By Gordon Duff
27 May 2010
Gordon Duff views how Israel and its US spies have been stealing, reverse-engineering and peddling American military secrets and technology.
This week, newspapers around the world received reports and signed documents from South Africa. The reports said that, in 1975, Israel agreed to sell South Africa nuclear weapons. South Africa then released an arms agreement signed by current Israeli President Shimon Peres. This is the document “heard round the world.”
Meetings are being held in New York to set up a conference for 2012 to guarantee that the Middle East is nuclear free. Israel has been informed that it will not be able to hide behind denials and that the nuclear arsenal put on the sale block by Israel in 1975 – and nobody knows how many times since – has to go. When Israel was finally caught, it changed at least one part of a game, but the game will go on.
What does it mean? Neither South Africa nor Israel is admitting that the nukes were delivered. General beliefs are that they were, a real shock to Nelson Mandela when he took office, from prisoner of apartheid to commander of a nuclear power. What is proven by this is that Israel was, even 35 years ago, a nuclear state, in direct violation of numerous international treaties. It also proves that Israel offered nukes to South Africa, a rogue nation under sanctions that covered not only any weapons but trade as well. This made Israel a criminal state and Mr Peres a war criminal.
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More than that, it makes any aid America gives Israel illegal. If Israel is nuclear, which is now official, and in violation of international treaties, just as with Iraq and Iran, then America has to demand inspections and disarmament. There is no choice. This is the law. Law for Iran, law for Iraq is also law for Israel. Israel has expected this day for years. The US can’t give or sell arms to any country with an illegal nuclear arsenal. Worse than this, we are sworn to defend the world from any nation that would spread nuclear weapons, a charge made by the South African government, one that has been made before, but can no longer be ignored.
How did Russia get the bomb? Americans gave Russia the technologies, not just Americans but Zionists: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Morris Cohen, Martin Sobell, David Greenglass, Klaus Fuchs and Harry Gold. This was a couple of years before the establishment of the State of Israel or we would have called them all Israeli-Americans. They believed that America couldn’t be trusted and that infamous mass murderer Josef Stalin could. From this point on, spying against America, everything from secret weapons to defence plans, everything America depended on to stay safe was stolen and sold to Russia, China or North Korea by spy organizations run out of Israel.
The Rosenbergs died, executed for their crimes. They were communists and believed in what they were doing. Today this isn’t the case. America’s military secrets are being peddled around the world for money, to keep the world on edge and have built Israel into a military superpower based on stolen American technology and, we are told, a nuclear arsenal built from stolen American designs and fuelled with 2.5 tons of “misplaced” plutonium, one of the great secrets of our era.
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America’s nuclear programme, Livermore Labs, Oak Ridge, Hanford, Rocky Flats, Fernald, Pantax, Portsmouth, Mound, Pinellas, Savannah River, Sandia Labs, Los Alamos and more, needed to enrich uranium, design and fabricate nuclear weapons is vast, covering enough area to encompass some states. Tens of thousands of employees, hundreds of billions of dollars and physical facilities so large they could be seen from the moon are involved. Yet, by 1975, not only was Israel armed to the teeth with nukes, a tiny country, but had so many they could sell them on the open market like gumdrops.
The only possible answer was that America was supplying Israel with weapons-grade fissionable material, plutonium or uranium 235. A number of investigators and whistleblowers have tracked these shipments to NUMEC in Pennsylvania and to France. I have spoken with some who were involved in the investigation. No report has been made. Everyone involved has been discredited or silenced. Is it a rumour or did Israel kill the Kennedys for trying to create a “nuclear free” Middle East? As this is the only very strong motivation for the assassinations that has never been made into a movie or filmed in a TV series or documentary, I am putting my money on this. John F. Kennedy may have signed his own death warrant when he sent the final demand to Israeli President David Ben Gurion on 5 July 1963 demanding inspection of the Dimona nuclear facility. Ben Gurion resigned rather than receive the letter and before a new demand could reach Tel Aviv, Kennedy was dead.
The world is a funny place. With 95 per cent of the world’s weapons design and development being done in the US, why is it that American technologies show up in enemy hands continually? Could the long history of Israeli spying against the US be involved?
