Prof. Juan Cole has a hypothesis about why Lebanon is being destroyed, the connection with Iran, and Peak Oil.
His article is here –
Sunday, August 06, 2006
One Ring to Rule Them
The wholesale destruction of all of Lebanon by Israel and the US Pentagon does not make any sense. Why bomb roads, roads, bridges, ports, fuel depots in Sunni and Christian areas that have nothing to do with Shiite Hizbullah in the deep south?
Prof. Cole invites people to find flaws and make comments.
He wonders if the ultimate goal is to get control of Iran and its oil, and freeze out China and India.

Posted by: Owl | Aug 6 2006 9:16 utc | 4

OK, for the record, I’ll say it now plain for everyone to see, this country was better off with Saddam.
Of course, now that it’s broken, it’s too late for this kind of conclusions, and there’s no way to fix the country and bring back a bit of sanity, safety and actual freedom without going through immense sufferings.
And concerning every single person who ever thought even for a minute that invading Iraq would be a good thing to do for the Iraqis, fuck them all. They should just enlist in the Red Cross or any other human rights and relief NGO and go to Iraq to help them, or they should have the guts to cut half their little finger like a dishonored yakusa, to make some real amend for their sin and crime.
As for comparing it to Rwanda, that’s clearly abusive. So far, I haven’t seen one side totally wiping out the other unarmed one. Both have guns and aren’t shy of using them at large.

Posted by: CluelessJoe | Aug 6 2006 9:18 utc | 6

Quote:
and there’s no way to fix the country and bring back a bit of sanity, safety and actual freedom without going through immense sufferings.
—
They are already going “through immense sufferings” and without seeing an end…Of course I am sarcastic when I say to call Saddam beck. Even that would be a good solution comparing with practically “no idea what to do” that Americans are offering…

Posted by: vbo | Aug 6 2006 9:28 utc | 8

What’s with that red underlining thing? Time to do some homework…..

Posted by: alabama | Aug 6 2006 9:32 utc | 10

Interesting: What we still don’t understand about Hizbollah

The problem is not that the Israelis have insufficient military might, but that they misunderstand the nature of the enemy.
In terms of structure and hierarchy, it is less comparable with, say, a religious cult such as the Taliban than to the multi-dimensional American civil rights movement of the 1960s.
…
Evidence of the broad nature of Hizbollah’s resistance to Israeli occupation can be seen in the identity of its suicide attackers. Hizbollah conducted a broad campaign of suicide bombings against American, French and Israeli targets from 1982 to 1986. Altogether, these attacks, which included the infamous bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, involved 41 suicide terrorists.
…
Of the 41, we identified the names, birth places and other personal data for 38. We were shocked to find that only eight were Islamic fundamentalists; 27 were from leftist political groups such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union; three were Christians, including a female secondary school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon.
…
There is not the close connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism that many people think. Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.
Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organisations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective. Most often, it is a response to foreign occupation.

Posted by: b | Aug 6 2006 9:51 utc | 12

Hizbollah conducted a broad campaign of suicide bombings against American, French and Israeli targets from 1982 to 1986
b, about the time the bombing of Lebanon commenced, an official — I think he was from the UN — made a statement that Hizbollah has not been connected with “any terrorist act in 20 years.” I have been hunting for the exact quote for a few days and can’t find it. But it appears that Hizbollah has been considered to be acting strictly in self-defense since then. People tend to confuse who is who in the area and who’s doing what to whom.

Posted by: Ensley | Aug 6 2006 12:45 utc | 14

Not sure what in the sphincter of hell happened to my first link in #15, but it should have taken you someplace like this. I think I linked to a gorram pop-up by mistake.

Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 6 2006 13:09 utc | 16

from owl’s 4 must read link
More wars to come, in this scenario, since hitting Lebanon was like hitting a politician’s bodyguard. You don’t kill a bodyguard just to kill the bodyguard. It is phase I of a bigger operation.
yep, taking out the pons

