Illuminati Rebel Issues Dire Warning

Aristocrat, Leo Zagami - 33rd Degree Mason, also Affiliated with P2 Lodge of Monte Carlo

Leo Zagami, 36, has an urgent message.

The Illuminati plan to "Nazify" the West by the year 2012 and persecute all believers in God, using the pretext of war, terror and economic collapse.

The scion of an ancient Illuminati family, Zagami had a religious conversion (to Islam) last June and rebelled. He'd had enough of the horrifying Satanic, black magic rituals, mind control and torture that was going on inside the lodges, behind closed doors.

On Saturday he posted on his web site Illuminati Confessions names of high ranking Masons who are ready to do battle with the Satanists. He has organized his own security detail and even posted a personal phone number to address serious questions.

"These are the end times; it's no joke," Zagami says in an January 3rd interview on his website.

"The cosmic alignment on the 21st of December 2012 gives you 6 years to prepare... So its about time you all wake up and fight for your right to stay free under one God before they take complete control and start persecuting the true believers in the one God. …Get your swords and get ready to fight to defend your faith or perish…This is a war against Satan so please wake up in the western countries or you might wake up in a nightmare one morning in December 2012."

"From 2010 you will start feeling the big changes in the air more and more but in 2012 you will have the clear evidence of the end of this civilization in front of your eyes….the total NAZIFICATION of the western countries by 2010 before the economic situation starts to badly crack for everyone. Then social tension will hit a peak never seen before and internal conflicts could eventually become in 2012: CIVIL WAR!"

“Are you ready to die for God and your believe in a positive change for the world or are you all a bunch of cowards in the hands of the devil, just talking and talking with no sense of reality?”

As an ex-member of the Comitato Esecutivo Massonico - Masonic Executive Committee (MEC) of Monte Carlo, Zagami was, until recently, a true insider, a 33rd degree Freemason, and a high-member of the infamous Freemasonic P2 (Propaganda 2) Lodge. He was the "prince", prepared to take over from the older Illuminati "king", Licio Gelli.

The reason I have overlooked Zagami until now is that he suggests Illuminati power resides in the Vatican with the Jesuits. I maintain that that the world central banking cartel, headed by the Rothschilds, calls the shots. They use Freemasons, Zionists, Jesuits, Vatican, Socialists, Liberals, Communists, Feminist and Gay activists, Neo Cons, all intelligence agencies, media, foundations etc. to exercise control.

But it would be stupid to continue to overlook Zagami's invaluable testimony over an academic disagreement. I don't think Zagami lets the Zionists off the hook. He merely focuses on what he knows first-hand.

The Illuminati is like the mob. Does it matter if the Chicago, London or New York families are in charge? They are overlapping circles dedicated to the same perverse end.

Greg Szymanski again deserves our thanks for featuring Zagami on his web site since October. Jeff Rense also deserves credit for posting Greg's stories. The material below is partially a summary from Greg's interviews.


THE ILLUMINATI PUPPET SHOW

Zagami describes the world as "a global puppet show in the hands of the usual families of idiots, who usually never change their ways century after century."

"They all work together, including Hugo Chavez who really is helping Bush's agenda by his theatrical performances," said Zagami. Chavez is controlled by the Vatican and working with the New World Order as are all other leaders of the world's major government's and religions.

"This is how they operate with the top layers working together for one purpose in what they think is the perfect cover-up. Wahabi or Wahibi [the Saudis] were created by the Zionists and their English friends who think they are the lost tribe of Israel. The same happened with Arafat and the so-called Muslim Brotherhood created by the English intelligence."

Of course, the Muslim Brotherhood also might be behind Iranian leaders and the leaders of the Iraqi Insurgency. It's all theatre put on for the yokels.

In an email to me Sunday, Leo called the Iraq-Iran-Israel conflict a "foreign intelligence show" and Ahmaninejad a "well known Satanist with no real connection to Islam."

He said Putin's conflict with the Rothschilds is also a "charade." He is also Illuminati controlled.

Zagami challenges his former colleagues in Freemasonry to "go public with your pagan satanic worship and your black magic you bunch of cowards, that's what I say to them. The European aristocracy has always been ruled by sorcery and black magic …have always used black magic and evil forces … for domination over their own citizens. They learned these satanic ways from their Masters in Rome who got them in turn from the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Sumerian...its a never ending tale of constant manipulation…of mankind."

He says G.W. Bush is the son of "the most powerful man in the illuminati and he was built by his father and the CIA to become the ultimate Antichrist Vatican Zionist puppet and it doesn't really matter if he is in the White House or not because the Bush will always rule in the present situation any future actor that goes in the White House now. Remember Anton LaVey founder of the Church of Satan and Mind War controller of the CIA was a close friend of George H. Bush, and they planned together the satanic future of his son George W.Bush and the coming of the age of Satan after 9/11 a long time ago when LaVey was still alive."

He says 666 is everywhere these days: "the Hebrew equivalent of our "w" is the letter "vav" or "waw". The numerical value of vav is 6. So the English "www" transliterated into Hebrew is "vav vav vav", which numerically is 666. And you can't definitely have a business these days without a web site WWW, then we have the video surveillance and last but not least the micro chipping coming up. The micro chipping will be the ultimate Mark of the Beast and will put us fully in the hands of Satan and his evil controllers ready for Armageddon against the Messiah. So we need to rebel before that to help the coming back of the real Messiah."

"All religions are corrupt by the illuminati these days including most of Islam, the Jews, the Evangelical, Protestant and the Born-Again side of Christianity, all ruled secretly by Freemasonry, the intelligence services, the Knights of Malta and last but not least the usual Jesuits so genuine [religious] dialogue is almost impossible."

CONCLUSION

Leo Zagami sees himself as "the last idealist in the Illuminati." It is a hopeful sign that courageous and decent men like him should appear at this time. It would be a far greater sin to spurn a genuine hero than to be taken in by an imposter. At the same time, the Illuminati has always feigned divisions: FDR, Hitler all championed the "people."

"YOU ARE LIVING IN A ILLUMINATI PRISON BUILT BY THE JESUITS AND FINANCED BY THE ZIONIST," Leo emailed me. I agree about the "Illuminati prison part." For the rest, I will continue to ask Leo questions and do my own reading and thinking.

The elite is building an abattoir before our eyes: the New World Order. The events of 9-11 are proof of their intent to use it. We have a choice: To go like sheep to the slaughter, or to take Zagami's advice, and prepare.

Host: Greg Degree Mason also Affiliated with

P2 Lodge of Monte Carlo

http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Greg07.html

http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Greg/0701/20070109_Tue_Greg.ramehind the New World Order and how the puppets of the American government are selling out their country, giving complete loyalty to Rome. Don't miss this interview.

Listen to an interview with Leo Zagami on Red Ice

Zionism And The Birth Of Middle East Terrorism

Ilan Pappe's book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, is the most important work on the history of Palestine that has appeared in decades. Its central focus is the manner in which the Zionists designed and executed a plan to expel the Palestinian people from their homeland, to erase the history of those people from the landscape of the new state of Israel, and to create an ersatz history of the region to tell a false Israeli story. Pappe's history, told with integrity and clarity, provides an essential framework for understanding the birth and development of Middle East terrorism and insurgency. That may not have been Pappe's goal, but the inevitability of Palestinian insurgency emerges clearly from his account.

The first myth to die under Pappe's pen is Israeli innocence.

The Israeli version of Middle East turmoil has it that the entire fault lies with the Palestinians. While Lord Balfour's declaration may have been written with the good Lord's fingers crossed behind his back, the declaration actually specified that nothing was to be done to disturb the rights of the people already in Palestine. The declaration, realistic or not, expected that Jews who migrated to the region would somehow fit in the spaces between Palestinians.

However, there was no unoccupied space worth occupying. Rather, the Palestinians-close to a million of them-lived in more than a dozen towns and a thousand villages. Since the economy was traditional agriculture, each Palestinian village was the home and gathering place for villagers who farmed the surrounding near countryside. Since most human movements were on foot, the reality of community design was that the peasant farmers as well as their landlords created a new village cluster when distances exceeded the practical norms for daily foot travel between village and farmlands. Many of the villagers did not own the land they farmed; Palestinian landed gentry often owned it, but the villagers were wedded to the land as their principal if not sole livelihood.

Over centuries the size and shape of these communities had been well defined by the realities of traditional agriculture, that combination of land, water, climate, and lifestyle needed to sustain a given population. For centuries that combination was productive, but as the population slowly expanded there simply were no empty spaces. Here the Zionist design hit an insuperable barrier: There actually was no place for a Jewish national home in Palestine.

