Dick Cheney knows no limits

May 20, 2006

John Dean states:

Dean: ... I find it frightening because Dick Cheney knows no
limits. The only person he reports to is George Bush. He works
behind closed doors . And I know, from little tidbits I'm picking up
from friends who have to be careful not to speak out of school, that
there's more probably more covert activity going on, both abroad and
maybe here in the United States, than in decades because of this so-
called war on terror.

...To me the fact that a vice president can go to Capitol Hill and
lobby for torture is just unbelievable. Just unbelievable! The
fact that a small clique of attorneys in the Department of Justice
can write how can we get around the Geneva Conventions so that we
can torture during interrogations...

... I've got some friends who were in there (the White House) and
they were telling me what was happening, and they said Bush doesn't
have a clue what's going on. Cheney's setting things up the way he
wants. He's designing a National Security Council that's more
powerful than the statutory National Security Council under
Condoleezza Rice.

... When I deconstructed his State of the Union just before the Iraq
War and looked at the available information even then, it was clear
that the representations he was making as fact were not fact. Is
that lying? It certainly is a form of distortion. This is the
highest point in a Presidency in his relationship to Congress when
he reports for the State of the Union. It is a crime to lie to
Congress. The founders thought that misrepresentation to Congress
was to be an impeachable offense.

When Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, he went to Congress to seek
permission after the fact. We have a President who says, "Screw
that, I'm just going to do it." It's an in-your-face attitude. And
he's rolling over the prerogatives of Congress.

http://progressive.org/mag_wx052006

Senate aids said that the Pentagon's top intelligence czar, Stephen
Cambone and other top Pentagon officials briefed senior senators (in
the first week on May 2006) on a proposed Pentagon plan to have one
set of interrogation techniques for enemy prisoners of war and
another, presumably more coercive set, for the suspected terrorists
imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In an effort to enhance
military interrogations, Cambone is overseeing the task of rewriting
the Army's field manual (that spells out how Army interrogators,
must legally interrogate enemy POWs).

Source: New York Times via Seattle PI, May 10, 06 page A6.

In the Black(water)
The Nation 05 June 2006 Issue:

Shortly after the hurricane Katrina hit, Blackwater "launched a
helicopter and crew with no contract, no one paying us, that went
down to New Orleans" ..The Nation reports, that from September 8 to
September 30, 2005, Blackwater was paid $409,000 for providing
fourteen guards and four vehicles to "protect the temporary morgue
in Baton Rouge, LA.

Comment: By what lawful authority and on whose authority do civilian
armed men take over the law enforcement functions of New Orleans?
Now we know what John Dean said Cheney has been (is) doing. Making
a privately funded special operations force or clandestine
operations program without Congressional oversight. This is
exacting what VP Bush Sr, Richard Perle, Walt Raymon, and Oliver
North did under Reagan (Team B/the Contras) by running clandestine
operations out of the NCS.
Source: Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile page 331.

Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky charges that the (AWOL Bush)
Administration has written Blackwater "blank checks," saying that
the internal DHS review of the company "leaves us with more
questions than answers." She points out that the report fails to
address the major issues stemming from deploying private forces on
US streets.

From September to the end of December 2005, the government paid
Blackwater at least $33.3 million under contract with the Department
of Homeland Security's (DHS) Federal Protective Service. Attempts to
get information on Blackwater's current contracts in New Orleans
have been unsuccessful.

"It is expected that FEMA will require guard services on a
relatively long-term basis (two to five years)." Two to five years?
Already most of the 330 federally contracted private guards in the
hurricane zone are working for Blackwater, according to the
Washington Post. Another firm, DynCorp, is also trying to grab more
of the action.

Blackwater has recently hired some high-profile former government
officials, like Cofer Black, former chief of CIA counterterrorism,
and former Pentagon Inspector General Joseph Schmitz. In March Black
represented Blackwater is rapidly expanding its operations,
creating a new surveillance-blimp division, launching new training
facilities in California and the Philippines, and increasingly
setting its sights on the lucrative world of DHS contracts. It is
clamoring to get into Darfur and has also hired Chilean troops
trained under the brutal rule of Augusto Pinochet. "We scour the
ends of the earth to find professionals," company president Gary
Jackson told the Guardian. "The Chilean commandos are very, very
professional, and they fit within the Blackwater system."