Posted by: annie | Aug 6 2006 15:51 utc | 18

Kristol Quits FoxNews for Vodka Sponsorship
Israeli PM Offers Journalist PR Job in Hebron
Thursday, August 10, 2006
CRAWFORD, Texas — API
Thoroughly disgraced National Standard editor and Fox News
commentator William Kristol threw in the towel Thursday at a
Bush Ranch tribute to the faith-based war on the Arab world.
Speaking to a insider group of oil men and arms merchants
assembled for the annual Carlyle Group barbecue, Kristol
entertained them with quips from his brief career as a pol
pablum publisher and talking head.
“There are things our faith-based Republican Patriots wanted
and things the reality-based Democrat Hizbolla-Nazis wanted,
and everybody wasn’t going to get everything that they wanted,”
Kristol said to the crowd.
Refusing to acknowledge that most of the positions he has
espoused through his magazine turned out to be fatally flawed,
based on lies, half-truths and Neo-Likud crusader messiahism,
Kristol turned to the defeat of Joe Lieberman just days before.
“Joe was Right. Joe fought the Good Fight as an agent for the
Faith-Based GOP. Joe was defeated by lies about his unwavering
support for this all-out crusade against those deluded Semites
fanatics who continue to believe in the Koran over the Torah.”
However, when the assembled businessmen began to hiss
under their breaths, Kristol seemed to lose his steam, and his
knees wobbled noticeably.
He admitted, “I haven’t always been entirely accurate (hiss), and
my utterings more often than not were pulled out of Knisset’s ass
(hiss) instead of thoroughly researched on the ground (boo).
Therefore, effective today, on the anniversary of Hiroshima, another
great disaster for the civilized world, I am stepping down as editor
of the National Standard, and Fox News commentator, for a position
in private industry.”
Insiders at Fox News revealed the bleary-eyed joker-smiling Kristol
has accepted a position as spokesman for Kristal Vodka, hoping
the panache of a high-end cocktail, and the deep pockets of the
booze industry, will keep his face in the media limelight.
Osobaya Marketing Group acknowledged in a one-paragraph press
release that Kristol was approached with a sponsor contract offer,
but there were still on-going negotiations whether he would appear
on camera in the vodka ads, or merely lend his voice-over.
“There will likely be some contract skirmishes, we understand
he can be somewhat of an overt media whore.”
Israeli Prime Minister and Likudnik Olmert, on hearing the resignation
announcement, immediately issued a press release offering Kristol
a position alongside Ari Fleischer, as a high-paid spokesman and
lobbyist for the AIPAC in Washington DC. However, there has yet to be
confirmation from Kristol’s PR director whether he will accept the offer.
“Mr. Kristol will be taking a much needed vacation in the Hamptons,
while he decides how to re-direct his career towards the future,
one entirely outside of politics which has been so unkind to him.”

Posted by: Peristroika Shalom | Aug 6 2006 16:38 utc | 20

What gets me these days are the fact that real news broadcasts from the usual suspects are straight from Onion.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 6 2006 16:57 utc | 22