Initially the Zionist response to the space problem was to buy land from landowners who were often absentees. In traditional practice, the villagers working the land went with it when the land was sold, but that practice did not serve the purposes of the Zionists. Palestinians were pushed off the land the Zionists bought and Jewish immigrants replaced the Palestinians. Resistance to this intrusive pattern of displacement caused two Palestinian uprisings before World War II. The British suppressed both rebellions rather harshly and dispersed much of Palestinian leadership. However, perhaps surprisingly, no Palestinian insurgent group emerged from that experience.

The second myth the Zionists invented was that the Palestinians left voluntarily.

The problem, as Pappe defines it for the Zionists, was that leaving the Palestinians on the land did not allow creation of the Jewish national home either rapidly or expansively enough to meet their scheme. The newborn United Nations organization notionally set out to solve this problem right after World War II by partitioning Palestine. The UN neither consulted the Palestinians nor considered their interests. Rather its solution gave more that half of Palestine- in fact most of the best lands-to the new Jewish national home. However, the Palestinians still occupied all of it; Pappe estimates the Zionists had acquired less than 6% of the land at that stage. The UN scheme, innocently it seems, but certainly ill thought out, was that the Palestinians and the new Jewish settlers would live together.

That scheme simply did not fit Zionist plans. To reject it David Ben Gurion-eventual first Prime Minister, then de-facto leader-conceived stage one of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Pappe says the operation was called plan D. The ensuing process is what the Palestinian people call the Nakba or catastrophe of 1948. Ben Gurion and his core group took two Israeli terrorist groups, Stern and Irgun, as well as the young security force called Haganah and began to clear the land of Palestinians. During 1947 and 1948 these forces systematically murdered many Palestinian males and expelled the Palestinians from more than 500 villages and many from the traditional towns of Palestine except Jerusalem. They pushed more than 800,000 Palestinians into exile to Jordan-then including the West Bank-and surrounding countries.

Several massacres by Zionist terrorists, such as the killing of the people of the village of Deir Yassen near Jerusalem, received little to no international attention at the time (Albert Einstein and a small group of American Jewish notables wrote a letter about it to the New York Times, while Alfred Lilienthal's early 1950s book, What Price Israel, called sharp attention to it), but the great bulk of this Zionist war crime went virtually unnoticed in the United States and elsewhere in the west. Despite objections from knowledgeable officials in the State Department, the Truman administration, in power throughout the process, took no note of the crimes. Rather, in 1948 the United States was the first country to "recognize" the new state of Israel. That recognition essentially blessed the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Zionist myth number three says that Israel was founded in a barren wilderness that the Israelis made flower.

The Zionist PR scheme was to pretend they were putting deserving Jews into empty Palestinian lands. Pappe puts this myth to rest very persuasively. In a most literal sense, the Zionists buried the evidence. Systematically, as the Palestinian people were expelled their villages were destroyed. Buildings were pulled down and plowed under. In many cases fruit and olive trees, many centuries old, were kept but they were surrounded by new plantings including evergreens and other trees. Landmarks that were distinctively Palestinian were destroyed. The result was an "Israelized" landscape that, visitors were told, was the greening of the barren land that had existed before Jewish settlers transformed it. For people who knew little to nothing about the region or its history, meaning most Americans, the myth was persuasive at the time, and it pretty much remains so. But the myth can persist only if people ignore the fact that more than four million Palestinians-the Nakba refugees, their children and grandchildren-today are crammed into the confining space of about 10% of their historic homeland, imprisoned by walls, razor wire and Israeli checkpoints in the least desirable parts of Palestine.

Myth number four is that the Israelis are the innocent victims of Palestinian terrorism.

This has to be the most carefully contrived and media protected fiction in history. For example, back last July the Israel Defense Force invaded Lebanon. While the IDF was unable to find and decimate Hezbollah-the Shi'a insurgent group in southern Lebanon-as planned, Israeli aircraft conducted a virtual carpet bombing of the coastal regions of Lebanon, largely destroying the country's economic infrastructure. However, while the Lebanon campaign had the world's attention, the IDF undertook a similar attack on the Gaza Strip and West Bank open-air prisons of the Palestinians. That campaign of bombing, strafing, assassination and harassment of the Palestinian people has continued to the present. The Palestinians sporadically have fought back with rocket fire and suicide bombings, but the casualty count is brutally lopsided. Hundreds of Palestinians are killed or injured for every Israeli. The Israelis now have in prison more than 11,000 Palestinians, while the alleged cause celebre of the recent attacks is Palestinian confinement of one IDF soldier.

Palestinian insurgency and terrorism are children of the Israeli pattern of repression.

The West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the areas where 90% of Palestinians are presently confined, have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. The link between that condition and the evolution of Palestinian insurgent/terrorist groups is absolutely clear.

Why is it that insurgent/terrorist group formation did not begin with the Nakba? The answer is inexact, but an article by the PLO representative to the United States, Afif Safieh, that appeared in the American Jewish paper, FORWARD, suggests the explanation. By way of background, at the time of the Nakba many Palestinians appear to have believed that surrounding Arab countries would come to their rescue, and sporadic if weak military ventures by Egypt and others appear to have sustained this dream. The 1956 war that involved US, Britain and the Israelis should have demonstrated the hopelessness of that strategy, but the really decisive setbacks were Israeli capture of the West Bank in the 1967 war followed by the indecisive 1973 war. These failures persuaded Palestinians, as Safieh, put it, "that there was no military solution to the conflict" as well as no chance of a unitary Palestinian state in which Israelis and Palestinians could live together. As David Ignatius of the Washington Post noted in an August 2006 article, the 1973 war appeared to jolt all the players into recognizing that they had a stake in making peace.

That realization penetrated many different segments of the Palestinian people who were then variously dispersed in refugee camps in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and surrounding countries. But, while moving toward negotiations, the Palestinians were not prepared to abandon paramilitary moves. According to Safieh, " the PLO aimed to remain a military factor so as to be accepted as a diplomatic actor."

The PLO, however, was not able to exert a singular control of Palestinian military impulses. Formed in 1964 in Egypt as a Palestinian nationalist umbrella group, the PLO has a history that reflects the ups and downs of the Middle East peace process. After Israel's successful 1967 war, the PLO became a breeding ground for militant groups. Initially Yasser Arafat brought his Fatah group into the PLO and the organization carried out numerous attacks against Israel and in the region. Dissatisfied with the PLO performance, the Abu Nidal organization (ANO) spun off from it and became the most aggressive Middle East terrorist organization. Reflecting extensive militant factionalism, other groups emerged, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1967, the PFLP General Command in 1968, the Palestine Liberation Front in the mid 1970s, Palestine Islamic Jihaad in the mid 1970s, and various splinter groups of the above.

Most important groups formed in later years were Hamas in 1987 and the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades in 2000. While Abu Nidal, Fatah, PFLP, and PFLP General Command carried out numerous attacks both within Palestine and Israel as well as regionally, the new arrivals, Hamas and Al Aqsa Brigades, confined their activities to Israel and Palestinian territory. With the death of Abu Nidal in 2002, that group appears to have curtailed its activities, and the recent pattern of Palestinian insurgent activity has been pretty much confined to Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. A year before the 2006 Palestinian elections Hamas declared a unilateral ceasefire and concentrated on political action that resulted in Hamas winning a majority of the assembly. That ceasefire still stands as Hamas policy, although there have been a few lapses by Hamas hardliners.

The peace process has moderated Palestinian terrorism patterns even as the Palestinians continued to lose ground.

Deciding in favor of the political process in 1974, Arafat pretty much held the PLO to a non-violent stance until the mid 1980s. That was partly responsive to the first Camp David round during Jimmy Carter's presidency. However, the prospect that those accords would actually go anywhere had pretty well dimmed by 1985. Nonetheless, the peace process received another boost via the signature of the so-called Oslo Accords by Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in 1993. The Accords were actually signed in Washington, DC in a meeting hosted by Bill Clinton, and the better term for the document is a Declaration of Principles on Interim Self Government Arrangements for Palestine.

While the Accords have been widely touted as a breakthrough and a binding set of principles for the parties, as Rabin pointed out in a letter to Arafat, the Declaration stated that "permanent status issues, such as Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements and borders are to be excluded from the interim arrangements and that the outcome of the permanent status talks should not be prejudged or preempted by the interim arrangements." While this letter made clear that Israel had neither given anything away nor committed itself to doing so, Rabin was assassinated in November 1995. The gunman who did it said he was fearful that Rabin would give part of the holy land to the Palestinians. In effect, subsequent history has demonstrated that the assassin actually had nothing to fear; to date all Israeli leaders have successfully avoided giving away anything, except maybe the promised turnover of control over the Gaza Strip. The word "maybe" applies because even though Sharon executed a high-profile withdrawal from Gaza, the IDF still has the Strip locked down, regularly bombs it and rigorously controls traffic in or out.

King Abdullah's renewal of an Arab League peace proposal is the first significant move in several years.

