Category: News

Just to add a little to last month’s post, “Is the Pentagon Policy Shop Funding Likudist Fronts?”, on Devon Gaffney Cross’ London-based Policy Forum for International Security Affairs, Jeffrey Gedmin’s (?) Case for Freedom, and Anatol Sharansky’s OneJerusalem.org, all of which appear to have as a common denominator — and a common, Israel-based IP address — interlocking directorates, their participation at last June’s Prague Conference on Democracy and Security Conference (about which I’ve written twice, here and here) and OneJerusalem’s director, a New York-based attorney named Allen Roth, who, it turns out, is a long-time aide and adviser to Ronald Lauder. It was Lauder, a major supporter of former Israeli Prime Minister and Likud chief Binyamin Netanyahu, who reportedly gave $1 million to OneJerusalem to launch a campaign against President Bush’s Annapolis conference last fall, apparently because he feared that renewed, U.S.-backed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians could lead to a divided Jerusalem. It was also in his capacity as president of the World Jewish Congress, a post to which he was elected in 2007, that Lauder appealed in a controversial open letter to the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, not to do anything that would compromise Israeli sovereignty over the entire city.

The first thing worth noting is that both the Policy Forum and Case for Freedom websites appear to be moribund. Despite the $79,000 Pentagon grant it received last September and its new mandate to reach out beyond the elite media “to the active, curious, and engaged public” in Great Britain and Europe, the Policy Forum site — which is entitled Policy Forum for International Affairs but which refers to itself internally as Policy Forum for International Security Affairs — apparently hasn’t been updated since last June when it ran some opinion pieces on the U.S. presidential campaign.

The Case for Freedom site, which describes itself as a “dynamic community for dissidents and freedom’s advocates across the globe,” appears nearly as dead as Policy Forum’s. Its last news entry is a link to a February 26 article from the Daily Telegraph entitled “China Mounts Dissident Assault before Games.” Aside from its dynamic self-description, the inactivity on the Case for Freedom site is particularly remarkable given the fact that it was launched at Sharansky’s Prague Conference (at which Bush himself gave a high-profile address over the objections of the State Department) and the peculiar role played by Gedmin, the president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), in the launch. Indeed, ten months after the group’s founding, Gedmin’s interview of Gary Kasparov remains the featured item on the group’s home page.

Gedmin, of course, is the former director of the New Atlantic Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (which sent a five-person delegation led by Richard Perle and Michael Novak to the Prague Conference). Shortly after 9/11, in November, 2001, Gedmin became head of the Aspen Institute in Berlin where his job, according to right-wing Philanthropy Roundtable’s “National Terror Guidebook,” was to “explain key Bush administration policies (and) …challenge the more common assumptions held by Europeans about the United States.” In other words, his role was somewhat similar to that of Devon Gaffney Cross’, who began operating her Policy Forum in London in 2002. As I noted in last month’s post, Cross and Gedmin have been close colleagues for quite some time. In addition, however, I’ve been told by two sources acquainted with the Berlin office’s activities that, on taking over the office, Gedmin boasted to his new colleagues that he was bringing to his new job a $1 million grant — from Lauder’s foundation. (It’s worth noting that the Berlin office in FY 2005 was also awarded a $1.7 million grant to “bring together key policy makers, opinion leaders, NGO representatives, media, and human rights activists from the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. to discuss practical steps toward the promotion of civil society and democracy in the region” from the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative, then overseen by Liz Cheney). Among the main activities of the office under Gedmin was to bring prominent neo-conservatives and other hawks to Berlin to meet with prominent Germans.