sorry for double post

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 6 2006 17:05 utc | 24

Written back in 2001(!)
– –
Global Eye — Dark Passage
By Chris Floyd
Not since “Mein Kampf” has a geopolitical punch been so blatantly telegraphed, years ahead of the blow.
Adolf Hitler clearly spelled out his plans to destroy the Jews and launch wars of conquest to secure German domination of world affairs in his 1925 book, long before he ever assumed power. Despite the zigzags of rhetoric he later employed, the various PR spins and temporary justifications offered for this or that particular policy, any attentive reader of his vile regurgitation could have divined his intentions as he drove his country — and the world — to murderous upheaval.
Similarly — in method, if not entirely in substance — the Bush Regime’s foreign policy is also being carried out according to a strict blueprint written years ago, then renewed a few months before the Regime was installed in power by the judicial coup of December 2000.
The first version, mentioned in passing here last week, was drafted by a team operating under then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1992. It set out a new doctrine for U.S. power in the 21st century, an aggressive, unilateral approach that would secure American domination of world affairs — “by force if necessary,” as one of the acolytes put it.
When the Dominators were temporarily ousted from government after 1992, they continued their strategic planning with funding from the military-energy-security apparatus and right-wing foundations. This culminated in a new group, the aptly-named Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Members included hard-right players like Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad (now “special envoy” to the satrapy of Afghanistan) and other empire aspirants currently perched in the upper reaches of government power.
In September 2000, PNAC updated the original Cheney plan in a published report, “Strengthening America’s Defenses.” In this and related documents, the earlier precepts were reiterated and refined. The plans called for unprecedented hikes in military spending, the plantation of American bases in Central Asia and the Middle East, the toppling of recalcitrant regimes, the militarization of outer space, the abrogation of international treaties, the willingness to use nuclear weapons and control of the world’s energy resources.
And the present course of action was clearly set forth: “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”
But Iraq is just a stepping stone. Iran is next — indeed, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the PNAC team say that Iran is “perhaps a far greater threat” to U.S. oil hegemony. Other nations will follow, including Russia and China. In one way or another — by military means or economic dominance, by conquest, alliance or silent acquiescence — they must all be brought to heel, forcibly prevented from “challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
These texts spring from the Dominators’ quasi-religious cult of “American exceptionalism,” the belief in the unique and utter goodness of the American soul — embodied chiefly by the nation’s moneyed elite, of course — and the irredeemable, metaphysical evil of all those who would oppose or criticize the elite’s righteous (and conveniently self-serving) policies.
Anyone still “puzzled” over the Bush Regime’s behavior need only look to these documents for enlightenment. They have long been available to the media — which accepted Bush’s transparent campaign lies about a “more humble foreign policy” at face value — but have only now started attracting wider notice, in the New Yorker magazine this spring, and this week in the Glasgow Sunday Herald.
The documents explain America’s relentless march across Afghanistan, Central Asia and soon into the Middle East. They explain the Bush Regime’s otherwise unfathomable rejection of international law, its fanatical devotion to so-called missile defense, its gargantuan increases in military spending — even its antediluvian energy policy, which mandates the continued primacy of oil and gas in the world economy. (They can’t conquer the sun or monopolize the wind, so there’s no profit, no leverage for personal gain and geopolitical power in pursuing viable alternatives to oil.) The Sept. 11 attacks gave the Regime a pretext for greatly accelerating this published program of global dominance, but they would have pursued it in any case.
So there will be war: either soon, after the November mid-term elections, or — in the unlikely event that Iraq’s offer of inspections is accepted — then later, after some “provocation” or “obstruction,” no doubt in good time before the 2004 presidential vote. The purse-lipped rhetoric about “liberation” and “moral clarity” is just so much desert sand being thrown in our eyes. Backstage, the Bush Regime is playing Mafia-style hardball, warning reluctant allies to get on board now or else miss out on their cut of the loot when America — not a “democratic Iraq” — divvies up Saddam’s oil fields: a shakedown detailed this week by the Economist, among many others.
The Dominators dream of empire. Not only will it extend their temporal power, they believe it will also give them immortality. One of their chief gurus, Reaganite firebreather Michael Ledeen, says that if the Dominators reject “clever diplomacy” and “just wage total war” to subjugate the Middle East, “our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” This madness, this bin Laden-like megalomania, is now driving the hijacked American republic — and the world — to murderous upheaval.
It’s all there in the text, set down in black and white.
Read it and weep.
“Bush Planned Iraq ‘Regime Change’ Before Becoming President,”
Glasgow Sunday Herald, Sept. 15, 2002
“Foreign Policy Blueprint,”
TomPaine.com, March 2002
“US and the Triumph of Unilateralism,”
Asia Times, Sept. 10, 2002
“George Bush and the World,”
New York Review of Books, Sept. 26, 2002 issue
“The Next World Order,”
The New Yorker, March 25, 2002
“Saddam in the Crosshairs,”
Village Voice, Nov. 21-27, 2001
“Rebuilding America’s Defenses,”
Project for a New Century, September 2000
“Statement of Principles,”
Project for a New American Century, June 3, 1997
“Fortunes of war await Bush’s circle after attacks on Iraq,”
The Independent (UK), Sept. 15, 2002
“Don’t Mention the O-Word,”
The Economist, Sept. 12, 2002
“Backing on Iraq? Let’s Make a Deal,”
Los Angeles Times, Sept. 13, 2002
“In Iraqi War Scenario, Oil is a Key Issue,”
Washington Post, Sept. 15, 2002
“Cronies in Arms,”
New York Times, Sept. 17, 2002
Questions That Won’t Be Asked About Iraq,”
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, Republican, Texas, Sept. 10, 2002
Bombs Will Deepen Iraq’s Nightmare: An Iraqi Dissident Speaks,”
The Guardian, Sept. 17, 2002
Looking War in the Face,”
Boston Globe, Sept. 10, 2002
“Iraqgate,”
Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 1993

Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 6 2006 17:16 utc | 26

on Juan Cole, posted by Owl:
Everything going on in the ME we see today is part of the Great Game, the fight for the life blood of First-World Nations. So Cole’s posting of a European (and rather naive) screed on this issue is welcome – I won’t go into details, prefer to add.
First-world nations cannot continue to be first-world without control of fossil resources. Green energy, renewables, self-sustaining communities, and so on, are not all crazy, but not realistic on a large scale. The US DoD is the biggest guzzler, to the tune that would astonish so badly I prefer to leave it aside.
Peak Oil (the point at which half the oil in the world has been extracted) has become a mythical event, a shadowy symbolic point, that can be situated in time yesterday (Deffeyes) or projected into the future – say 2020, typical of oil company’s projections.
In any case, it is felt, then there is still half to go, technotopia will provide for the rich with their labs and scientists – the poor can die. Everything can continue as usual.
Not so, on various counts. Consider:
Oil is used to do work for people – make plastics, medecines, fertiliser; run tractors, fuel jets, power cars and tankers, heat and cool homes and industrial locales; build or make – barrages, roads, rail, solar panels, irrigation systems, computers, hydro-electridc plants, entire new towns; grow, harvest, condition, package and distribute food; produce arms, wage war.
And more.
Almost none of it is used for the environment or other living organisms, except those humans want to harvest or slaughter.
Therefore, it is proper to consider the oil peak not in absolute terms but in per capita terms. Each of us in the West has about 20 to 50 slaves (in human energy terms) working for us each day. Think of pushing a car to work, doing all the laundry by hand, building your home with man power only, and eating off a plantation without any agricultural machines.
Peak oil is long behind us. It took place around 1980.
What about electricity, natural gas, nuclear power, coal, renewables, etc.? Surely oil is not the only energy! And think of all the technological developments since 1980 – cheaper solar panels!
Fair enough. Sadly, peak overall energy, per capita, hit in – 1979.
Duncan paper on die-off:
This paper is a standard classic; not contested in its essence, obviously all numbers can be quarreled with, and are.
Link
So far, the first world has managed to maintain its domination and control, by obscuring the real issues. The US has been slow to react, partly because of its ‘democratic’ structure, which explains the neo-con authoritarianism, in part.

Posted by: Noirette | Aug 6 2006 17:41 utc | 28

I really didn’t get the impression that the smear was directed at Gore so much as it is an attempt to virally generate an anti-global warming meme.
oh, i don’t know about that. that image was pretty damning. believe me they are very worried about a gore run. from the alabama’s #9 front page wapo link

A victory by businessman Ned Lamont on Tuesday would confirm the growing strength of the grass-roots and Internet activists who first emerged in Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Driven by intense anger at President Bush and fierce opposition to the Iraq war, they are on the brink of claiming their most significant political triumph, one that will reverberate far beyond the borders here if Lieberman loses.
The passion and energy fueling the antiwar challenge to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman in Connecticut\’s Senate primary signal a power shift inside the Democratic Party that could reshape the politics of national security and dramatically alter the battle for the party\’s 2008…’
An upset by Lamont would affect the political calculations of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who like Lieberman supported giving Bush authority to wage the Iraq war, and could excite interest in a comeback by former vice president Al Gore, who warned in 2002 that the war could be a grave strategic error. For at least the next year, any Democrat hoping to play on the 2008 stage would need to reckon with the implications of Lieberman’s repudiation.
global warming is boring, gore’s boring, hypnotic imagery, they are starting early.
gore is their worst possible outcome. worst ever.

Posted by: annie | Aug 6 2006 18:16 utc | 30

uncle $cam
james jesus angleton was a rare bird – who did so much damage to american counter intelligence that man have thought he was a kgb mole
at the end of his life – the number of people he considered were kgb was impressionant – nearly every director of cia except donovan & helms, he thought a number of u s presidents were effectively influenced by kgb, at one moment it was sd he was involved in the death of bevin & he accused the greater part of the labor party in brtain to be kgb or agents of influence, all the prime ministers of france, their secret service a branch office of kgb – on & on & on & on
he believed in the fullness of his heart that everything from the huingarian uprising ot the sino soviet schism was make believe – waiting for the west to succumb
mr angleton took paranoia to a level most psychiatry couldn’t get close

Posted by: r’giap | Aug 6 2006 18:35 utc | 32

There are a lot of truths that corporate media is hiding or disassembling. One is Peak Oil. Yet, most would agree that the USA wouldn’t give a damn about the Middle East except for oil and religion.
The argument is that in the downward slope oil is fungible. Neo-Cons and Oil Men must not believe this if they are arguing for regime change in Tehran. Rational opponents would argue that the cost of millions of overweight American boys killing Revolutionary Guards in the rubble of Damascus and Tehran is too dear.
Yet, corporate media is pointing the Oil Men’s way. New York times had several articles on millions of men in the USA unemployed because they can’t get the wages to survive and are still single into middle age because women have scorned them because they are unable to afford their offspring. How much better for them to die in Arabia?
The only counter argument is that knowledge is not energy intensive. As long as schools survive the die off, I doubt that the stone age will return. Only energy disappears into entropy. Metals survive. Mankind will always be able to recycle and farm as long as they have the knowledge and a nuclear exchange was avoided.