While early in the Bush administration the so-called Roadmap was proposed by the US, EU, UN and Russian Quartet, the most substantial feature of the map is a set of admonitions to the Palestinians as to what they must do to move toward negotiations. In any case, neither Ariel Sharon nor his successor Ehud Olmert signed on to the Roadmap, and so far the Israeli posture on King Abdullah's renewal of the Arab proposal is equally non-committal. Shimon Perez, the vice premier, said last week "the Saudi initiativehas merits." He summed it up cautiously by saying: "You come with your positions, and we will come with ours." That actually could represent a step forward, if the Israelis were to come to the table prepared to make real, here-now concessions on the final status issues that were supposed to have been settled-under the Oslo Accords-by negotiations no later than 1999. However, the Arab initiative calls for the Israelis to move back to the 1967 Green Line, as well as for resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem, in exchange for peace with the Arab world. Israeli refusal to talk about giving ground on such issues has effectively scuttled any prior peace initiative.

Compared to past proposals the Arab initiative lands in a much different Palestinian milieu.

All previous negotiations have occurred with Yasser Arafat in the Palestinian lead and with his Fatah party politically in charge of the process. Since the January 2006 elections Hamas has had the political lead. Hamas leadership has proved exasperating to the US and Israel because Prime minister Ismail Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders have adopted the normal Israeli line: no concessions in advance. If Israeli leadership were to accept that even-handed concept, negotiations probably could begin tomorrow. For Israel to sit down for talks, however, it would have to start by accepting the fact that willingness to sit down on the other side of a negotiating table and do business with them is the only advance recognition Hamas seems prepared to extend.

If one reads Ilan Pappe's work carefully, the Zionist leadership of Israel is hung up firmly, perhaps terminally, on three issues: Any right of Palestinian return beyond the West Bank and Gaza, any concession of territory beyond the Gaza Strip and the slivers of Palestine now contained in the Bantustans where Palestinians are now confined, and any genuine concession of equality to the Palestinian people. The Zionist hope has been that their own resistance and unrelenting pressure from the United States would keep the 4 million Palestinians at bay until Israeli facts on the ground make any Palestinian state impossible. Then the Palestinians can either leave or remain in a slave status to the Israelis.

Hamas, it would appear, has forced the issue. Having refused to make any concessions, Hamas has reserved the right to apply as much force against Israel as Hamas resources can muster. The only thing holding that posture in check is the possibility, now dangled collectively by the Arabs together, that peace can be had for a simple price: Israel gets the part of Palestine it has confiscated so far, but only up to the 1967 green line; while the Palestinians get the rest of Palestine and some just settlement for their expulsion. Any simpler, more forgiving statement of the options is unlikely. Any hard line refusal of the Zionists to negotiate on the merits of those proposals is likely to assure renewal of older groups or the birth of new Palestinian groups to continue the struggle.

The writer is the author of the recently published work, A World Less Safe, now available on Amazon, and he is a regular columnist on rense.com. He is a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer of the US Department of State whose immediate pre-retirement positions were as Chairman of the Department of International Studies of the National War College and as Deputy Director of the State Office of Counter Terrorism and Emergency Planning. He will welcome comment at wecanstopit@charter.net.

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Female Jewish Bomber Murders 12 in Jerusalem
"Girl in Red" in Bomb Horror
Jerusalem, Thursday
31 October 1946






Forty minutes after a telephoned warning, the Jerusalem Railway Station was blown up yesterday. Agency reports say that at least twelve people are missing, and the station will not be able to be used for a week.

A young Jewess described as the “Girl in Red” slipped past Arab police, held up the railway clerk at pistol point, and planted three suitcases, containing bombs, in the waiting room.
Troops and police were rushed to the station to try and locate the bombs and a constable managed to remove one. A second exploded in his hands while he was trying to get it out of the building, wrecking the loading room and the waiting room. The police constable was killed instantly.

In the meanwhile, the “Girl in Red” leapt into a taxi, which tore off through a hail of fire from police. In an attempt to break through the police cordon drawn around the city, the taxi roared through twisting lanes in the Jewish slum quarters.

It is thought that the taxi must have stopped briefly to let the girl out, because when it was finally cornered near the walls of the Old City, she was not in it. The only occupants were three Jews, two of whom were wounded. There was a quantity of explosives and hand-grenades under the flooring of the taxi.

Police took in charge the bullet riddled, bloodstained taxi, scoured the adjacent Montefiore quarter, and arrested another Jew who was found wounded in a nearby house. They also held ten other suspects including a girl dressed in red, who is being questioned in an attempt to establish the identity of the girl who planted the bombs.

Although earlier agency reports mentioned at least 12 missing, the only fatality so far mentioned in the official version is the police officer. He was a demolition expert. Reuters in Jerusalem says that police and troops last night were still searching the debris at the station for further casualties.

After the explosion, an Irgun Zvai Leumi (terrorist) spokesman, broadcasting over the secret radio “Voice of Fighting Zion”, said: “The Jews are at war. Only arms will decide Palestine’s future, not an election.”

Final death toll is 12, with 11 injured. The Female Jewish terrorist has been identified as
Sima Fleishhaker-Hoizman
Source: The Daily New, Perth, Western Australia
31 October 1946


Pioneers of terrorism

Facts about the founding fathers of Israel

By Sam Kabbani

Below are some rarely-mentioned facts about the relationship between Zionism and modern-day terrorism:

1. The first aircraft hijacking was carried out by Israel in 1954 against a Syrian civilian airliner.

2. Grenades in cafes: first used by Zionists against Palestinians in Jerusalem on 17 March 1937.

3. Delayed-action, electrically timed mines in crowded marketplaces: first used by Zionists against Palestinians in Haifa on 6 July 1938.

4. Blowing up a ship with its civilian passengers still on board: first carried out by Zionists in Haifa on 25 November 1940. The Zionists did not hesitate to blow up their own people in protest at the British policy of restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine. The ship, Patria, was carrying 1,700 Jewish immigrants.

5. Assassination of government officials: first carried out by the Zionists against the British in Cairo, when on 6 November 1944 Lord Moyne was assassinated by the Stern Gang. Yitzhak Shamir, a member of the Irgun and later leader of the Stern Gang and Israeli prime minister, was behind the plan.

6. Use of hostages as a means of putting pressure on a government: first used by the Zionists against the British in Tel Aviv on 18 June 1946.

7. Blowing up of government offices with their civilian employees and visitors: first carried out by the Zionists against the British in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946. The toll was 91 Britons killed and 46 wounded in the King David Hotel. Menachim Begin, who masterminded and carried out the attack and later became Israeli prime minister, admitted that the massacre was coordinated with and carried out under the instruction of the Haganah Zionist gang.

8. Booby-trapped suitcases: first used by the Zionists against the British Embassy in Rome on 13 October 1946.

9. Booby-trapped cars in civilian areas: first used by the Zionists against the British in Sarafand (east of Jaffa) on 5 December 1946.

10. Beating of hostages: first used by the Zionists against the British in Tel Aviv, Netanya and Rishon on 29 December 1946.

11. Letter bombs sent to politicians: first used by the Zionists against Britain when 20 letter bombs were sent from Italy to London between 4 and 6 June 1947.

12. Murder of hostages as a reprisal for government actions: first used by the Zionists against the British in the Netanya area on 29 July 1947.

13. Postal parcel bombs: first used by the Zionists against the British in London on 3 September 1947.

14. The massacre of Qibya, northwest of Jerusalem, was carried out by Unit 101, under the command of Ariel Sharon on Wednesday 14 October 1953. The attack was the bloodiest and most brutal Zionist crimes since the infamous Deir Yassin massacre. Forty-two houses as well as a school and a mosque were dynamited over their inhabitants. Seventy-five women, men and children were killed.

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British journalists manipulated by the secret intelligence

British journalists – and British journals – are being manipulated by the secret intelligence agencies, and I think we ought to try and put a stop to it.

The manipulation takes three forms. The first is the attempt to recruit journalists to spy on other people, or for spies to go themselves under journalistic “cover”. This occurs today and it has gone on for years. It is dangerous, not only for the journalist concerned, but for other journalists who get tarred with the espionage brush. Farzad Bazoft was a colleague of mine on the London Observer when he was executed by Saddam Hussein for espionage. It did not, in a sense, matter whether he was really a spy or not. Either way, he ended up dead.

The second form of manipulation that worries me is when intelligence officers are allowed to pose as journalists in order to write tendentious articles under false names. Evidence of this only rarely comes to light, but two examples have surfaced recently – mainly because of the whistleblowing activities of a couple of renegade officers – David Shayler from MI5 and Richard Tomlinson from MI6.