Once again, one has to ask how much sense it makes for a prominent neo-conservative, Iraq war advocate and staunch defender, and beneficiary of Lauder’s largesse to be placed in charge of U.S. government broadcasting to Arab and Iranian audiences on issues such as U.S. policy in the Middle East and the Gulf. (Of course, another AEI alumnus, James Glassman, is chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the RFE/RL’s oversight body, and has been nominated to serve as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.) Surveys of regional opinion have consistently shown overwhelming frustration and anger with Washington’s steadfast support for Israel in its conflict with Palestinians. So why place someone in such a high-profile government post who is so clearly part of a network of individuals who are so as closely associated with Likudists like Netanyahu, Sharansky, and Lauder? Why, indeed, place someone in such a high-profile post who is so clearly part of a network that even opposes negotiations of the kind promoted by Bush himself?

Meanwhile, you’ll remember that the IP address that is home to One Jerusalem, Case for Freedom, and Policy Forum also hosts the personal blog of Caroline Glick, the hard-line deputy managing editor and columnist of the Jerusalem Post and one-time Netanyahu foreign-policy adviser. As a correspondent pointed out, Glick is also senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Frank Gaffney’s ultra-hawkish Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC, where, according to her blog, she “travels several times a year to Washington (to) … brief senior administration officials and members of Congress on issues of joint Israeli-American concern.” Gaffney, of course, is Devon Cross’ brother and a beneficiary of casino king Irving Moskowitz, although it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Lauder and Roth were also CSP contributors.

Finally, another correspondent pointed out that the mysterious Zacharias Gertler, who served with Roth as a director of Cross’s Policy Forum until last May, was credited by yet another close Netanyahu and One Jerusalem associate, former Israel Amb. Dore Gold, with being “the real force who inspired” his 2003 book, “Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism.” In Gold’s acknowledgments section, Gertler’s help and encouragement are noted directly before those of Yigal Carmon, the president and co-founder (with Meyrav Wurmser) of MEMRI, and of Allen Roth and Steven Schneier, a major Netanyahu fund-raiser who also attended the Prague conference as a representative of the Policy Forum. Gold’s writings are a frequent feature on onejerusalem.org’s website.

After an absence of a couple of weeks, ICasualties.org is coming back online.

ICasualties.org is the best source for details on US casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. They have compiled an extensive database of this information, which is sortable by state, city, time periods, rank, service, etc. They help to feed this information to Antiwar.com and much of the alternative and mainstream media.

ICasualties was recently the victim of a malicious cyber-attack which disabled their server and sent visitors to random sites. The perpetrators have not been identified. Our administrator, Michael Ewens, contacted their Webmaster, Michael White to offer advice on how to battle the attack. They expect to be getting more of their old content back up over the next several days.

It is important to resume linking to ICasualties.org to restore their previous high rankings on Google and other search engines. They do an important job and it is important to support them.

In late 2006, Congress revised the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act to make it far easier for a president to declare martial law. Those changes were repealed at the end of this January as part of Public Law 110-181 (HR 4986), the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (signed into law by President Bush on January 28, 2008).

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), who championed the opposition to the original law, was also the hero of the repeal. It helped that all the nation’s governors opposed the 2006 law.

Boise State Professor Charlotte Twight, the author of the excellent Dependent on DC, alerted me to the change last night. I checked on Nexis and the only news coverage I found regarding the repeal was a 322-word Gannett News wire story from February 1 that focused on how the repeal made governors happy.

I first wrote about the Posse/Insurrection peril for American Conservative a year ago. My most recent piece on the subject was an article for the January issue of the Future of Freedom Foundation’s (FFF) Freedom Daily. The law was changed between the time the piece was published and when FFF posted the January article online on April 9.

This morning I received a request to sign an “Economists’ Statement in Support of John McCain’s Economic Plan.” The statement laid out his plans to prevent taxes from rising, to reduce some taxes, such as the corporate income tax, to support free trade agreements, and to restrain the growth of domestic government spending. Notice something missing? I did.

Here’s the answer I sent to the co-chair, economist James Carter:

There’s nothing in there I disagree with. [I later found a few things but I agreed with the vast majority.] The problem is that it leaves out a huge part of his economic policy that will make it virtually impossible to achieve what’s in the statement. That huge part is his policy on war–with Iraq and maybe with Iran. War is very expensive and is part of an economic policy. So by signing the statement, I would be helping Senator McCain maintain the fiction that there’s no connection between war and economic policy. I’m unwilling to do that.