Every advanced technology given by the US to Israel is reverse-engineered and peddled to Venezuela, North Korea, China or the highest bidder. Any technology not offered is stolen. The game? Just as with peddling nukes to South Africa back in 1975, it is all about business.
The only reason Israel is on our radar is that their “games” played on the American stage with their puppet networks like Fox News and their political hacks, McCain, Lieberman, Waxman, Schumer and so many more, countless more, are ready to send a generation of American kids to war against Iran on the word of a proven liar, Israel, proven liar over peddling nukes, proven liar over settlements in Palestine, proven liar over Iraq’s nuke programme – lies told and retold by the master storytellers who daily reinvent themselves as victims.
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
27 May 2010
Israel faces unprecedented pressure to abandon its official policy of “ambiguity” on its possession of nuclear weapons as the international community meets at the United Nations in New York this week to consider banning such arsenals from the Middle East.
Israel’s equivocal stance on its atomic status was shattered by reports on Monday that it offered to sell nuclear-armed Jericho missiles to South Africa’s apartheid regime back in 1975.
The revelations are deeply embarrassing to Israel given its long-standing opposition to signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, arguing instead that it is a “responsible power” that would never misuse nuclear weapons technologies if it acquired them.
Reports of Israel’s nuclear dealings with apartheid South Africa will also energise a draft proposal from Egypt to the UN non-proliferation review conference that Israel – as the only nuclear power in the region – be required to sign the treaty.
Israeli officials are already said to be discomfited by Washington’s decision earlier this month to agree a statement with other UN Security Council members calling for the establishment of a Middle East zone free of nuclear arms.
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The policy is chiefly aimed at Iran, which is believed by the US and Israel to be secretly developing a nuclear bomb, but would also risk ensnaring Israel. The US has supported Israel’s ambiguity policy since the late 1960s.
Oversight of Israel’s programme is also due to be debated at a meeting of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna next month.
The administration of US President Barack Obama is reported to have held high-level discussions with Israel at the weekend to persuade it to consent to proposals for a 2012 conference to outlaw weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.
As pressure mounts on Israel, local analysts have been debating the benefits of maintaining the ambiguity policy, with most warning that an erosion of the principle would lead inexorably to Israel being forced to dismantle its arsenal.
Echoing the Israeli security consensus, Yossi Melman, a military intelligence correspondent for the Haaretz newspaper, also cautioned that declaring Israel’s nuclear status “would play into Iran's hands” by focusing attention on Tel Aviv rather than Tehran.
Israel refused to sign the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, having developed its first warhead a few years earlier with help from Britain and France.
Tom Segev, an Israeli historian, reported that Israel briefly considered showing its nuclear hand in 1967 when Shimon Peres, Israel’s current president, proposed publicly conducting a nuclear test to prevent the impending Six-Day War. However, the test was overruled by Levi Eshkol, the prime minister of the time.
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Mr Peres, who master-minded the nuclear programme, later formulated the policy of ambiguity, in which Israel asserts only that it will “not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East”.
That stance – and a promise not to conduct nuclear tests – was accepted by the US administration of Richard Nixon in 1969.
According to analysts, the agreement between Israel and the US was driven in part by concerns that Washington would not be able to give Israel foreign aid – today worth billions of dollars – if Israel declared itself a nuclear state but refused international supervision.
Nonetheless, revelations over the years have made it increasingly difficult for the international community to turn a blind eye to Israel’s arsenal.
Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at the Dimona nuclear energy plant in the Negev, provided photographic evidence and detailed descriptions of the country’s weapons programme in 1986. Today the Israeli arsenal is estimated at more than 200 warheads.
In 2006 Ehud Olmert, then the prime minister, let slip Israel’s nuclear status during an interview with German TV when he listed “America, France, Israel and Russia” as countries with nuclear arms.
Even more damaging confirmation was provided this week by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which published documents unearthed for a new book – The Unspoken Alliance by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, an American historian – on relations between Israel and South Africa’s apartheid regime.
