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Why the US Backs Israel |
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Tuesday, 20 September 2016 08:19 |
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McNamara writes: "The US and Israel signed a pact that contains the largest pledge of military assistance to a single country in US history. In justifying the largesse, commentators and officials have pointed to the threat of a resurgent Iran and ISIS. Yet the diplomatic platitudes are less illuminating than a statement Netanyahu made a year ago at the Knesset: 'I am asked if we will forever live by the sword,' the prime minister said, then gave his answer: 'Yes.'"
Israeli soldiers search Palestinians during clashes in the West Bank city of Hebron, September 19, 2016. (photo: Reuters)
Why the US Backs Israel
By Ryan McNamara, Jacobin
20 September 16
A new US military package will shower billions of dollars on Israel. But not because it supports democracy.
 f multibillion-dollar weapons deals are any measure, Israel and the US have never been closer.
This past week, despite a reported personal rift between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the US and Israel signed a pact that contains the largest pledge of military assistance to a single country in US history. The ten-year agreement will provide $3.8 billion of aid yearly to Israel — up from the $3.1 billion awarded to Israel in the countries’ previous decade-long deal.
In justifying the largesse, commentators and officials have pointed to the threat of a resurgent Iran and ISIS. The deal, National Security Advisor Susan Rice said at a press conference, “will ensure that Israel has the support it needs to defend itself.”
Yet the diplomatic platitudes are less illuminating than a statement Netanyahu made a year ago at the Knesset: “I am asked if we will forever live by the sword,” the prime minister said, then gave his answer: “Yes.”
Israel is in a constant state of military action, largely enabled by the US. In just one twenty-four-hour period during negotiations over the new aid package, Israel bombed Gaza and announced new settlements in the West Bank city of Hebron. Each of these acts was at once a show of strength and an outgrowth of US support.
Netanyahu, like many Israeli and US leaders, recognizes that Israel must possess an overwhelming military advantage over its neighbors in order to accomplish its goals. Annexations, occupations, and blockades don’t come free.
The US gets something out of the deal as well: Israel’s unparalleled military power allows it to counterbalance other countries and forces hostile to US hegemony in the region.
Israeli politician Yair Lapid was quite explicit on this point in a recent article in Foreign Policy. “America’s cooperation with Israel often allows it to pursue an active and influential policy in the Middle East,” adding that Israel is as “a forward base for the West in the Middle East.”
This is nothing new, of course. The US government has long thought it prudent to buttress Israel’s military might to advance its interests in the Middle East.
Since 1989, the United States has stored weapons in Israel for potential use in conflicts around the Middle East and North Africa — Lapid’s “forward base for the West.” In addition, the US grants Israel access to these munitions stockpiles when the its military runs out of weapons, as in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War and the 2014 Gaza assault.
Further back, when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was leading the Arab Nationalist movement and challenging American and European influence in the region, Israel proved a bulwark, eventually dealing Egypt a crushing military defeat in 1967. A few years later, at the height of the Cold War, the Israelis stole a Soviet radar from Egypt, a major intelligence coup. And in 1970, when the US government was preoccupied with the Vietnam War, it called on Israel to mass forces on the Syrian border to prevent Syrian troops from stopping Jordan’s Black September massacre.
In recent years, the US and Israel have been working together to design anti-missile defense systems, including Israel’s famed Iron Dome. The Pentagon has commissioned its own version of the Iron Dome to protect “forwardly deployed” forces in places like Afghanistan, with Israel’s state-owned Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and the private US defense contractor Raytheon reportedly beginning work on the project. In its promotional material, Raytheon brags that “the Tamir” — the interceptor missile the Iron Dome fires — “is the only combat proven” variety. (As Lapid acknowledges, Israel provides the US “a relatively cheap way to test the most advanced arms in field conditions.”)
Raytheon isn’t the only defense contractor benefiting from the US and Israel’s symbiotic relationship.
The US dispenses its aid in the form of vouchers for American defense companies’ weapons — an effective transfer of public money to Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the like. This enrichment of US weapons companies will only increase with the new deal: the package gradually removes a stipulation under which the Israeli government was allowed to convert 26 percent of the aid to shekels and subsidize its own defense industries.
If anything, though, the two countries’ defense sectors are growing closer. Several Israeli defense firms, such as Elbit Systems, have incorporated subsidiaries in the US to qualify for contracts with the US government.
But the defense industry giveaways only sweeten the deal. Fundamentally, the glue that binds the US and Israel together is their shared commitment to maintaining the current balance of power in the Middle East.
And that means Israel must retain its “qualitative military edge” — that is to say, superior equipment and training over other armed forces in the region. The concept is even written into US law: the Arms Export Control Act mandates that any arms sales to Israel’s neighbors must “not adversely affect Israel’s qualitative military edge.”