Posted by: Jim S | Aug 6 2006 19:06 utc | 34

I’m not trying to be a Reductionist or confuse things, but more good reading on Peak Oil.
This from Michael Meacher, Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton. He was Environment Minister from 1997 to 2003.

Posted by: Rick Happ | Aug 7 2006 5:59 utc | 36

Major oil field discoveries fell to zero for the first time in 2003. Worse still, the excess capacity held by Opec nations has dwindled, from an average of 30pc to about 1pc of global demand now.
Two different reasons: one physical, the other primarily political.
If we were not at war with Iraq, and we respected people’s rights in Nigeria, excess capacity would be much higher, maybe 15%.
The industry would consolidate to 2-4 competitors before we hit peak. That it hasn’t yet, is probably the strongest case that we are not there.

Posted by: Malooga | Aug 7 2006 6:21 utc | 38

In Afghanistan, a Crackdown on Imported Pleasures

In recent weeks, the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai has moved aggressively to crack down on what Afghans call imported vices. He is acting partly in response to pressure from domestic religious leaders and partly to upstage Islamic Taliban insurgents who are stepping up attacks across the south.
Police in this capital of 4 million, which is also home to several thousand foreigners, have raided about a dozen restaurants and shops suspected of selling alcohol to Afghans and have seized and destroyed thousands of bottles. Officers have detained more than 100 Chinese women as suspected prostitutes, seven of whom were deported at the airport here Wednesday.
The cabinet also approved reviving the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice, a body that Afghan governments have maintained through much of the country’s history. It became notoriously punitive under Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001, when turbaned enforcers whipped women if their veils slipped and arrested men for wearing too-short beards or playing chess.
The proposal, which must be ratified by parliament, has outraged human rights groups, Western-oriented Afghan leaders and Western diplomats here because of the concept’s association with the Taliban, which was ousted by a U.S. military assault in 2001 and replaced by a transitional democracy with U.N. guidance and international military and economic support.

Karzai is right to do this. Otherwise he will lose all local support. If his masters do not let him proceed with this, he will be out a year from now.