Blackwater founder Erik Prince shares Bush's fundamentalist
Christian views. He comes from a powerful Michigan Republican family
and social circle, and his father, Edgar, helped Gary Bauer start
the Family Research Council.

Joseph Schmitz-the former Pentagon Inspector General turned general
counsel to Blackwater's parent, The Prince Group-lists on his resume
membership in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a Christian
militia formed before the First Crusade. Like Prince, he comes from
a right-wing family; his father, former Congressman John Schmitz,
was an ultraconservative John Birch Society director who later ran
for President. Joseph Schmitz was once in charge of investigating
private contractors like Blackwater, but he resigned amid
allegations of stonewalling investigations conducted by his
department.

Schakowsky says... troubling indicator of a trend toward less
accountability and transparency and greater privatization of
critical government functions. It's time that more members of
Congress ask tough questions about Blackwater and its rapid,
profitable rise.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052106I.shtml

London Review of Books THE ISRAEL LOBBY
By John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt March 23, 2006

The thrust of U.S. policy in the region derives almost entirely from
domestic politics, and especially the activities of the `Israel
Lobby.' Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign
policy, but no
lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national
interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans
that U.S. interests and those of the other country -- in this case,
Israel -- are essentially identical.

It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and
military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in
total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in
2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct
assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget.

By serving as America's proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet
expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet
clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other
U.S. allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess
forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It
also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.

Israel's nuclear arsenal is one reason some of its neighbors want
nuclear weapons, and threatening them with regime change merely
increases that desire. Today, Israel is the strongest military
power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior
to those of its neighbors and it is the only state in the region
with nuclear weapons.

Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of
alarming reports about Iraq's WMD programs. As one retired Israeli
general later put it, `Israeli intelligence was a full partner to
the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding
Iraq's non-conventional (WMD) capabilities.'

As the journalist Gideon Levy observed at the time, `Israel is the
only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly
and where no alternative opinion is voiced.' In fact, Israelis were
so gung-ho
that their allies in America told them to damp down their rhetoric,
or it would look as if the war would be fought on Israel's behalf.

Just after the war started, Samuel Freedman reported that `a
compilation of nationwide opinion
polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive
of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per
cent.' Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq
on `Jewish influence.' Rather, it was due in large part to the
Lobby's influence, especially that of the neoconservatives within it.

Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential
rivals like China, in what the State Department inspector-general
called `a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorized
transfers.'


Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed
between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority
of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of
war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars.

Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is
not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for
example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were
either `not very'
or `not at all' emotionally attached to Israel.

Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of
the key organisations in the Lobby, such as the American-Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of
Major Jewish
Organizations, are run by hardliners who generally support the Likud
Party's expansionist policies, including its hostility to the Oslo
peace process. The bulk of U.S. Jewry, meanwhile, is more inclined
to make concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups -- such as
Jewish Voice for Peace -- strongly advocate such steps. Despite
these differences, moderates and hardliners both favor giving
steadfast support to Israel.

The Israel lobby strives to ensure that public discourse portrays
Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding
and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is
to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the
political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to
guaranteeing U.S. support, because a candid discussion of U.S.-
Israeli relations might lead Americans to favor a different policy.

In the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy
from Illinois, who, according to aprominent Lobby figure,
had `displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns.'
Thomas Dine, the
head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: `All the Jews
in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the
American politicians -- those who hold public positions now, and
those who aspire -- got the message.'

Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they
make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The
*Washington Post* once estimated that Democratic presidential
candidates `depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per
cent of the money.'

When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more `even-
handed role' in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman
accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement
was
`irresponsible.'

A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred
towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film
alleging that faculty members of Columbia's Middle East Studies
program were anti-Semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who
stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a
faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges
found no evidence of anti-Semitism and the only incident possibly
worth noting was that one professor had `responded heatedly' to a
student's question. The committee also discovered that the
academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt
campaign of intimidation.

Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing
mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get
this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would
be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded,
but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling
debate.

Israel's advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim
that there is a `new anti-Semitism,' which they equate with
criticism of Israel.

Source: MARK K JENSEN

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html

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