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The top-secret papers reveal that in 1975 Mr Peres, then Israel’s defence minister, met with his South African counterpart, P.W. Botha, to discuss selling the regime nuclear-armed missiles. The deal fell through partly because South Africa could not afford the weapons. Pretoria later developed its own bomb, almost certainly with Israel’s help.
Israel, Mr Polakow-Suransky said, had fought to prevent declassification of the documents.
Despite publication by the Guardian of a photographed agreement bearing the date and the signatures of both Mr Peres and Mr Botha, Mr Peres’s office issued a statement on Monday [24 May] denying the report.
Israel’s increasingly transparent nuclear status is seen as an obstacle to US efforts both to impose sanctions on Iran and to damp down a wider potential nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
This month the US surprised officials in Tel Aviv by failing to keep Israel’s nuclear programme off the agenda of the IAEA’s next meeting, on 7 June. The issue has only ever been discussed twice before, in 1988 and 1991.
Aware of the growing pressure of Israel to come clean, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, declined an invitation to attend a nuclear security conference in Washington last month at which participants had threatened to question Israel about its arms.
At the meeting, US President Barack Obama called on all countries, including Israel, to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
A draft declaration being considered at the UN review conference later this week again demands that Israel – and two other states known to have nuclear weapons, India and Pakistan – sign the treaty.
Egypt has proposed that the 189 states that have signed the treaty, including the US, pledge not to transfer nuclear equipment, information, material or professional help to Israel until it does so.
Reuven Pedatzur, an Israeli defence analyst, warned recently in Haaretz that there was a danger the Egyptian proposal might be adopted by the US, or that it might be used as a stick to browbeat a recalcitrant Israel into accepting greater limitations on its arsenal. He suggested ending what he called the “ridiculous fiction” of the ambiguity policy.
Emily Landau, an arms control expert at Tel Aviv University, however, said that those who believed Israel should be more transparent were “misguided”. Ending ambiguity, she said, would eventually lead to calls for Israel’s “total and complete disarmament”.
The last Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference, five years ago, failed when the US repudiated pledges to disarm and refused to pressure Israel over its nuclear programme.
Wednesday 26 May 2010
You've got to hand it to BP. After witnessing the Great Financial Crash of 2008, it seemed like it would be decades before any corporation could eclipse Wall Street's reckless rush to place its own short-term profits ahead of the public interest. But the epic drilling disaster off the Louisiana coast demonstrates that many of the problems that wrecked Wall Street are deeply embedded in other sectors of the American economy. Over the past 30 years, corporate titans have so thoroughly corrupted the notion of "free markets" that many of the world's riskiest businesses are not only insulated from regulatory supervision, they have been immunized from even minimum standards of market discipline.
Forget for a moment that the oil catastrophe is first and foremost an ecological massacre, and forget that burning fossil fuels creates an entirely distinct set of environmental nightmares. Instead, imagine that we live in an accountants' paradise in which everything can be described by the language of dollars and cents, assets and liabilities, profit and loss. In this world, both Wall Street and the oil industry are largely protected from the risks inherent in their everyday operations, pushing real costs onto others in order to boost their own balance sheets. On Wall Street, this phenomenon is called "too-big-to-fail." After the BP disaster, we might call the energy equivalent "too-big-to-drill."
Nobody working at Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase or Citigroup seriously believes the U.S. government would ever allow their firm to fail, and the various bailouts of 2008 and 2009 proved them right. That scenario radically distorts the market, making massive and unnecessary risk-taking the rational choice for bigwig bankers. If their bets pay off, the bank books huge profits. If the bets backfire, the government will bail out the bank. Banks get to exclude very real costs from their quarterly earnings, artificially boosting their profits.
This distortion is so severe that economists call it "market failure." The market literally does not work. Instead of moving goods and services to people who want and need them, corporations simply extract profits from innocent bystanders. It is a form of theft, and the exact same scenario exists with the liability cap on offshore drilling.
We know that the economic fallout from the BP mess will move into the billions of dollars. Current estimates are around $14 billion, but it's easy to imagine that amount soaring much higher if BP fails to contain the oil gushing from the Gulf, or clean up what has already been released. But while BP is liable for the costs of cleaning up the mess, under current law, BP is only on the hook for $75 million in economic damages—losses the spill creates for other businesses. For a firm that books multi-billion profits every quarter, the economic consequences of the spill will be no more than a blip on the radar. This was not simply an accident. BP could have prevented this disaster, but instead chose to roll the dice in order to cut costs. The liability cap rewards the company for that negligence.