Take Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet for example. Assured to be the most advanced jet on Earth when it is released, the $100 million aircraft has countries around the world clamoring for it. But in the Middle East, Israel gets first dibs. Speaking at the White House in April 2015, Vice President Joe Biden promised a delivery of the F-35 to Israel, “making Israel the only country in the Middle East to have this fifth-generation aircraft.” Similarly, when the US upgraded Saudi Arabia’s F-15 jets, Israel was pledged an additional twenty F-35s, which allegedly outclass the F-15.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of Israel’s founding fathers and Netanyahu’s chief ideological influences, would’ve understood all of this quite well. “Every native population in the world resists colonists,” he wrote in a 1923 essay entitled “The Iron Wall.” “That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope.” Thus, he continued, Israel must build up its military to the point where there is no longer any hope for effective armed resistance.
Today, this logic can be applied to Israel’s neighbors more generally, many of whom are unwilling to submit to Israel’s designs for their future. Whether it’s reshaping Lebanon, annexing the Golan Heights, or expanding settlements and establishing de facto control over Jerusalem, Israel can only meet its foreign policy goals if it possesses superior means of violence.
The new military package was not designed to protect Israeli citizens in their “dangerous neighborhood,” nor is it a signal of the American appreciation for democracy. It serves to enable Israeli aggression, and project US power in the region and the global arms trade.
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Say a Prayer for Jeffrey Sterling |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 19 September 2016 13:45 |
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Ash writes: "Jeffrey Sterling is a former CIA intelligence officer, a U.S. political prisoner, and a black man in an American jail. Jeffrey Sterling has also suffered a heart attack in the federal prison in which he is detained at Englewood, Colorado, and may be dead by the time you read this. Can you help?"
Jeffrey and Holly Sterling honeymooning on the beach in Jamica, June 2007. (photo: Reporters Without Borders)
Say a Prayer for Jeffrey Sterling
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
19 September 16
 effrey Sterling is a former CIA intelligence officer, a U.S. political prisoner, and a black man in an American jail.
Jeffrey Sterling has also suffered a heart attack in the federal prison in which he is detained at Englewood, Colorado, and may be dead by the time you read this.
Can you help? Good question. Thanks for asking that question. Jeffrey and his wife Holly are reaching out for all the help they can get, ASAP. Per John Kiriakou’s post on RSN this morning, “Holly has enlisted the support of Norman Solomon’s Roots Action, which has asked supporters to call Warden Deborah Denham at 303-763-4300. In addition to the warden, Solomon recommends contacting the Bureau of Prisons’ North Central Regional Office by calling Sara M. Revell at 913-621-3939 or writing to her at NCRO/
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.”
Jeffrey Sterling is incarcerated ostensibly on an espionage conviction for revealing to New York Times reporter James Risen a secret U.S. project titled Operation Merlin.
For the record, Risen, having received the full benefit of top notch legal council, remains free. Jeffrey rots in prison.
Risen reported on the pages of The New York Times that Operation Merlin was a failure and that it, in all likelihood, had accelerated Iran’s nuclear program rather than undermining it as the CIA had intended.
But Sterling had a different problem, his blackness. In the practically all-white CIA, Sterling stood out like a “big black guy speaking Farsi.” Which was what his supervisor at the “company” cited as justification for rejecting his application for overseas deployment, specifically citing race as a contributing factor.
Then Sterling made his real mistake. He sued the CIA for discrimination. Before sentencing Jeffrey Sterling to three and a half years in prison, Judge Leonie Brinkema, the same judge coincidentally who sentenced former CIA agent John Kiriakou to thirty months in prison on similar charges, said that she was sending a message: “If you do knowingly reveal these secrets, there’s going to be a price to be paid.”
The real message was that the U.S. federal prison system can absolutely function as a gulag. If you challenge or embarrass the American empire, this is what happens to you.
Bear in mind two things. The administration of Barack Obama has prosecuted more cases traditionally viewed as whistleblowing than that of any other president in U.S. history, by far. It is by all indications a brutal campaign of repression against the very people who speak out against American government abuse.
Further, there was no real evidence presented at trial that Sterling revealed anything of a classified nature to Risen or anyone else. The jury was a typical “terrorized by government terrorism propaganda” lynch mob that would have convicted anyone of anything the government instructed them to. Founders spinning in their graves be damned.
Nothing is more sacred or essential to a democracy than transparency. It is not enough to protect society, if that society must sacrifice its values and freedom for those protections. Jeffrey Sterling is in prison because he tried to shed light on questionable government practices.