The third sort of manipulation is the most insidious – when intelligence agency propaganda stories are planted on willing journalists, who disguise their origin from their readers. There is – or has been until recently – a very active programme by the secret agencies to colour what appears in the British press, called, if publications by various defectors can be believed, “I/Ops”. That is an abbreviation for Information Operations, and I am – unusually – in a position to provide some information about it.

Let us take that third allegation first. Black propaganda – false material where the source is disguised – has been a tool of British intelligence agencies since the days of the war, when the Special Operations Executive got up to all kinds of tricks with clandestine radio stations, to drip pornography and pessimism into the ears of impressionable German soldiers. Post-war, this unwholesome game mutated into the anti-Soviet Information Research Department. Its task was ostensibly to plant anti-communist stories in the press of the third world, but its lurid tales of Marxist drunkenness and corruption sometimes leaked back to confuse the readers of the British media. A colourful example of the way these techniques expand to meet the exigencies of the hour came in the early 1970s, when the readers of the News of the World found before their eyes – and no doubt to their bewilderment – a front page splash, Russian Sub in IRA plot sensation, complete with aerial photograph of a Soviet conning tower awash off the coast of Donegal. That was the work of Hugh Mooney of the IRD, an organisation which was eventually closed down in 1977. Its spirit did not die, however. Nearly 25 years later, readers of the Sunday Telegraph were regaled with a dramatic story about the son of Col Gadafy of Libya and his alleged connection to a currency counterfeiting plan. The story was written by Con Coughlin, the paper’s then chief foreign correspondent, and it was falsely attributed to a “British banking official”. In fact, it had been given to him by officers of MI6, who, it transpired, had been supplying Coughlin with material for years.


Writ
The origins of that November 1995 Telegraph article only came to light when they were recently disclosed by Mark Hollingsworth, the biographer of renegade security service officer David Shayler. Shayler had worked on MI5’s Libya desk at the time, in liaison with his counterparts in the foreign espionage service, MI6, and had come away with a detailed knowledge of events, and a bundle of secret documents to back them up. The allegations were confirmed from an unexpected direction. The Sunday Telegraph was served with a libel writ by Gadafy’s son. The paper was unable to back up its suggestion that Gadafy junior might have been linked to a fraud, but pleaded, in effect, that it had been supplied with the material by the Government. In a long and detailed statement, which entered the public domain in the course of a judgment given in an interlocutory appeal on 28 October 1998, the paper described how, under Charles Moore’s editorship, a lunch had been arranged with the then Conservative foreign secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, at which Con Coughlin had been present. Told by Rifkind that countries such as Iran were trying to get hold of hard currency to beat sanctions, Coughlin was later briefed by an MI6 man – his regular contact. Some weeks afterward, he was introduced to a second MI6 man, who spent several hours with him and handed over extensive details of the story about Gadafy’s son. Although Coughlin asked for evidence, and was shown purported bank statements, the pleadings make clear that he was dependent on MI6 for the discreditable details about the alleged counterfeiting scam. He was required to keep the source strictly confidential.

Throughout the formal pleadings, the Telegraph preserved the fig-leaf of its sources by referring to a “Western government security agency”. But this veil of coyness was blown away by City solicitor David Hooper in his book on libel published in March, Reputations Under Fire, where he says briskly: “In reality [they were] members of MI6” So, unusually, an MI6 exercise in planting a story has been laid bare. Now, there is no suggestion that Con Coughlin is dishonest in his work. He is a perfectly conscientious journalist who I expect did his best to substantiate his facts and undoubtedly believed in their truth. But nevertheless, those facts may not have been true. And I believe he made a serious mistake in falsely attributing his story to a “British banking official”. His readers ought to know where his material is coming from. When the Sunday Telegraph got into trouble with the libel case, it seems, after all, to have suddenly found it possible to become a lot more specific about its sources.

This was not an isolated example of recent MI6 “I/Ops”. In August 1997, the present foreign editor of the Independent, Leonard Doyle, was also in contact with MI6 while he was at his previous post at the Observer. I know, because I became involved in an MI6-inspired story as a result. Doyle’s MI6 contact supplied him with intelligence information about an Iranian exile who, while running a pizza business in Glasgow, was also attempting to lay hands on a sophisticated mass spectrometer which could be used for measuring uranium enrichment – a key stage in acquiring components for a nuclear bomb. We were supplied with a mass of apparently high quality intelligence from MI6, including surveillance details of an Istanbul hotel meeting between our pizza merchant and men involved in Iranian nuclear procurement.

I should make clear that we did not publish merely on the say-so of MI6. We travelled to Glasgow, confronted the pizza merchant, and only when he admitted that he had been dealing with representatives of the nuclear industry in Iran, did we publish an article. In that story we made it plain that our target had been watched by western intelligence. Nevertheless, I felt uneasy, and vowed never to take part in such an exercise again. Although all parties, from the foreign editor down, behaved scrupulously, we had been obliged to conceal from our readers the full facts and had ended up, in effect, acting as government agents.

Now, after the Tomlinson/Shayler defections and the subsequent revelation of MI6’s continuing “I/Ops” programme of which my Iranian experience was plainly a part, I think the cause of honest journalism is best served by candour. We all ought to come clean about these approaches, and devise some ethics to deal with them. In our vanity, we imagine that we control these sources. But the truth is that they are very deliberately seeking to control us.


Jigsaw
The second intelligence tactic of manipulation in my list which gives concern, is the habit of allowing spooks to write under false names. It was Tomlinson, I suspect, who, having worked in the area, first blew the whistle on this one. And it was a recently published book – MI6 by Stephen Dorril – which once again added the final piece of the jigsaw. Two articles appeared in the Spectator magazine in early 1994 under the by-line “Kenneth Roberts”. They were datelined Sarajevo, and “Roberts” was described as having been working with the UN in Bosnia as an “advisor”. In fact, he was MI6 officer Keith Robert Craig (the pseudonym was a simple one), whose local cover was as a civilian “attached” to the British military unit’s Balkan secretariat. At the time, Bosnia was the site of attacks and atrocities from neighbouring Serbia, and also the focus of some passionate reporting from British journalists. The British military were there as UN “peacekeepers”, but anyone who read “Roberts’s’’ articles might have begun to wonder whether it was not a better policy for British troops to go home and leave the Serbs a free hand. The first article on 5 February, rehearsed arguments for a UN withdrawal, pointing out that all sides committed atrocities. The second piece complained, baselessly, about “warped” and inaccurate reporting by journalists, including the BBC’s Kate Adie.

It is possible, of course, that Craig was merely overcome with private literary urges whilst marooned in the Balkans, and thought it more politic to express his own opinions under a “nom de plume”. But one of the traditional roles of “I/Ops” is to plant stories. What is not clear is how the introduction to the Spectator was made, or whether Craig confided his real trade to the then editor of the Spectator, Dominic Lawson. In his recent published compilation about MI6, the author Stephen Dorril points out that Dominic Lawson’s brother-in-law at the time, Anthony Monckton, was himself a serving MI6 officer, who was to take over the Zagreb station in the Balkans in 1996. (Rosa Monckton, his sister and Dominic Lawson’s wife, was the late Princess Diana’s close friend.).

These relationships – which the disenchanted Tomlinson knew all about because he had himself served undercover in the Balkans in the same time-frame, and which have only slowly emerged into the public domain – have become the subject of a swirl of rumour. There is no reason to believe the Editor of the Spectator did anything improper at all, and certainly no reason to think, as he has been forced to deny, that he was acting as an agent of MI6, whether paid or unpaid. But, for an editor, it must be a bad idea to end up in a position where an MI6 officer is writing for your publication on matters of political controversy, under a false name. Transparency is better.

The final malpractice which the Tomlinson/Shayler defections have brought to light, is the continuing deliberate blurring by MI6 of the line between journalist and spy. This is an old crime – Kim Philby, former foreign correspondent of The Observer would have had plenty of stories to tell about that. But it should be exposed and stopped. Tomlinson himself, by his own account, spent six months in 1993 travelling around Croatia and Serbia trying to recruit informants, under the guise of a British journalist. Dorril, in his book, further asserts that the Spectator itself was unknowingly used as “cover” by no fewer than three MI6 officers working in Bosnia, Belgrade, and Moldova.

The most dismaying allegation floated by Tomlinson was that he had heard tell within MI6 of a “national newspaper editor” who was used as an agent, and had received up to £100,000 in covert payments, accessed at an offshore bank, via a false passport obligingly supplied by MI6 itself. This claim set off a hue and cry, during which the hapless Dominic Lawson was obliged to issue his denial, and other editors came under suspicious scrutiny. In fact, I believe Tomlinson has been wrongly reported. Those who have talked to him in detail say that he has no first-hand knowledge, but merely knew of something a colleague obliquely mentioned. Hearing the words “editor” and “national newspaper”, Tomlinson jumped to the wrong conclusion, and then started guessing. Spies are, after all, very like journalists in their methods – but merely less reliable. What those in the newspaper business know is that there is all the difference in the world between “the Editor” and “an editor”. Newspapers have, for example, education editors; they have environment editors; they have defence editors (not, I should say, that I have any evidence against any individual members of these categories). And it would be a senior journalist at that level, who could travel, see things, report back, who would be of more practical use in the business of espionage than, say the Editor of The Times. So the hunt is still on for the miscreant. And miscreant he is: for, make no mistake, this kind of behaviour by journalists is dangerous and wrong.