Let's be clear. This is an explicit, codified bailout for BP and every other company that engages in offshore drilling—a bailout every bit as disgusting as those recently bestowed upon Wall Street. The company is being shielded from the real costs of its business, and has been using artificially inflated profits to pay out princely fortunes to its top brass. Wall Street looted the housing market, converting real assets into bonuses. Now BP is looting the Gulf Coast.
There is a theory of law—a very conservative theory, at that—which actually says that BP should have to pay out much more than whatever the ultimate economic tab for the oil mess comes to. The government should amplify, rather than reduce, those costs in order to ensure that dealing out damage to innocent bystanders does not become a regular business practice. If the total cleanup tab is really $14 billion, that sum only amounts to BP's total 2009 profit. We can't have companies dealing out crazy economic and ecological damage on a regular basis, which is why Federal Judge Richard Posner, an appointee of Ronald Reagan, suggests imposing massive penalties on firms that do so.
The point here is not to argue that the way conservatives think about markets is right, but rather to note that the conservative conception offers the minimum legal framework necessary for even theoretically maintaining a functional economy. And by that standard, two of the linchpins of the American economy, finance and energy, are not even acting as markets. They are acting as parasites on the broader economy, cannibalizing other industries for their own benefit. For years we've heard politicians bloviate about the need to cut taxes and reduce costs for big corporations in the name of jobs. But the eight million jobs lost in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash and the millions more to be destroyed by BP's recklessness put the lie to these slogans. BP and Wall Street are not using their political protection to create jobs, strengthen the economy and further the public good. They're using that protection to kneecap other sectors and convert the damage to profits and bonuses.
And yet defenders of these predators still use the language of markets to defend the policies. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said that without the $75 million liability cap, smaller companies would be unable to compete with giants like BP. Sens. James Inhofe, R-Okla., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Ala., have made the same argument. President Barack Obama's Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, supports raising the liability cap, but has said $10 billion is too high because, "You don't want only the BPs of the world to be involved in these operations."
This argument is absurd. If any company--large or small--unleashes economic damage of more than $75 million, it should have to pay for it. If you are in the business of creating huge ecological risks, you should also, at minimum, be in the businesses of paying for it.
After more than a year of Republican obstruction, it's no surprise to see McConnell and his underlings resorting to whatever tactics they can to block reforms and curry favor with big corporations—nor is it a surprise to see the Obama administration caving to outrageous Republican demands after witnessing both the health care and Wall Street reform negotiations. But even for McConnell, this marks a new low. The senator from Kentucky spent months alleging that the Wall Street reform package includes hidden bailouts for Wall Street, a charge that is simply not true. Now, after sounding the alarm on a fictitious bailout, he is actively going to bat for BP's very real bailout.
BP isn't the only company getting away with murder here. Transocean, the firm that actually owns the rig BP was leasing, also has its liability capped at $65 million. If Congress or regulators do not intervene, taxpayers and other businesses are about to do Transocean a big favor, even though Transocean has done everything it can to avoid contributing to society. The Houston-based company even opened an office in Switzerland with just a dozen employees in order to dodge U.S. corporate income taxes. Transocean also had the rig insured for more than it is actually worth. With the liability cap, it's likely to actually profit from the disaster. Just in case the government decides to actually do something about this heist, the company is in a hurry to pump $1 billion in cash out to its shareholders in the form of dividends—leaving it with less money to pay out in any future lawsuits.
In practice, we need much more than a system that simply weighs costs and revenues—disasters like the Gulf oil spill and the Wall Street crash create ecological and human trauma that no accountant can aggregate. The real pain of being unemployed for years on end is not merely financial, it's the psychological toll of being unwanted and useless. Similarly, destroying an ocean is just bad in and of itself, regardless of how much it costs. Companies that can kill eight million jobs (Wall Street) or devastate an entire coastline (BP) should be prevented from doing so with strong regulations and committed, valued regulators.