The U.S. government loves to accuse and sanction other nations for repression of opponents and critics. American political prisoners like Jeffrey Sterling bear witness to that hypocrisy.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: Obama Is Against Torture, but Afraid of CIA Torturers |
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Monday, 19 September 2016 11:04 |
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Excerpt: "We believe that more needs to be done to replant the moral moorings of honesty that must anchor the intelligence profession to which we have given so many years."
A protest against torture. (photo: Justin Norman/cc/flickr)
Obama Is Against Torture, but Afraid of CIA Torturers
By Consortium News
19 September 16
MEMORANDUM FOR: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Vice Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: U.S. Media Mum On How Your Committee Faced Down Both CIA and Obama
 e write to thank you for your unwavering support for your extraordinarily courageous and tenacious staff in (1) investigating CIA torture under the Bush/Cheney administration and (2) resisting CIA/White House attempts under the Obama administration to cover up heinous torture crimes like waterboarding.
We confess to having been shocked at the torture detailed in the version of the executive summary your Committee released on December 9, 2014. We found ourselves wondering what additional behavior could have been deemed so repugnant that the White House and CIA insisted it be redacted; and if the entire 6,700-page investigation – with whatever redaction might be truly necessary – would ever see the light of day. We think you could take steps now to make it less likely that the full report be deep-sixed, and we will make some suggestions below toward that end.
With well over 400 years of intelligence experience under our collective belt, we wondered how you managed to get the investigation finished and the executive summary up and out (though redacted). We now know the backstory – thanks to the unstinting courage of the committee’s principal investigator Daniel Jones, who has been interviewed by Spencer Ackerman, an investigative reporter for The (UK) Guardian newspaper. The titanic struggle depicted by Ackerman reads like a crime novel; sadly, the four-part series is nonfiction:
I. “Senate investigator breaks silence about CIA’s ‘failed coverup’ of torture report”
II. “Inside the fight to reveal the CIA’s torture secrets”
III. ” ‘A constitutional crisis’: the CIA turns on the Senate”
IV. “No looking back: the CIA torture report’s aftermath“
Ackerman’s reporting on Jones’s tenacity in facing down the gorilla CIA makes abundantly clear how richly deserved was the encomium you gave Jones when he left the committee staff in December 2015.
You noted, “Without his indefatigable work on the Intelligence Committee staff, the Senate report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program would not have been completed, nor would its 525-page executive summary have been released to the public.”
It seems equal praise might well be due to any Snowden-like patriot/whistleblower who “inadvertently” included the “Panetta Review” in the reams of material given your committee by the CIA.
Remarkably, a full week after The Guardian carried Ackerman’s revelations, none has been picked up by U.S. “mainstream” newspapers. Not the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post – not even The Hill.
(As for alternative media, Charles P. Pierce’s timely piece for Esquire whetted his readers’ appetite for the gripping detail of the Guardian series, explaining that it would be “unfair both to Ackerman’s diligence and Jones’s courage” to try to summarize even just the first installment. “Read the whole damn thing,” Pierce advises.)
And so, the culprits who should be hanging their heads in shame are out and about, with some still collecting book royalties and some blithely working for this or that candidate for president. As if nothing happened. Sadly, given the soporific state of our mainstream media – particularly on sensitive issues like these – their silence is nothing new, although it does seem to have gotten even worse in recent years.
The late William Colby, CIA director from 1973 to 1976, has been quoted as saying: “The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” Whether or not Colby was quoted correctly, the experience of the past several decades suggests it is largely true. Better sourced is a quote from William Casey, CIA director from 1981 to 1987: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
In these circumstances, we know from sad experience that there is no way any of us can get on any of the Sunday talk shows, for example – despite our enviable record for getting it right. Nor does it seem likely that any of the “mainstream” media will invite you to discuss the highly instructive revelations in The Guardian. We respectfully suggest that you take the initiative to obtain media exposure for this very important story.
One additional request: As you and your investigators know better than anyone, it is essential to safeguard the integrity not only of the unredacted executive summary but also of the entire 6,700-page committee report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
And, again, you are aware that as soon as Sen. Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, took the gavel from you, he took steps seemingly aimed at ensuring that the full report never sees the light of day. Could you ask him why, as soon as he became chair, he asked the executive branch to transfer their copies to the Senate Intelligence Committee?
Many interpreted that as an ill-disguised attempt to thwart holding accountable those responsible for the abuses. Moreover, if the report cannot be reviewed by those who might be asked to participate in activities like torture in the future, how is it even possible for anyone to learn from the prior unfortunate experience?
The public is entitled to the entire story about the CIA torture program and its lies to Congress, the White House, and to us. Any attempt to bury the fullest investigation of the torture program – an investigation that provides an example of Congressional oversight at its best – would undermine the democratic accountability that is supposed to be provided by the separation of powers.