A couple hundred Ron Paul supporters gathered in front of the Capitol today to hear speakers organized by the Granny Warriors.

I stopped by mid afternoon. I was told by one attendee that “Ron Paul came by and spoke around 11:15. Unfortunately, the sound system was not yet working at that point.” He said he had heard Congressman Paul might return and speak again later today.

Here are some pics – (Full size versions are available at my Flickr page here)

<img src=’http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3167/2417392868_381a585e15.jpg’ alt=” class=’alignnone’ /

UPDATE 4 17 08: Some commentors have suggested that I grossly undercounted the number of attendees. I note that the front page of the http://www.dailypaul.com website continues to highlight the photo I took of the rally.(The photo is used without permission or clear attribution). This photo and other photos posted at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bovard/ indicate the crowd size.

Dick Cheney is a liar. A lousy one. He is again threatening that “al Qaeda in Iraq” (which he would have you believe is interchangeable with the “al Qaeda in Waziristan” he let escape in 2001) will take over the fertile crescent if U.S. forces withdraw. In this version, they will make so much money from control over the oil that they will somehow be a threat to us or something…

Well, last summer when Rudy Giuliani tried to pretend that al Qaeda was motivated to attack the United States due to freedom for women and to paint Rep. Ron Paul M.D. as some sort of terrorist sympathizer for stating the plain truth in the War Party’s house about Osama’s tactic of provoking a full scale invasion of Afghanistan (Iraq was a bonus) in order to bleed our empire dry and force our combat troops off of what they consider to be holy land, the Arabian peninsula – and out of the Muslim world at large – I decided to see what the experts had to say.

I came up with Ron Paul’s Reading List for the Farsighted: Interviews for Antiwar Radio with Robert A. Pape, Michael Scheuer, Chalmers Johnson, Philip Giraldi and Ray McGovern. They said Ron Paul was right and that Rudy Giuliani was ridiculous.

In particular, they addressed the fact that Osama bin Laden has every reason to be pleased that the U.S. occupies Iraq and that “al Qaeda in Iraq” (which did not exist until more than a year and a half after the invasion) was only tolerated to the degree they were while helping to fight the occupation.

(Now that the U.S. has temporarily bribed the “Sunni insurgency,” whom they’ve renamed the “Concerned Local Citizens” or “Sons of Iraq,” to stop fighting Americans and instead help fight al Qaeda, they have actually put many of the al Qaeda men on the payroll as well, according to Patrick Cockburn who told me that he saw this with his own eyes.)

Anyway, last May I asked Philip Giraldi, a former counter-terrorism officer in the CIA and columnist for Antiwar.com, whether the War Party was right in pointing to a threat of an al Qaeda takeover of Iraq in the event of U.S. withdrawal, he answered:

“No. I think the reality is that if the United States leaves it will be a very bad thing for al Qaeda because the Sunnis don’t particularly want them around and would get rid of them.”

“There have already been reports that the Sunnis are already kind of tired of them because when they stage a major provocation or attack, it’s the local Sunni population that has to take the grief when the U.S. Army descends. … It’s a marriage of convenience with al Qaeda insofar as it’s a marriage at all. So I think it would be fallacious to assume – In fact, let me [say it] stronger than that: I think it would be ridiculous to assume that al Qaeda could establish some kind of serious presence in Iraq similar to what it did in Afghanistan because the dynamic is completely different.”

If Dick Cheney’s militia can’t take over the place, how are we supposed to believe that a ragtag group of Egyptians, Lybians and Saudis can?

(I first debunked this nonsense for Antiwar.com back in 2005.)

Thanks to Anders, A UK blogger and Stress regular, who created this short Youtube to help drive the point home.