Posted by: b | Aug 7 2006 7:37 utc | 40

Declassified archives document ties between CIA and Nazis

By Andre Damon
27 July 2006
On June 6, the US national archives released some 27,000 pages of secret records documenting the CIA�s Cold War relations with former German Nazi Party members and officials.
The files reveal numerous cases of German Nazis, some clearly guilty of war crimes, receiving funds, weapons and employment from the CIA. They also demonstrate that US intelligence agencies deliberately refrained from disclosing information about the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann in order to protect Washington�s allies in the post-war West German government headed by Christian Democratic leader Konrad Adenauer.
Eichmann, who had sent millions to their deaths while coordinating the Nazis� �final solution� campaign to exterminate European Jewry, went into hiding in Buenos Aires after the fall of the Third Reich. Utilizing friendly contacts in the Catholic Church and the Peron government in Argentina, Eichmann was able to reside in the South American country for 10 years under the alias of Ricardo Klement. He was abducted in 1960 by Mossad, Israel�s foreign intelligence agency, put on trial in Israel and executed in 1962.
The documents show that the CIA was in possession of Eichmann�s pseudonym two years before the Mossad raid. The CIA received this information in 1958 from the West German government, which learned of Eichmann�s alias in 1952. Both the CIA and the Bonn government chose not to disclose this information to Israel because they were concerned that Eichmann might reveal the identities of Nazi war criminals holding high office in the West German government, particularly Adenauer�s national security adviser Hans Globke.
When Eichmann was finally brought to trial, the US government used all available means to protect its West German allies from what he might reveal. According to the declassified documents, the CIA pressured Life magazine into deleting references to Globke in portions of Eichmann�s memoirs that it chose to publish.
In addition to the revelations regarding Eichmann, the documents chronicle the CIA�s creation of �stay-behind� intelligence networks in southwestern Germany and Berlin, labeled �Kibitz� and �Pastime,� respectively. The Kibitz ring involved several former SS members. In the early 1950s, the CIA provided these groups with money, communications equipment and ammunition so that they could serve as intelligence assets in the event of a Soviet invasion of West Germany.
The CIA documents were reviewed by Timothy Naftali, a historian with the National Archives Interagency Working Group, the government body that oversaw their declassification and release. According to an article published by Naftali, the stay-behind program was dissolved �in the wake of public concerns in West Germany about the resurgence of Neo-Nazi Groups.� Specifically, the Kibitz-15 group, led by an �unreconstructed Nazi,� became a potential source of public embarrassment for the US, as its members were broadly involved in Neo-Nazi activity. [1]
The CIA terminated the program by 1955 and arranged for many of its contacts to be resettled in Canada and Australia. According to the documents, Australia provided funds for relocation while the CIA provided its ex-assets with a resettlement bonus.
The CIA employed Gustav Hilger, a former adviser to Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. As an employee of the German foreign office, Hilger was present at the negotiation of the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939. The CIA deemed his experience with the USSR sufficiently valuable to free him from incarceration at Fort Meade in Maryland and employ him as an intelligence evaluator in West Germany.
In 1948, Hilger moved to the United States and obtained a position at the CIA�s K Street building in Washington as a researcher and expert on the USSR. Hilger eventually left the CIA to work for the West German foreign office.
According to a paper analyzing the CIA documents published by Robert Wolfe, a former senior archivist at the US National Archives, �it is beyond dispute that Hilger criminally assisted in the genocide of Italy�s Jews…. During the roundup of Italian Jews in late 1943, a note signed �Hilger� recorded Ribbentrop�s concurrence that the Italians be asked to intern the Jews in concentration camps in Northern Italy, in lieu of immediate deportation. The SS intended thereby that the Italian Jews and their potential Italian protectors should believe that internment in Italy was the final destination, rather than eventual deportation to the murder mills in Poland to be immediately murdered or gradually worked to death. The stated purpose of this ruse was to minimize the number of Italian Jews who would go into hiding to avoid deportation to Poland� [2]
In another instance, the CIA employed Tscherim Soobzokov, a former Nazi gendarme and Waffen SS lieutenant, who, according to a paper published by Interagency Working Group Director of Historical Research Richard Breitman, �participated in an execution commando [combat group detailed to executing Jews and Communists en masse] and had searched North Caucasian villages for Jews.�
Soobzokov was employed by the CIA for seven years. Over this period, he repeatedly used his intelligence contacts to avoid investigation by the FBI and the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in regard to his complicity in war crimes.
According to Breitman�s paper, CIA examiners noted that Soobzokov was an �incorrigible fabricator� who repeatedly lied about his past in order to conceal his participation in criminal activity. Nevertheless, the CIA shielded him against investigation, at one point sending the INS a document asserting that Soobzokov had never worked for the Nazis. [3]
Prior to the outbreak of war, a significant section of the American ruling elite had favored cooperation with the Nazis as a European hedge against the spread of Bolshevism. Henry Ford was notorious for his anti-Semitism and his political affinity for German Fascism, and a number of major American companies retained their business ties with the Third Reich. Notably, IBM sold Germany the punch cards that were used to catalog the �final solution. (See: How IBM helped the Nazis IBM and the Holocaust�)
However, as one European nation after another fell before Hitler�s onslaught, the threat of German imperialist dominance in Europe spurred the American ruling class to enter the European theater.
US imperialism mobilized popular support in its war against the Nazi regime by appealing to the democratic and anti-fascist sentiments of the American people. After the defeat of Germany, it organized, together with its World War II allies�Britain, the Soviet Union and France�the Nuremburg trials to prosecute top Nazi officials for their complicity in war crimes.
However, with the start of the Cold War, the United States reversed its policy of identifying, trying and executing prominent Nazi war criminals. As is starkly demonstrated in the case of Eichmann, the knowledge possessed by many of these individuals made trying them inconvenient.
Regardless of its limited prosecution of upper-echelon Nazis, the United States had no qualms about recruiting Nazi Party members and war criminals into its military research apparatus. Prominent German military developers such as Werner Von Braun and Bernhard Tessmann were assimilated into the US rocketry program, while Kurt Blome, a Nazi scientist who experimented on concentration camp prisoners, was employed by the US to develop chemical weapons.
Likewise, the early stages of the Cold War saw high-level Nazi cadres drafted into the US intelligence machine and deployed in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. According to the Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the bureau assigned to investigate German war criminals living within the US, at least 10,000 Nazis entered the US between 1948 and 1952. Of the thousands of German Nazis who fled�or were brought�to the United States, only some 100 have been prosecuted by the OSI.