Furthermore, as you were quoted in the Guardian series, the agency searches “may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function . . .”
Senator Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, was exactly on point: “You either have oversight and separation of powers with the checks and balances that come with that, or you don’t. It’s amazing that, once again, no one at the CIA was held accountable.” Consequently, the issue now is not only the cover-up of torture by the CIA but – at least equally important – the “unbridled agency that spied on Americans (including Senate Intelligence Committee staffers) as eagerly as they spied on foreign adversaries,” as the Guardian described it in referring to the Church Committee investigation in the 1970s.
Does American democracy deserve any less than an intense investigation of the CIA’s obstruction of the democratic process in the 2000s?
The Guardian revelations make it still more difficult for the kind of excuses made by those who can hardly pretend to be disinterested observers – former CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, for example – who wrote Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program, published on September 9, 2015. We published our own (VIPS) critique of “Rebuttal” five days later. And before the final vote on John Brennan’s nomination to become CIA director, we tried to warn you not to trust him.
We believe you will agree that more needs to be done to replant the moral moorings of honesty that must anchor the intelligence profession to which we have given so many years. And we think that one step in that direction would be for you to seize this new opportunity to give prominence to the edifying story of how your committee and its staffers stepped up so effectively to their responsibilities in investigating and exposing the very sad and delicate chapter of CIA torture.
The play-by-play provided by the Guardian series, with its appropriate focus on the top investigator Daniel Jones, has created an opportunity we hope will not be squandered; a chance to tell a truly uplifting story sure to encourage others to behave in similarly exemplary manner.
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Jean Maria Arrigo, PhD, member of 2005 American Psychological Association task force evaluating the role of psychologists in U.S. intelligence and military interrogations of detainees (associate VIPS)
Eugene DeFriest Betit, Ph. D., DIA, US Army (ret.)
Thomas Drake, former Senior Executive, NSA
Bogdan Dzakovic, Former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security, (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry C Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF (Ret.); ex-Master SERE Instructor for Strategic Reconnaissance Operations (NSA/DIA) and Special Mission Units (JSOC)
John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Edward Loomis, NSA, Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)
Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.) (associate VIPS)
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Near East, CIA and National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (Ret.)
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Scott Ritter, former MAJ., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel (USA, ret.), Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary (associate VIPS)
Valerie Plame Wilson, former CIA Operations Officer
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned)
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FOCUS: You Say You Won't Vote for Hillary Clinton. Can We Have a Word? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Monday, 19 September 2016 10:23 |
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Reich writes: "There are just over 7 weeks until Election Day. My request to those of you who still don't want to vote for Hillary Clinton: Please reconsider."
Robert Reich. (photo: unknown)
You Say You Won't Vote for Hillary Clinton. Can We Have a Word?
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
19 September 16
 an we have a word? I continue to hear from many of you who say you won’t vote for Hillary Clinton because, you claim, (1) she’s no better than Donald Trump, or (2) even if she’s better, she’s still corrupt, and you refuse to vote for the “lesser of two evils,” or (3) you don’t want to reward the Democratic Party for corrupt primaries that gave the nomination to Hillary instead of Bernie Sanders.
Please allow me to respond.
(1) Anyone who equates Donald Trump with Hillary Clinton hasn’t been paying attention. Trump is a dangerous, bigoted, narcissistic megalomaniac with fascist tendencies who could wreak huge damage on America and the world. Hillary isn’t perfect but she’s able and experienced. There is simply no comparison.
(2) Even if you see Hillary Clinton as the “lesser of two evils,” the greater of two evils in this case (if you see the choice in these terms) is seriously evil. You've probably had occasion in the past to vote for someone who doesn’t meet your ideals, when the alternative is someone who falls much further from those ideals. This doesn’t mean you've sold out or compromised your principles. You've just been realistic and practical. Realism and practicality are critically important now.
(3) I understand your frustration with the Democratic Party, and your reluctance to “reward” it for its bias against Bernie in the primaries. But anything you do that increases the odds of a Trump presidency isn’t just penalizing the Democratic Party; it’s jeopardizing our future and that of our children and their children. All of us must continue to work hard for a political system responsive to the needs of ordinary Americans. The movement Bernie energized must not and will not end. But Donald Trump, were he to become president, would set back the cause for decades.
There are just over 7 weeks until Election Day. My request to those of you who still don’t want to vote for Hillary Clinton: Please reconsider. It is no exaggeration to say the fate of the nation and the world are at stake.
What do you think?
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ere’s what passes for funny in a room packed full of weapons-industry executives and lobbyists: When Vice Adm. Joseph Rixey — the man in charge of the Pentagon agency that administers foreign arms sales — said “I know you don’t go after human rights violators for potential customers.”