Our first task as practitioners is to document what goes on in this very furtive field. Our second task ought to be to hold an open debate on what the proper relations between the intelligence agencies and the media ought to be. And our final task must then be to find ways of actually behaving more sensibly.

Iran Looming War Manufactured by Britain

British Manufactured Gulf Maritime Border Map. No such agreed upon border between Iraq and Iran exists, measurements show ship was nearer Iranian coast

In claiming HMS Cornwall was within Iraqi territorial waters, the British government and the media have covered-up the fact there is no agreed upon Iraqi-Iranian maritime border, as other bizarre coincidences and dubious circumstances surrounding the hostage crisis begin to emerge.

Former British Ambassador Craig Murray and others are highlighting the fact that the maritime border between Iraq and Iran is contested, and the British have essentially manufactured a border to make it appear as if HMS Cornwall was within Iraqi territorial waters. The mainstream media has uniformly failed to address this issue.

"The Iran/Iraq maritime boundary shown on the British government map does not exist. It has been drawn up by the British Government. Only Iraq and Iran can agree their bilateral boundary, and they never have done this in the Gulf, only inside the Shatt because there it is the land border too. This published boundary is a fake with no legal force," claims Murray.

"Accepting the British coordinates for the position of both HMS Cornwall and the incident, both were closer to Iranian land than Iraqi land. Go on, print out the map and measure it. Which underlines the point that the British produced border is not a reliable one."

As illustrated in the Encarta encyclopedia territorial map above, the position of the ship denoted by the red circle is nearer the Iranian border than the Iraq border. The blue circumference touches the edge of the Iranian border.

As the Moon of Alabama blog points out, "That boundary is simply not well defined and Iran and Iraq have fought several wars about the Shatt al-Arab and its waterways. There is no binding or otherwise recognized international agreement about the maritime boundaries."

"If one would use a maritime boundary defined by equidistance from the Iraqi and Iranian coastlines, as is commonly (see Art.7) done in such cases, the result would be something like this purple line."

As becomes obvious from looking at the map, taking the equidistant measurement from the Iraqi and Iranian coastlines, the ship is clearly within Iranian territory.

Iranian news source IRNA claims that this represents Britain's sixth violation and trespass of Iranian territory in the last three years, while also stating that the western media has been complicit in "a wave of propaganda campaign against Iran immediately after Iranian border guards arrested British marines."

Even if you dismiss judging territorial water boundaries by the method detailed above, the fact is that the media parroted carte blanche the British government's version, without even pointing out that there is no recognized and agreed upon Gulf water boundary between Iraq and Iran.

Other highly suspicious circumstances surrounding the hostage crisis have also begun to emerge.

During a BBC Newsnight feature story, it was demonstrated that the Iranian footage of the capture of the British sailors was in large part likely faked and the commentators all but suggested the entire incident was staged or at least constituted "gross negligence" on behalf of the British.

Readers have also pointed out the bizarre coincidence of the fact that immediately before the sailors were captured, they were being accompanied by a BBC film crew onboard HMS Cornwall, who filmed a human interest interview with Faye Turney, who has become the poster child of the whole crisis. The interview was broadcast immediately after the sailors were taken hostage and portrayed Turney in a very humanizing light, with pictures of her loved ones in the background.

With the crisis deepening and tensions being ratcheted up by the bellicose rhetoric of both Blair and the Iranians, this Gulf of Tonkin style incident is starting to look increasingly dubious as the drumbeat for war grows ever louder.

Brits in the Gulf and a Doctored British Map - UPDATED

Former British Ambassador Craig Murray is now challenging the legitimacy of the map just published by the British government in the current dispute with Iran over those 15 captured British sailors and marines.

"Fake Maritime Boundaries

I have been unpopular before, but the level of threats since I started blogging on the captured marines has got a bit scary.

It is therefore with some trepidation that I feel obliged to point this out.

"The British Government has published a map showing the coordinates of the incident, well within an Iran/Iraq maritime border. The mainstream media and even the blogosphere has bought this hook, line and sinker.

"But there are two colossal problems.

"A) The Iran/Iraq maritime boundary shown on the British government map does not exist. It has been drawn up by the British Government. Only Iraq and Iran can agree their bilateral boundary, and they never have done this in the Gulf, only inside the Shatt because there it is the land border too. This published boundary is a fake with no legal force.

"B) Accepting the British coordinates for the position of both HMS Cornwall and the incident, both were closer to Iranian land than Iraqi land. Go on, print out the map and measure it. Which underlines the point that the British produced border is not a reliable one.

"None of which changes the fact that the Iranians, having made their point, should have handed back the captives immediately. I pray they do so before this thing spirals out of control. But by producing a fake map of the Iran/Iraq boundary, notably unfavourable to Iran, we can only harden the Iranian position."

When I spoke with the former Ambassador he told me how dumbfounded he is by the way in which the mainstream media continues to treat this dispute.

The BBC for instance has already interviewed a supposed expert regarding the map, who vouched for its authenticity. But the point is, as Craig Murray, points out, how can such a map exist if the subject of boundaries has never been settled between Iraq and Iran? Turns out the expert had been referred to the BBC by the British Ministry of Defense--who also turned out the plan.

Sounds like the rerun of a bad movie we've already seen.

Barry Lando is the author of WEB OF DECEIT: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, From Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush, just published by Other Press. Born in Canada and educated at Harvard and Columbia, Lando was a correspondent for Time-Life before becoming a producer for 60 Minutes, where he worked for twenty five years. He has won several top journalism awards, including two Emmys, a Dupont and a George Polk. Aside from producing more than a hundred reports for 60 Minutes, he also reported and produced an hour long documentary in 2004 for France’s Canal+ on Saddam Hussein, a documentary which was then rebroadcast in several countries around the globe. He has written extensively for such publications as The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, and Salon. He currently lives in Paris.

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The British Government has published a map showing the coordinates of the incident, well within an Iran/Iraq maritime border. The mainstream media and even the blogosphere has bought this hook, line and sinker.

But there are two colossal problems.

A) The Iran/Iraq maritime boundary shown on the British government map does not exist. It has been drawn up by the British Government. Only Iraq and Iran can agree their bilateral boundary, and they never have done this in the Gulf, only inside the Shatt because there it is the land border too. This published boundary is a fake with no legal force.

B) Accepting the British coordinates for the position of both HMS Cornwall and the incident, both were closer to Iranian land than Iraqi land. Go on, print out the map and measure it. Which underlines the point that the British produced border is not a reliable one.

None of which changes the fact that the Iranians, having made their point, should have handed back the captives immediately. I pray they do so before this thing spirals out of control. But by producing a fake map of the Iran/Iraq boundary, notably unfavourable to Iran, we can only harden the Iranian position.

Tony Blair has let it be known that he is "utterly confident" that the British personnel were in Iraqi waters. He has of course never been known for his expertise in the Law of the Sea. But let us contrast this political certainty with the actual knowledge of the Royal Navy Commander of the operation on which the captives were taken.

Before the spin doctors could get to him, Commodore Lambert said:

"There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that they were in Iraqi territorial waters. Equally, the Iranians may well claim that they were in their territorial waters. The extent and definition of territorial waters in this part of the world is very complicated".

That is precisely right. The boundary between Iran and Iraq in the northern Persian Gulf has never been fixed. (Within the Shatt-al-Arab itself a line was fixed, but was to be updated every ten years because the waterway shifts, according to the treaty. As it has not been updated in over twenty years, whether it is still valid is a moot point. But it appears this incident occurred well south of the Shatt anyway.) This is a perfectly legitimate dispute. The existence of this dispute will clearly be indicated on HMS Cornwall's charts, which are in front of Commodore Lambert, but not of Mr Blair.

Until a boundary is agreed, you could only be certain that the personnel were in Iraqi territorial waters if they were within twelve miles of the coast and, at the same time, more than twelve miles from any island, spit, bar or sandbank claimed by Iran (or Kuwait).

That is very hard to judge as the British government refuse to give out the coordinates where the men were captured. If they really are utterly certain, I find that incomprehensible. Everyone knows the Gulf is teeming with British vessels and personnel, so the position of units a few days ago can hardly be valuable intelligence.

Until a boundary is set, it is not easy to posit where it should be. It has to be done by negotiation or arbitration. I have participated in these negotiations, for example on the boundary between the Channel Islands and France.