An economy built around bailouts like these cannot function. It's a recipe for high long-term unemployment, sluggish growth, environmental degradation and social unrest.
Zach Carter is an economics editor at AlterNet. He writes a weekly blog on the economy for the Media Consortium and his work has appeared in the Nation, Mother Jones, the American Prospect and Salon.
Wednesday 26 May 2010
by: Eleanor J. Bader, t r u t h o u t | Book Review
Assertions by conservatives that President Obama is a socialist reveal a deep lack of knowledge about this political philosophy. (Photo: Fibonacci Blue / Flickr)
"Afterword" by Howard Zinn
Haymarket Books
$12.00, 173 pages
It’s obvious that if you repeat something often enough, in an authoritative voice, listeners will begin to believe what you say. That’s the theory behind both advertising and conservative media.
The oft-repeated barrage of verbal assaults lobbed at Barack Obama - that he’s a commie/foreigner/infidel/Nazi - confirm this. Indeed, an April 2010 CBS/NY Times poll found that 52 percent of Americans believe that the president is moving the US toward socialism, something they clearly regard as bad, and maybe even dangerous, for the US and its people. What’s more, The Huffington Post reported in February that 78 percent of Republican leaders consider the Commander in Chief to be a full-blown pinko.
That these assertions are insane - and more than a little frightening - goes without saying. But they also reveal a profound lack of knowledge about socialism, the class struggle, and theories of governance.
Alan Maass’ The Case for Socialism goes a long way in rectifying this information gap, and should be required reading in every high school and college civics class. Clearly and accessibly written, it posits socialism as a viable and necessary alternative to capitalism.
The late historian Howard Zinn, in an afterword that was originally published in The Progressive, reminds readers that in the early decades of the 20th century, a vast number of US residents were cheered by socialism’s promise. For one, more than a million people read Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper published from 1897-1922. Other left-wing publications - including The New Masses, The Labor Herald, and The Call - were similarly popular until the combined effects of the Palmer Red Raids and the country’s economic collapse drove them out of business. Zinn notes that prior to Palmer’s clampdown, “The [Socialist] Party had 100,000 members and 1200 office-holders in 340 municipalities. Socialism was especially strong in the Southwest, among tenant farmers, railroad workers, coal miners, and lumberjacks. Oklahoma had 12,000 dues-paying members in 1914 and more than one hundred socialists in local office.”
Zinn implied that if it could happen then, it could happen now. And why not?
Maass opens The Case for Socialism with a simple declaration: “Capitalism isn’t working.” Not in the US and not in other parts of the world. In fact, virtually anywhere one goes, suffering is pervasive. “Almost half the world’s population - more than three billion people, the equivalent of the population of ten United States - live on less than $2.50 a day. A billion people are undernourished and go to bed hungry each night. Two in five people around the world lack access to clean water, and one in four lacks basic electricity,” Maass reports.
Here in the US, whole communities are being decimated by evictions and foreclosures, healthcare is a shambles, and hunger and homelessness are at near-record levels. Twenty percent of children are born into poverty, and illnesses correlating with inadequate nutrition are epidemic. At the same time, Maass reports that in 2009, the world’s 793 billionaires had a combined worth of $2.4 trillion. This translates into “twice the combined gross domestic product of all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa.”
Yes, three billion human beings have fewer resources than 793 others.
“The free market system is organized in completely the wrong way for the good of meeting the needs of the largest number of people in society,” Maass continues. “Capitalism is built around organized theft - the theft of a portion of the value of what workers produce by the people who employ them.” Buttressed by out-of-whack priorities, atrocities abound:
- World governments annually spend more than $1 trillion on war. The US government’s military budget for this year is an obscene $663.8 billion;
- The US nuclear weapon’s program cost $52 billion in 2008. This is seven-and-a-half times the amount spent on Head Start pre-school programs;
- Companies like Bud Light, Coca-Cola, and Michelob spent upwards of $3 million for 30-second ad spots during the 2010 Super Bowl. This sum is more than most people will earn in a lifetime of labor.
- Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/the-case-socialism59538
