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WHO RULES: THE ISRAEL LOBBY
OR UNCLE SAM?
The answer
at last! Uri Avnery, former Knesset member, assesses the Lobby's
power. "If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow
annulling the 10 Commandments, 95 U.S. Senators (at least) would
sign the bill forthwith." But, yes, in the end the dog wags
the tail.Fifty
years ago Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" blew the cobwebs
out of millions of young minds and drove a stake through the
heart of Eisenhower's America. Lenni Brenner remembers Ginsberg
in the East Village.Dr Mengele died in exile, in disguise. Dr Ishii
died rich and recognized, in his own Tokyo home. Christopher
Reed on Japanese WW2 medical tortures and how the U.S. covered
them up.CounterPunch
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Now!
In Syria, the world appears through
a glass, darkly. As dark as the smoked windows of the car which
takes me to a building on the western side of Damascus where
a man I have known for 15 years - we shall call him a "security
source", which is the name given by American correspondents
to their own powerful intelligence officers - waits with his
own ferocious narrative of disaster in Iraq and dangers in the
Middle East.
His is a fearful portrait of
an America trapped in the bloody sands of Iraq, desperately trying
to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in order to reduce its
own military casualties. It is a scenario in which Saddam Hussein
remains Washington's best friend, in which Syria has struck at
the Iraqi insurgents with a ruthlessness that the United States
wilfully ignores. And in which Syria's Interior Minister, found
shot dead in his office last year, committed suicide because
of his own mental instability.
The Americans, my interlocutor
suspected, are trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni
Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists
rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. "I
swear to you that we have very good information," my source
says, finger stabbing the air in front of him. "One young
Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman
in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive
and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come
back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone
and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone
them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile
signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better
signal. Then his car blew up."
Impossible, I think to myself.
But then I remember how many times Iraqis in Baghdad have told
me similar stories. These reports are believed even if they seem
unbelievable. And I know where much of the Syrian information
is gleaned: from the tens of thousands of Shia Muslim pilgrims
who come to pray at the Sayda Zeinab mosque outside Damascus.
These men and women come from the slums of Baghdad, Hillah and
Iskandariyah as well as the cities of Najaf and
Basra. Sunnis from Fallujah and Ramadi also visit Damascus to
see friends and relatives and talk freely of American tactics
in Iraq.
"There was another man,
trained by the Americans for the police. He too was given a mobile
and told to drive to an area where there was a crowd - maybe
a protest - and to call them and tell them what was happening.
Again, his new mobile was not working. So he went to a landline
phone and called the Americans and told them: 'Here I am, in
the place you sent me and I can tell you what's happening here.'
And at that moment there was a big explosion in his car."
Just who these "Americans"
might be, my source did not say. In the anarchic and panic-stricken
world of Iraq, there are many US groups - including countless
outfits supposedly working for the American military and the
new Western-backed Iraqi Interior Ministry - who operate outside
any laws or rules. No one can account for the murder of 191 university
teachers and professors since the 2003 invasion - nor the fact
that more than 50 former Iraqi fighter-bomber pilots who attacked
Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war have been assassinated in their
home towns in Iraq in the past three years.
Amid this chaos, a colleague
of my source asked me, how could Syria be expected to lessen
the number of attacks on Americans inside Iraq? "It was
never safe, our border," he said. "During Saddam's
time, criminals and Saddam's terrorists crossed our borders to
attack our government. I built a wall of earth and sand along
the border at that time. But three car bombs from Saddam's agents
exploded in Damascus and Tartous- I was the one who captured
the criminals responsible. But we couldn't stop them."
Now, he told me, the rampart
running for hundreds of miles along Syria's border with Iraq
had been heightened. "I have had barbed wire put on top
and up to now we have caught 1,500 non-Syrian and non-Iraqi Arabs
trying to cross and we have stopped 2,700 Syrians from crossing
... Our army is there - but the Iraqi army and the Americans
are not there on the other side."
Behind these grave suspicions
in Damascus lies the memory of Saddam's long friendship with
the United States. "Our Hafez el-Assad [the former Syrian
president who died in 2000] learnt that Saddam, in his early
days, met with American officials 20 times in four weeks. This
convinced Assad that, in his words, 'Saddam is with the Americans'.
Saddam was the biggest helper of the Americans in the Middle
East (when he attacked Iran in 1980) after the fall of the Shah.
And he still is! After all, he brought the Americans to Iraq!"
So I turn to a story which
is more distressing for my sources: the death by shooting of
Brigadier General Ghazi Kenaan, former head of Syrian military
intelligence in Lebanon - an awesomely powerful position - and
Syrian Minister of Interior when his suicide was announced by
the Damascus government last year.
Widespread rumours outside
Syria suggested that Kenaan was suspected by UN investigators
of involvement in the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister
Rafik Hariri in a massive car bomb in Beirut last year - and
that he had been "suicided" by Syrian government agents
to prevent him telling the truth.
Not so, insisted my original
interlocutor. "General Ghazi was a man who believed he could
give orders and anything he wanted would happen. Something happened
that he could not reconcile - something that made him realise
he was not all-powerful. On the day of his death, he went to
his office at the Interior Ministry and then he left and went
home for half an hour. Then he came back with a pistol. He left
a message for his wife in which he said goodbye to her and asked
her to look after their children and he said that what he was
going to do was 'for the good of Syria'. Then he shot himself
in the mouth."
Of Hariri's assassination,
Syrian officials like to recall his relationship with the former
Iraqi interim prime minister Iyad Alawi - a self-confessed former
agent for the CIA and MI6 - and an alleged $20bn arms deal between
the Russians and Saudi Arabia in which they claim Hariri was
involved.
Hariri's Lebanese supporters
continue to dismiss the Syrian argument on the grounds that Syria
had identified Hariri as the joint author with his friend, French
President Jacques Chirac, of the UN Security Council resolution
which demanded the retreat of the Syrians from Lebanese territory.
But if the Syrians are understandably
obsessed with the American occupation of Iraq, their long hatred
for Saddam - something which they shared with most Iraqis - is
still intact. When I asked my first "security" source
what would happen to the former Iraqi dictator, he replied, banging
his fist into his hand: "He will be killed. He will be killed.
He will be killed."
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