,
Jr. Subcomandante Marcos Patrick Cockburn Website of the Day
June 5, 2006 Bruce Jackson Chris Floyd Michael Neumann Heather Gray William Hughes David Swanson Alexander Cockburn Website of the Day
June 3 / 4, 2006 Robert Fisk James Petras Rosemary Radford Ruether Harry Clark Jeffrey St. Clair Ron Ridenour Ron Jacobs Fred Gardner Peter Montague John Walsh Greg Moses Sean Donahue Mike Whitney Dave Patten Ali Khan Robert Dotson,
MD Hammond Guthrie St. Clair / D'Antoni Poets' Basement Website of the
Day
June 2, 2006 Kathy Kelly Alan Maass Mickey Z. Dave Lindorff Chris Kutalik Sunsara Taylor Sam Husseini Mike Ferner Website of the
Day
June 1, 2006 Brian Cloughley David Peterson Lee Ballinger Jonathan Cook Mike Whitney Paul Rockwell Clifton Ross Kevin Zeese Website of the
Day
May 31, 2006 Dave Lindorff Joshua Frank Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz P. Sainath Ramzy Baroud Seth Sandronsky Mickey Z. Ralph Nader Jeffrey St. Clair Website of the Day
May 30, 2006 Lee Ballinger Jonathan Cook Gary Leupp John Ross Robert Jensen Michael Dickinson Michael Carmichael Tim Wise Harry Browne Website of the
Day
May 27 / 29,
2006 Paul Craig Roberts Kathleen Christison Kathy Kelly Christopher
Reed Lawrence R. Velvel Tom Barry Gary Leupp Col. Dan Smith Ron Jacobs Don Fitz Fred Gardner Peter Montague Raymond Garcia John Farley Seth Sandronsky Tia Steele Lenni Brenner Dr. Susan Block Scott Michael Perey Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Recipe of the
Weekend Website of the Weekend
May 26, 2006 Col. Douglas
MacGregor Brian J. Foley Michael Dickinson Missy Comley Beattie Pierre Tristam Joe Allen Kona Lowell Roger Burbach Website of the
Day
May 25, 2006 Les AuCoin Jeff Halper Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Bob Wing Elise Gould Robert Bryce Website of the Day
May 24, 2006 Michael Donnelly Patrick Cockburn Lucinda Marshall Dave Lindorff Shmuel Rosner Moshe Adler Heather Gray Pratyush Chandra Paul Craig Roberts Floyd Rudmin Website of the Day
May 23, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts Sharon Smith Sunsara Taylor Joel Whitney Alice Cherbonnier Ron Jacobs Kristen Ess Patrick Cockburn Website of the
Day
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Weekend
Edition The Iraq War Itself is a War CrimeNothing New About HadithaBy DAVE LINDORFF What is it that makes the Marine massacre of civilians at Haditha such a big issue, when we had much worse massacres going on before our eyes much earlier? The biggest of these was the giant massacre that took place over the course of two weeks in the 300,000-population city of Fallujah in November, 2004 Recall that the Marines--the service that, if we are to believe the propaganda coming out of the Pentagon, have such high standards where civilians are involved--surrounded the city and ordered everyone except the fighters to leave. The plan was to kill everyone who was left, and that's what they did. The problem is that they also were extremely loose in terms of how they defined that "everyone." At the time, on the eve of the assault that leveled the entire city, New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins reported that troops were stopping every person who was trying to flee the city and checking them for traces of powder on their hands. Those found to have residues were turned around and sent back to what would be the killing ground. But he reported that those males over the aged of 12 were also turned back, whether they had powder traces on their hands or not. In other words, the Marines
encircling the doomed city decided that all males who were teenagers
or older were presumed combatants. The official tally of dead in Fallujah at the end of the slaughter is 6000, but that is surely too low of a figure. Buildings were leveled by intense bombing and shelling, and nobody was sifting through the wreckage afterwards counting bodies. In fact, much of the city was bulldozed by American forces immediately after the assault, meaning that many bodies will never be found. We also were treated to a video, taken by an embedded ABC cameraman, which showed a Marine entering a house where several alleged Iraqi fighters were lying, badly wounded, on the floow. The Marine executed them all with "two clicks" to the head. He was later located and exonerated by military "justice," which accepted his lame excuse that one of the wounded men moved, and might have been hiding a weapon under his shattered body. All of these things that occurred in Fallujah were war crimes. The very invasion of Fallujah was a major war crime, as the assault was at bottom an act of vengeance and retaliation for the attack in that city earlier in the year on four mercenaries working for the U.S., in which the men were killed and their bodies publicly mutilated. Such revenge upon a city in response to an attack from people in the city is banned under international law, and is a gross war crime. There were accounts from reporters and from residents of Americans shooting fleeing residents as they tried to swim across the river, even when they were holding up white cloths. The marines attacked a hospital, arrested doctors and dragged wounded inmates from their beds. This was also a war crime. The Pentagon belatedly admitted to using banned white phosphorus incendiary weapons against the city--weapons that burned enemy fighters and innocent trapped civilians alike to horrible deaths. The U.S. military's own rules say phosphorus cannot be used even against enemy troops. Yet it was used. There is evidence that napalm, also a banned weapon, was used. The interesting question is why this one massacre in Haditha is now getting such media attention, while the mainstream media and the Congress completely ignored the much grosser Fallujah attrocities that happened less than two years earlier. Clearly, the massacre at Fallujah, and the many other attrocities and killings that have left tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, including many babies and children, dead at the hands of U.S. troops, are not, as Haditha is being portrayed, the work of a few monsters or of a few troops who's flipped from the stress of battle. The scale of the killings is so great it has to be seen as policy--whether overt or encouraged by a wink and a turned head. The blame, as in the case of torture, must not be allowed to stay at the enlisted level, or even at the middle ranks. It should be traced out to its source, which is the Secretary of Defense and the Commander in Chief, for it is Rumsfeld and Bush who, in trashing the Geneva Conventions and in looking for ways to get around those civilizing rules or war, have made Haditha, and Fallujah, the norm. For this, both men should be removed from office and tried for war crimes. Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new
book of CounterPunch columns titled "This
Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage
Press. Lindorff's new book is "The
Case for Impeachment", He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org. |