With a dead straight coastline with no islands, and a dead straight border between two countries hitting the coast at a right angle, you could have a straight maritime border between the two running out from the coast at a right angle. This never happens.

In practice, you agree a series of triangulation points on both coastlines and do a geometric triangulation exercise to find a line running out from the coast. Coasts of course can be very odd shapes. Draw an imaginary coast and border on a bit of paper and try it yourself. You will soon see why the rules permit you to take into account the general trend of the coastline, and even the angle of the land border. Those are not problems of geometry but old fashioned horse trading.

First, of course, both sides will argue about which triangulation points on the coast to accept. You are allowed, for example, to draw a line across a bay entrance and use that as the coast, but there is plenty of room for the other side to argue over where that line is drawn.

That is only the start. For territorial seas (but not the 200 mile exclusive economic zone) uninhabited rocks and sandbanks count. Again huge room for argument here - the ownership of a useless sandbank is not necessarily a settled thing. Sticking your triangulation point on a sandbank twelve miles out can make a huge difference.

Then it really gets complex. What if the sandbank only appears at low tide? What if it is dry all day, but only at certain times of the year? What if it is prone to move about a bit?

You haggle like mad over this. "You can't have that sandbank unless we have this one plus this spit." You also then get into weighting. "That bit of land is only around half the time, so we'll give it one third weighting" - in other words we will allow 33.3% more sea than you would get if it didn't exist and we just used a point on the coast.

Massive volumes have been written on the prinicples behind these negotiations, but they tend to ignore the fact that ultimately it has to come down to political negotiating skills between a vast range of justifiable possible agreements. That is why we just can't know where the boundary is between Iran and Iraq in this area, which has enough sandbanks to keep me happy thinking about it for centuries. If either side needs a negotiator...

Anyway, the UK was plainly wrong to be ultra provocative in disputed waters. They would be allowed to enter Iranian territorial seas in hot pursuit of terrorists, pirates or slavers, but not to carry out other military operations.

The Iranians had a right to detain the men if they were in seas legitimately claimed as territorial by Iran. Indeed, it is arguable that if a government makes a claim of sovereignty it rather has to enforce it, possession being nine parts of international law. But now the Iranian government is being very foolish, and itself acting illegally, by not releasing the men having made its point.

The story leaked by Russian intelligence claiming knowledge of US plans to attack Iran on 6 April has had great publicity in Iran, if very little here. Personally I doubt it is true. But it seems to me a definite risk that the Iranians will decide to keep the marines against that contingency.

That would be very unfortunate. The Iranian government, by continuing to hold the British personnel, are foolishly providing new impetus to Bush and Blair, whose attempts to bang the war drum against Iran have so far met profound public scepticism. We don't need any more oil wars.

If Blair actually sought the release of our people, rather than anti-Iranian propaganda, he would stop making stupid macho noises and give an assurance that we intend to resolve not only this problem but all disagreements with Iran by peaceful means, and give specific reassurance that no attack is imminent.

But if the Iranian government wait for Blair to behave well, the marines will rot for ever. They should let the men (and woman) go now, with lots of signs of friendship, thus further wrongfooting Bush and Blair.

As Britain's outspoken Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, Craig Murray helped expose vicious human rights abuses by the US-funded regime of Islam Karimov. He is now a prominent critic of Western policy in the region.
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Update:

Briton Admits to Trespass on Video Shown by Iran

Britain Must Admit Error, Iran Says

Iranian president demands apology from UK

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, has demanded an apology from Britain for "violating international law" with the claimed breach of their waters by the 15 sailors and Marines captured a week ago.

Iranian state television reported his demands and has aired what they say is a "confession" by one of the British captives.

Amid widespread British claims of coercion, one of the personnel, named as Nathan Thomas Summers, is shown saying: "We entered Iranian waters without permission and were arrested by Iranian border guards.

"I would like to apologise to the Iranian people for this."

On Wednesday the Ministry of Defence published evidence showing that the boats were well inside Iraqi waters when they were captured a week ago.

The Foreign Office has denounced the broadcast of the footage, saying: "Using our servicemen in this way for propaganda reasons is outrageous."

Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief gave a message of support to the UK, saying: "The British soldiers should be released immediately and without preconditions."

But attempts to gain international condemnation of Iran’s capture of the personnel have been snubbed by the United Nations.

The UK asked UN Security Council members to say they “deplored” the continuing detention and to back calls for their “immediate release”.

But the council was divided on the issue, with Russia leading opposition to Britain’s demand for a tough stance against Iran.

Diplomats said Russia, backed by some other council members such as Indonesia, did not want to give the impression that the council was taking sides.

Iran’s UN mission had also criticised Britain’s bid to turn the dispute into an international issue, saying: “The British government’s attempt to engage third parties, including the Security Council, with this case is not helpful.”

After four hours of negotiations yesterday, the Security Council could only agree a watered-down version of the statement, voicing “grave concern”, which fell far short of Britain’s demands.

It read: “Members of the Security Council expressed grave concern at the capture by the Revolutionary Guard and the continuing detention by the government of Iran of 15 United Kingdom naval personnel and appealed to the government of Iran to allow consular access in terms of the relevant international laws.

“Members of the Security Council support calls, including by the secretary general in his March 29 meeting with the Iranian foreign minister, for an early resolution of this problem including the release of the 15 UK personnel.”

The Foreign Office tried to put a brave face on the setback, saying: “We are very encouraged by the international support we have received so far in lobbying the Iranians to release our people.

“We will discuss a security council statement further with colleagues in New York.”

Oil Traders Fear an Attack on Iran

Okay, now I'm worried.

There have been several rounds of reports that the war-obsessed Bush administration was getting ready to attack Iran-first last September, then in December, and more recently in January and February.

The one thing that kept me thinking that a catastrophic war with Iran might not be in the offing was oil prices, which didn't seem to be acting as one would expect them to if there were a major war looming in the Persian Gulf. Oil prices, in fact, have been drifting slowly downward since September 2006, when they hit $68.85. Yet if there were going to be a hot war between the U.S. and Iran, one would expect much higher prices. After all, most of the combat would be occurring along Iran's heavily armed coastline and in the Gulf, through which over a quarter of all the world's oil passes. In the event of such a conflict, oil shipments would shut down from that region as underwriters jacked the price of insuring oil tankers in the Gulf to astronomical levels. Estimates of how expensive oil could become in the event of a US attack on Iran, the world's second largest oil producing nation, have ranged as high as $200/barrel-a level that would bring the global economy to a screeching halt.

Well, there are new reports circulating now that an attack by US air and naval forces could come in early April, and this time, the oil traders are taking them seriously. On Tuesday, oil futures shot up $5/barrel to hit $68/barrel-quite a jump, and the highest price for oil since last September.

Reports say that traders were responding to rumors-unsubstantiated-that Iran had fired on an American ship in the Gulf, and no doubt also to the ongoing tensions over Iran's capture and detention of 15 British sailors, whom it claims had illegally entered Iranian territorial waters.

Phil Flynn, a trader with Alaron Trading in Chicago, was quoted as saying that the oil market has been "on pins and needles" because of the tensions in the Persian Gulf between the US and Iran.

Adding to worries about oil supplies from the Gulf, no doubt, is the vast armada that the U.S. has amassed up close to Iran's borders-an armada that includes two fully armed aircraft battle groups, equipped with hundreds of strike aircraft and tomahawk cruise missiles and capable of delivering a crippling blow to Iran's military and industrial infrastructure.

The Bush administration, while repeatedly insisting it has no plans to attack Iran, has pointedly also stated on numerous occasions that "all options are on the table" in dealing with what it claims are Iraqi efforts to develop nuclear weapons capability. The White House and Pentagon have also been running a propaganda campaign-ominously reminiscent of the run-up to the Iraq invasion--of trying to make a case that Iran is providing technical aid, weapons and training to Iraqi insurgents, particularly in the use of armor-penetrating explosive devices.

Iran, for its part, is continuing to develop its uranium refining skills and capacity, all the while denying that it has any plans to develop nuclear weapons. This past week, the United Nations voted stiffer sanctions on Iran for failing to bring its nuclear program into compliance with international rules and monitoring.

Iran denies that it has been aiding Iraqi insurgents or providing advanced weapons for use against US forces in Iraq, and indeed the evidence presented by the U.S. has been viewed with considerable skepticism.

Meanwhile, there are reports in the European press that American forces are massing along the Iraq border with Iran, even as the U.S. is conducting war games in the Gulf simulating an attack on Iran. There have also been reports for some time that US special forces have been operating in Iran, gathering intelligence and establishing coordinates on likely bombing targets, and perhaps linking with anti-government groups inside Iran that have been conducting terror attacks there. More recently there have been reports that the Bush administration has been using misappropriated Iraq reconstruction funds to finance Kurdish and Al Qaeda group attacks inside Iran.