Notes:
1. Timothy Naftali, �New Information on Cold War CIA Stay-Behind Operations in Germany and on the Adolf Eichmann Case http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/naftali.pdf
2. Robert Wolfe, �Gustav Hilger: From Hitler�s Foreign Office to CIA Consultant http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/wolfe.pdf
3. Richard Breitman, �Tscherim Soobzokov http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/breitman.pdf
I just discovered that if you google the title you can find an HTML cache of Carl Oglesby’s essay “The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt.” It’s also collected in a book, not seen by me, Fleshing Out Skull & Bone

It makes a strong case for the importance of the CIA-Nazi connection. I’m quoting it at length, to suggest the basic outline in the author’s own words (footnotes omitted), but there’s a lot more in the original. It’s definitely worth reading in full.
Quote:
Hitler continued to rant of victory, but after Germany’s massive defeat in the battle of Stalingrad in mid-January 1943, the realists of the German General Staff (OKW) were all agreed that their game was lost. […] Apparently inspired by the Soviet victory, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced at Casablanca, on January 24, 1943, their demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender and the complete de-Nazification of Europe. Within the German general staff two competing groups formed around the question of what to do: one led by Heinrich Himmler, the other by Martin Bormann.
…But Martin Bormann, who was even more powerful than Himmler, did not accept the premise of the separate-peace idea. Bormann was an intimate of Hitler’s, the deputy fuhrer and the head of the Nazi Party, thus superior to Himmler in rank. Bormann wielded additional power as Hitler’s link to the industrial and financial cartels that ran the Nazi economy and was particularly close to Hermann Schmitz, chief executive of I.G. Farben, the giant chemical firm that was Nazi Germany’s greatest industrial power. With the support of Schmitz, Bormann rejected Himmler’s separate-peace strategy on the ground that it was far too optimistic. The Allied military advantage was too great, Bormann believed, for Roosevelt to be talked into a separate peace. Roosevelt, after all, had taken the lead in proclaiming the Allies’ demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender and total de-Nazification. Bormann reasoned, rather, that the Nazi’s best hope of surviving military defeat lay within their own resources, chief of which was the cohesion of tens of thousands of SS men for whom the prospect of surrender could offer only the gallows.
[…]
An enormous amount of Nazi treasure had to be moved out of Europe and made safe. This treasure was apparently divided into several caches, of which the one at the Reichsbank in Berlin included almost three tons of gold (much of it the so-called tooth-gold from the slaughter camps) as well as silver, platinum, tens of thousands of carats of precious stones, and perhaps a billion dollars in various currencies. There were industrial assets to be expatriated, including large tonnages of specialty steel and certain industrial machinery as well as blue-prints critical to the domination of certain areas of manufacturing.
Key Nazi companies needed to be relicensed outside Germany in order to escape the reach of war-reparations claims. And tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, almost all of them members of the SS, needed help to escape Germany and safely regroup in foreign colonies capable of providing security and livelihoods. For help with the first three of these tasks, Bormann convened a secret meeting of key German industrialists on August 10, 1944, at the Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg. One part of the minutes of this meeting states:
The [Nazi] Party is ready to supply large amounts of money to those industrialists who contribute to the post-war organization abroad. In return, the Party demands all financial reserves which have already been transferred abroad or may later be transferred, so that after the defeat a strong new Reich can be built.
The Nazi expert in this area was Hitler’s one-time financial genius and Minister of the Economy, Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, available to Bormann even though he was in prison on suspicion of involvement in the anti-Hitler coup of 1944. According to a U.S. Treasury Department report of 1945, at least 750 enterprises financed by the Nazi Party had been set up outside Germany by the end of the war. These firms were capable of generating an annual income of approximately $30 million, all of it available to Nazi causes. It was Schacht’s ability to finesse the legalities of licensing and ownership that brought this situation about. Organizing the physical removal of the Nazis’ material assets and the escape of SS personnel were the tasks of the hulking Otto Skorzeny, simultaneously an officer of the SS, the Gestapo and the Waffen SS as well as Hitler’s “favorite commando.” Skorzeny worked closely with Bormann and Schacht in transporting the Nazi assets to safety outside Europe and in creating a network of SS escape routes (“rat lines”) that led from all over Germany to the Bavarian city of Memmingen, then to Rome, then by sea to a number of Nazi retreat colonies set up in the global south.

much much more, at the link however, I didn’t want to take up more bangwith than I have…
One last thing, I posted about Carl Oglesby here …

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 7 2006 9:55 utc | 42

India Bans Arab TV Channels Under Pressure From Israel
BOMBAY, 6 August 2006 � In a country widely referred to as the world�s largest democracy, the Indian government has succumbed to mounting Israeli pressure and ordered a nationwide ban on the broadcast of Arab television channels.
guess who made that happen? US/Indian deal on nuclear power anyone?