Back in the U.S., the Bush administration succeeded in getting Congress to back off of attempts to include legislation barring the White House from attacking Iran without prior Congressional approval. Bush has already claimed that Iran is a terrorist nation and that he thus has the authority to attack that country at will because of the 2001 Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force which was actually an authorization for the US attack on the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

It all would seem to point to the real possibility of an attack on Iran-a move that would be a war crime, that would be a disaster for the U.S., that would spark a global recession, and that would inflame the entire Middle East for years to come.

Do the oil traders know something that we in America should be knowing?

And why aren't Congress and the US media discussing all this?

Poll: Bush Hive Mind Supports Iran Attack

In yet another brain-dead poll conducted by Harris Interactive, nearly 60 percent of Americans believe “Iran is helping the Shiites in Iraq by providing weapons to them.”

No indication if the people polled understand that 53 percent of Iranians are Shi’ites, or that Iran providing weapons to fellow Shi’ites makes more sense than the United States providing weapons to Israeli Jews, as there approximately 5 million Jews in the United States, or around 3 percent of the population.

In fact, if we are to base nation-states along religious lines, as is the case with Israel, a large chunk of Iraq would rightfully be considered part of Iran, or at least the Shi’a part of Iran, that is to say most of the country. In order to get an idea of what I’m talking about, check out this map.

Further data breaks down along the same old tired, fanatical, irrational, and generally brain-dead lines: 14% in favor of bombing Iran, with an additional 18% “somewhat” favoring mass murdering Iranians in the name of Israel, although most Americans remain steadfastly unaware, as admitted by the Bush crime family intimate Philip Zelikow, that attacking Iraq and soon Iran serves the state of Israel, not the United States, as downtown Tehran is exactly 6352.5 miles from the Washington Monument and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, no matter what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did or did not say, will not invade on a fortnight, even if the neocons insist that’s how long it will take for Iran to patch together a crude nuke.

Of course, with an appropriate black flag terrorist event pinned on Iran, this fence sitting 18% and no doubt a large chunk those “somewhat” opposed to attacking Iran, or 19%, will team up to make a majority. As well, the “not sure” column, wishy-washy and easily swayed with the right degree of propaganda catapulted in their namby-pamby direction by the likes of Fox News, CNN, and the rest of the corporate media, will likely be onboard, plastic flags made in China in hand. In other words, given the correct degree of engineered violence and resultant media-hyped fear on the part of a know-nothing public, wired into Fox News like Borg drones assimilated to the collective mind, a majority of the population will either support the attack on Iran or be ambivalent enough not to give a hoot one way or the other, in short they will be accomplices.

Angus Reid, however, does not see it that way. “Americans Reject Attacking Iran Over Iraq Bombs,” the global monitor corporation announces. Indeed, a Bushzarro flip-flop, indeed an avalanche, hangs by a tenuous thread, a sword of Damocles, and will be easily snapped by a “dirty bomb” event or even a suicide bomber at the mall, conducted by a crazed Muslim patsy or mental patient with a Persian surname.

Britain Issues the Balfour Declaration

It was 78 years ago, on Nov. 2, 1917, that Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, a fateful statement that Zionists henceforth claimed gave Jews a legal right to a homeland in Palestine. The statement came in the form of a personal letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to a prominent British Jew, Lionel Walter, the second Lord Rothschild:

Foreign Office, November 2nd, 1917

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours,
Arthur James Balfour1

Arabs and anti-Zionists could not help noting the totally pro-Zionist content of the declaration. It failed to mention Christians or Muslims, Arabs or Palestinians, even though they remained by far the majority population in Palestine. At the time, there were about 55,000 Jews and 600,000 Palestinians in Palestine.2 The declaration spoke of a homeland, but that was widely understood to mean a Jewish state. And it pledged actively to help Jews while merely promising to protect the rights of "the non-Jewish communities."

Arabs far beyond Palestine were alarmed and disappointed. It was clear to them that British wartime promises of Arab independence were being ignored by London. The campaign to chase the Turks from Palestine was being concluded in late 1917 with Arab help. British forces stood at the gates of Jerusalem and soon they would clear the area and Palestine would pass from the Ottoman to the British Empire. But Arab aspirations for independence were being ignored.

Opposition came not only from Arabs and Muslims but within England as well. The only Jew in the Cabinet, Edwin Montague, the secretary of state for India, had opposed the original idea. He supported his position by enlisting the views of one of the greatest Arabists of the time, Gertrude Bell, a colleague of T.E. Lawrence and currently involved in British intelligence in Cairo. She wrote the Cabinet that "two considerations rule out the conception of an independent Jewish Palestine from practical politics. The first is that the province as we know it is not Jewish, and that neither Mohammedan nor Arab would accept Jewish authority; the second that the capital, Jerusalem, is equally sacred to three faiths, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, and should never, if it can be avoided, be put under the exclusive control of any one location, no matter how carefully the rights of the other two may be safeguarded."3

"The province as we know it is not Jewish."

Another dissent came from the Middle East from A.P. Albina, a Levantine Catholic merchant from Jerusalem who enjoyed good relations with top British officials. He wrote that it was contradictory for the Western powers to grant freedom to small nationalities while at the same time planning to give Palestine to the Jews. He described the Zionists as:

A foreign and hated race, a motley crowd of Poles, Russians, Romanians, Spaniards, Yemenites, etc., who can claim absolutely no right over the country, except that of sentiment and the fact that their forefathers inhabited it over two thousand years ago[.] The introduction into Palestine of Jewish rule, or even Jewish predominance, will mean the spoliation of the Arab inhabitants of their hereditary rights and the upsetting of the principles of nationalities....Politically, a Jewish State in Palestine will mean a permanent danger to a lasting peace in the Near East.4

Despite such concerns, and the opposition of the entire Arab and Islamic worlds, there were a number of reasons favoring the Zionist campaign to gain official British sanction. Foremost among these was the favorable attitude toward a Jewish homeland shared by both Foreign Secretary Balfour and Britain's prime minister, David Lloyd George. Welshman Lloyd George was a firm believer in the Old Testament's claim to the right of the Jews to Palestine.5 Balfour had been prime minister in the early 1900s at the time of the British offer of "Uganda" as a Jewish homeland and, although not Jewish, he considered himself a Zionist.6

British Interests

Beyond these sentimental and religious reasons, however, there were other motivations having to do with Britain's interests, among them a common concern for gaining U.S. support for Britain's post-war goals in dividing up the tottering Ottoman Empire, including Britain's ambition of taking over Palestine. In this, they were advised by the British embassy in Washington that Britain could be helped in achieving U.S. backing by finding favor with Jewish Americans. Reported the embassy: "They are far better organized than the Irish and far more formidable. We should be in a position to get into their good graces."7

One obvious way to do this was to follow the natural inclinations of Lloyd George and Balfour and support Zionist ambitions in Palestine, if only London could be sure President Woodrow Wilson agreed with such a path. In this they were immeasurably helped, as well as goaded, by a persistent and persuasive Russian-born Jewish chemist by the name of Chaim Weizmann. In 1917 he was head of the Zionist movement in Britain and a tireless worker in that cause. His achievements were so great that eventually he would be head of the World Zionist Organization and Israel's first president.

Aware of Lloyd George's and Balfour's desire for U.S. support, Weizmann sought a backdoor past the anti-Zionist State Department to the White House via America's foremost Zionist, Louis B. Brandeis, an intimate of President Wilson, who had appointed Brandeis in 1916 to the Supreme Court. On April 8, 1917, Weizmann cabled Brandeis, advising that "an expression of opinion coming from yourself and perhaps other gentlemen connected with the Government in favor of a Jewish Palestine under a British protectorate would greatly strengthen our hands."8 A month later, following America's entry into the war, Brandeis had a 45-minute meeting with Wilson. As a son of a Presbyterian clergyman and a daily reader of the Bible, Wilson shared with a number of Christians support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Indeed, Brandeis found the president's views of Palestine "entirely sympathetic to the aims of the Zionist Movement" and, moreover, was able to encourage the British by adding that Wilson favored a British protectorate in Palestine. 9

However, Wilson did not want to make a public declaration because of his concern with French ambitions toward the region and a futile hope that Turkey still could be persuaded to quit the war. Thus, when Britain sought Wilson's endorsement in September 1917 of a draft declaration, he responded that the time was "not opportune" for him to go public. In desperation, Weizmann cabled Brandeis that it "would greatly help if President Wilson and yourself would support the text. Matter most urgent. Please telegraph."10 Brandeis was able to use his access to the White House to meet with a Jewish adviser to Wilson, Colonel Edward Mandell House, and together they assured Weizmann that

From talks I have had with President and from expressions of opinion given to closest advisers I feel I can answer you in that he is [in] entire sympathy with declaration quoted in yours of nineteenth as approved by the foreign office and the Prime Minister. I of course heartily agree."11

When the British sent a revised draft of the statement for Wilson's examination in early October, he turned it over to Brandeis for his comments. The Justice and his aides redrafted it in slightly stronger and cleaner language, substituting "the Jewish people" for "the Jewish race"—thereby muting the vexing question of who's-a-Jew—and making the final clause read that there would be no prejudice to the "rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."12

Colonel House sent the revision on to Wilson. But, in the midst of world war, he felt no urgency about the matter. It was not until Oct. 13 that he sent a memo to House saying:

I find in my pocket the memorandum you gave me about the Zionist Movement. I am afraid I did not say to you that I concurred in the formula suggested by the other side. I do, and would be obliged if you would let them know it.13

So casual was Wilson about this momentous decision that he never did inform his secretary of state, or publicly announce his decision.14 Nonetheless, his private assurance to Britain of his support was enough for Lloyd George's Cabinet to adopt the declaration. In the corridors of power, it was well known that the president of the United States quietly supported the Balfour Declaration.