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 7 2006 10:58 utc | 44

Mexico’s Electoral Tribunal Orders Partial Recount to Begin on Wednesday

Posted by: Malooga | Aug 7 2006 12:47 utc | 46

This should be a big story if it can be proven:

KURTZ: All right, Matthew Chance, stand by, thank you for that report. We will come back to you.
And joining us now here Washington Anne Compton who covers the White House for ABC News, and Thomas Ricks, Pentagon reporter for “The Washington Post” and author of the new book “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.”
Tom Ricks, you’ve covered a number of military conflicts, including Iraq, as I just mentioned. Is civilian casualties increasingly going to be a major media issue? In conflicts where you don’t have two standing armies shooting at each other?
THOMAS RICKS, REPORTER, “THE WASHINGTON POST”: I think it will be. But I think civilian casualties are also part of the battlefield play for both sides here. One of the things that is going on, according to some U.S. military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they’re being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.
KURTZ: Hold on, you’re suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of it’s fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here?
RICKS: Yes, that’s what military analysts have told me.
KURTZ: That’s an extraordinary testament to the notion that having people on your own side killed actually works to your benefit in that nobody wants to see your own citizens killed but it works to your benefit in terms of the battle of perceptions here.
RICKS: Exactly. It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well.

Who are these analysts? In or out of govt? Is it possible Ricks is being set up after his book?
link

Posted by: lonesomeG | Aug 7 2006 14:49 utc | 48

Oops. Thanks b real. Here is the actual link. The copied portion is during Kurtz’ first exchange with Ricks.

Posted by: lonesomeG | Aug 7 2006 15:25 utc | 50

uncle
we don’t have to look very far – from brutal incompetence, incompetent brutality, a fascination with an axis of power & chaos & a political class so fucking stupid they have handed over whatever legislative power they might have ever possessed
there are similiarities with the hunta in greece under the colonels
if you were at rikers or marian or guantanamo – the similarity would be self evident

Posted by: r’giap | Aug 7 2006 19:03 utc | 52

More interesting news just in from ME – Lebanese govt. will send 15,000 troops to their southern border once Israeli troops withdraw. link

Posted by: jj | Aug 7 2006 21:15 utc | 54

So many threads revolving around various aspects of the same problem…
I hear ya jj, and I believe that is the only way to look at this. The thread that weaves through like a tapestry is…?

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 7 2006 21:27 utc | 56

lonesomeG :

KURTZ: That’s an extraordinary testament to the notion that having people on your own side killed actually works to your benefit in that nobody wants to see your own citizens killed but it works to your benefit in terms of the battle of perceptions here.
RICKS: Exactly. It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well.

It’s just a few more steps to 9/11. Gee Ambrose, it’s dark in here. Just keep walkin’.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Aug 8 2006 1:58 utc | 58

& some strange things in the occupied territories ;
“Parcel scare
Israel has detained about 30 MPs and a third of the Palestinian cabinet in the past six weeks.
Palestinian officials have called on the international community to intervene to secure their release.
Palestinian officials say a number of government workers have been taken to hospital in Ramallah after one of them opened a suspicious package addressed to Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya.
Palestinian deputy Prime Minister Nasser al-Shaer has accused Israel of trying to assassinate him and Mr Haniya.
Reports said the package contained an unknown substance, which caused the workers to suffer breathing difficulties and headaches.
The package was delivered to the Palestinian cabinet building in Ramallah.
Officials said it was not immediately clear who had sent it, or what the substance it contained was. ”
source :bbcnews

Posted by: r’giap | Aug 8 2006 3:10 utc | 60

2 Other Tidbits from the MUST READ ARTICLE LINKED ABOVE:
The Bush administration opposes including Social Security and Medicare in the audited deficit. Its reason: Congress can cancel or cut the retirement programs at any time, so they should not be considered a government liability for accounting purposes.
The Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, established under the first President Bush in 1990 to set federal accounting rules, is considering adding Social Security and Medicare to the government’s audited bottom line.
…
Adding those costs would make federal accounting similar to that used by corporations, state and local governments and large non-profit entities such as universities and charities. It would show the government recording enormous losses because the deficit would reflect the growing shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare.
The government would have reported nearly $40 trillion in losses since 1997 if the deterioration of Social Security and Medicare had been included, according to a USA TODAY analysis of the proposed accounting change. That’s because generally accepted accounting principles require reporting financial burdens when they are incurred, not when they come due.
START TAXING THE RICH & CORPORATIONS.
GUESS WE CAN’T AFFORD NO MO’ WARS, assholes.

Posted by: jj | Aug 8 2006 4:22 utc | 62