Thus, in the most off-handed way possible, Wilson lent his enormous weight to supporting the Zionist dream of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was a decision that was to have a profound effect on Middle East history and U.S. foreign policy, and especially on the daily lives of Palestinians and the world Jewish community.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Grose, Peter, Israel in the Mind of America, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.

Mallison, Thomas and Sally V., The Palestine Problem in International Law and World Order, London, Longman Group Ltd., 1986.

Murphy, Bruce Allen, The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices, Garden City, New York, Anchor Press/Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1983.

Neff, Donald, Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy Towards Palestine and Israel Since 1945, Washington, DC, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995.

Sanders, Ronald, The High Walls of Jerusalem: A History of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine , New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983.

Tessler, Mark, History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994.

NOTES:

1 Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem, pp. 612-13. The text of the early and the final drafts of the declaration are also in Mallison and Mallison, The Palestine Problem in International Law and World Order, pp. 427-29.

2 Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, p. 145.

3 Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem, p. 585.

4 Ibid., p. 586.

5 Ibid., pp. 119-20.

6 Grose, Israel in the Mind of America, p. 64.

7 Ibid., p. 63.

8 Murphy, The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection, p. 57.

9 Ibid., p. 57; Neff, Fallen Pillars, p. 11.

10 Murphy, p. 58.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., p. 60; Sanders, p. 598.

13 Sanders, p. 598.

14 Grose, p. 64.

Easter Surprise: Attack on Iran, New 9/11… or Worse

"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." – George W. Bush, September 2002

"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous... Having said that, all options are on the table." - George W. Bush, February 2005

The Bush administration continues moving closer to a nuclear attack on Iran, and we ignore the obvious buildup at our peril.

Russian media are sounding alarms. In February, ultra-nationalist leader Vladimir Shirinovsky warned that the US would launch a strike against Tehran at the end of this month. Then last week, the Russian News and Information Agency Novosti (RIA-Novosti) quoted military experts predicting the US will attack Iran on April 6th, Good Friday. According to RIA-Novosti, the imminent assault will target Iranian air and naval defense capabilities, armed forces headquarters as well as key economic assets and administration headquarters. Massive air strikes will be deployed, possibly tactical nuclear weapons as well, and the Bush administration will attempt to exploit the resulting chaos and political unrest by installing a pro-US government.

Sound familiar? It’s Iraq déjà vu all over again, and we know how well that war has gone.

Seymour Hersh has published numerous articles in The New Yorker detailing the Bush administration’s plans to invade Iran. His latest, "The Redirection," discusses US participation in Iran-based clandestine operations, the kidnapping of hundreds of Iranians (including many "humanitarian and aid workers") by US forces and the shocking revelation that an Iran-Contra-type scandal has been run out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office with some of the illicit funds going to groups "sympathetic to al-Qaeda."

"The Redirection" also reports that the Pentagon has been planning to bomb Iran for a year and that a recently-established group connected to the Joint Chiefs of Staff is formulating a assault strategy to be implemented "upon orders from the President, within twenty-four hours." Hersh notes that current capabilities "allow for an attack order this spring," possibly when four US aircraft-carrier battle groups are scheduled to be in the Persian Gulf simultaneously.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Congress busies itself with non-binding, timid resolutions on Iraq and recently altered a military-funding bill to make it easier for Bush to invade Iran. As Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV) explained, language demanding that Bush seek congressional approval before attacking Iran "would take away perhaps the most important negotiating tool that the U.S. has when it comes to Iran."

Such sheer ignorance and blind denial would be laughable if it weren’t marching us into Armageddon.

But with this Administration (and this Congress, apparently) diplomacy be damned.

It’s now widely known that Iran had broached peace talks with the US in 2003 - Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice admitted as much in 2006 when she said, "what the Iranians wanted earlier was to be one-on-one with the United States." Yet the White House rejected Tehran’s overture outright and Rice has since developed selective amnesia, later saying of the Iranian proposal, "I don’t remember seeing any such thing. "

For its part, the UN Security Council recently tightened sanctions aimed at pressuring Iran to cease uranium enrichment, and in response, Iran announced it would cooperate less with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

It’s worth noting that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and says that its program falls under the legally permitted right to "peacefully use nuclear technology." In contrast, Israel has neither signed nor ratified the NPT and the US would breach the Treaty by conducting a nuclear attack against Iran.

Besides, the Bush administration's message to its enemies has been very clear: if you possess WMD you're safe, and if you don't, you're fair game. Iraq had no nuclear weapons and was invaded, Iran doesn't as well and risks attack, yet that other "Axis of Evil" country, North Korea, reportedly does have nuclear weapons and is left alone. When considering that India and Pakistan (and presumably Israel) developed secret nuclear weapons programs yet remain on good terms with Washington, the case for war becomes even more tenuous.

What consequences would arise from a US attack on Iran? Retaliation, for one. Tehran promised a "crushing response" to any US or Israeli assault, and while the country - ironically - doesn't possess nuclear weapons to scare off attackers, it does have other options. Iran boasts a standing army estimated at 450,000 personnel, as well as long-range missiles that could hit Israel and possibly even Europe. In addition, much of the world's oil supply is transported through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow stretch of water which Iran borders to the north. In 1997, Iran's deputy foreign minister warned that the country might close off that shipping route if ever threatened, and it wouldn't be difficult. Just a few missiles or gunboats could bring down vessels and block the Strait, thereby threatening the global oil supply and shooting the price of crude oil to over $100 a barrel, with untold
negative consequences for the world economy.

An attack on Iran would also inflame tensions in the Middle East, and could tip the scales towards a new geopolitical balance, one in which the US finds itself shut out by Russia, China, Iran, Muslim countries and the many others Bush has managed to alienate during his period in office.

The most horrific impact of a US assault on Iran, of course, would be the potentially catastrophic number of casualties. The Oxford Research Group predicted that up to 10,000 people would die if the US bombed Iran's nuclear sites, and that an attack on the Bushehr nuclear reactor could send a radioactive cloud over the Gulf. If the US uses nuclear weapons, such as earth-penetrating "bunker buster" bombs, radioactive fallout would become even more disastrous.

The devastating implications of a US strike on Iran are clear. And that begs the question: how could the US public be convinced to enter another potentially ugly and protracted war?
Former CIA Officer Philip Giraldi chillingly noted that the Pentagon's plans to attack Iran were drawn up "to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States." Writing in The American Conservative in August 2005, Giraldi added, "The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites ... As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States."

Chew on that one a minute. The Pentagon's plan would be in response to a terrorist attack on the US, but not contingent upon Iran actually having been responsible. How outlandish is this scenario: another 9/11 hits the US, the administration says it has secret information implicating Iran, the US population demands retribution and bombs start dropping on Tehran.

While even contemplating another 9/11 brings shudders, it’s worth noting that last year, Congress quietly approved provisions making it easier for the President to declare federal martial law after a domestic terrorist incident. And recall that in late 2003, General Tommy Franks openly speculated on how a new 9/11 could lead to a military form of government: "a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution."

Meanwhile, Iran conducted wargames in the Persian Gulf last week and just yesterday, the US Navy began its largest maneuvers in the region since the 2003 Iraq invasion, complete with over 100 US warplanes and 10,000 personnel.

The clock is ticking, and there’s far too much at stake.

If you’re from the US, contact your Senators today and ask them to support the Webb amendment prohibiting the Administration from attacking Iran without congressional approval. Tell them to support the Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) bill making it harder for Bush to declare martial law and take over the National Guard, and while you’re at it, tell your Senators to only fund troop withdrawal and to bring the troops home. Thank those Congress members who voted against more war funding.

We could be looking at WWIII. The time for positive ACTION IS NOW.