Chanukah is a Jewish “Fourth of July” and a most Zionist holiday. that was the only reference I found by putting to google the task “A Jewish Fourth of July” “The Jewish Week” - this even though the paper had such an article in its July 3, 2009 issue. That was quite a pitty because the column under Jewish Intelligence - Jinsider was actually very good.

The missing column was by Jinsider legal intern Zack Eisner and Rabbi Simon Jacobson and should have been available also at www.meaningfullife.com - but was not.

It starts by saying that though the Founding Fathers doid not go to Hebrew School, nevertheless Jewish wisdom can be found in the Declaration of Independence and in the US Constitution - and then goes through the following four points:

Unalienable Human Rights via “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.” That is clearly based on the Torah saying that all human beings are created in the image of God and are equal as persons - so it would also imply equality between men and women.

Faith via the Declaration of Independence and the First Commandment implying there is a creator even when going after the separation of church and state.

Justice via the 15th Amendment calling for due process of law, and the scriptures: “Hear both small and great alike. Do not be afraid of man for judgement belongs to God.”

Free Speech via the 1st Amendment, and in the scriptures the greatest men and women of faith spoke out and even challenged God.

We liked that column as it shows how the paper is moving away from self-centerd positions to issues of general interest by linking to the American society at large. This being stressed further in this week’s editorial dealing for the first time with the issue of Climate Change and a very good editorial it was indeed.

 ———-

First Step On Climate Change

The Jewish Week, by The Editor, July 3, 2009

Climate change is a difficult issue to grasp. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that the planet is warming and that the emission of greenhouse gases are a cause, but it’s hard to identify the milestones of these changes in our everyday lives.

Seriously addressing climate change will require sacrifices from all of us, never a popular notion with politicians in our democracy. And there are too many vested interests determined to fight any real attempt to reverse climate change before it is too late.

That’s why last week’s House passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act was such a landmark. The legislation is hardly comprehensive, and passage in the Senate is by no means assured, but it represents the first  real attempt by political leaders to deal with the root causes of climate change. Perhaps more importantly, it is an important first step in altering a national mindset that puts today’s economic comfort ahead of the planet’s future.

We are pleased to note that several Jewish groups, led by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, were active players in the fight for passage. The Orthodox Union played a role in ensuring that religious groups would get a share of the funding for environmental upgrades.

Addressing the crisis in a practical but aggressive fashion is crucial to giving future generations a chance for the security and prosperity we have enjoyed in our lifetimes. It is related to the essential drive for energy independence that will greatly affect Israel’s as well as our own nation’s future. It is a matter of social justice, since the world’s poor are being more adversely affected by the early consequences of climate change. And time is running out, many scientists warn, with the potential costs of inaction reaching genuinely perilous levels.

“We have only been given one world to live in and for too long humanity has not done its part to ‘till and tend’ the earth for future generations,” said JCPA president Rabbi Steve Gutow. “We must do a better job in reducing air pollution, cleaning up rivers and streams, and protecting the wilderness. Congress’ vote to move forward with the climate bill was a good first step.”

We agree. {Concludes Gary Rosenblatt - The Editor}

———–

Furthermore, this week’s Middle East political topics take into account Mr. Sarkozy encouraging Mr. Netanyahu to make changes in his government by returning Tzipi Livni to the office of Foreign Minister, which would mean replacing the Avigdor Lieberman party with Kadima in his governing coalition. There are reports on the Ehud Barak-George Mitchell meeting in New York, and on the ways the Obama Administration might figure its near future moves in the Middle East - these presentations - obviously with Israel at heart - are nevertheless seen from an angle that says what is best for the US.

———

So why are we excited?

For years (at least for the last eight years) The Jewish Week, like the Israeli government, had all its eggs in the Washington Administration basket when it came to questions of climate change/global warming as they were interrelated with a Washington sold all to the oil interests - and the Jewish lobby like the Israeli government, thought that it would serve them best by being on the side of oil and not stir the pot.

The climate change article/editorial is not just a first in Washington’s acceptance of a pro-climate bill,  but a first article of this kind in The Jewish Week - sort of an independence of having to look over the shoulder at what the oil lobby - Jewish and otherwise - wants them not to say. we would like to hope that now Jewish organizations will find that basically all what the scientists and the ethicists are saying on environment in general, and on climate change in particular, has been put in the scriptures a long time ago. The Torah asks us to take care of God’s creation - not just to get funded from stimulus money!

It boggles our mind how all these years the Jewish lobby, and the State of Israel as well, did not speak up on the issue of making the world less addicted to oil - there is no state on the planet that had actually more interest then Israel in reducing this addiction of the world economy to petroleum. We understood the politics and why they kept away from it - so this issue of The Jewish Week marks to us not just Amerca’s Independence Day - but you bet - the independence of the Israeli people as well, and we hope they will now start looking at what Israeli governing coalition would serve their interests best.

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Having said the above, for some sort of balance, I want to add what “The Week” of July 3-10, 2009 quotes from Tony Judt, Professor at NYU and usually viewed as unfriendly to Israel, who wrote those things for The New York Times.

He says: Every Mideast peace plan presumes that Israel will have to disband its settlements in the West Bank,  but there is just one catch understood in Israel but not in Washington: “The settlements will never go.”

He proceeds and tells us that with 500,000 residents in those settlements, or 10% of the Jewish inhabitants of all of Israel, and with Maale Adumim now at 35,ooo and taking in more land than Manhattan, simply put, Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu will never dismantle them - so he asks - why does Washington pretend otherwise?

What above says is that a new start is neded for the handling of the Middle East negotiations - the building of a future by starting with negotiated final borders, and interestingly, it was the President of Arab-Americans who suggested recently that in order to allow for a start of negotiations - vertical increase of settlements could be acceptable for the time being, but not further horizontal structures.

 

The Japan Times, Saturday, July 4, 2009

Amano signals goal is to fight proliferation

By GEORGE JAHN
VIENNA (AP) The International Atomic Energy Agency picked Yukiya Amano as its next chief, ending a months-long succession battle to replace Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei for the watchdog’s top post.

After the agency’s 35-nation board made its decision Thursday, Amano touched on the devastation that U.S. atomic bombs wreaked on his country in pledging to do his utmost to prevent the spread of nuclear arms.

ElBaradei saw his agency vaulted into prominence during a high-profile 12-year tenure.

North Korea left the nonproliferation fold to develop a nuclear weapons program on his watch, and his agency later launched probes to get to the bottom of suspicions it was trying to make atomic weapons.

ElBaradei’s activist approach often rankled Washington, which had a strong preference for Amano, who was viewed by the United States as a technocrat amenable to pursuing a hard line on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Amano’s allusions to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pointed to a deep commitment to nonproliferation. And Japan keenly shares the U.S. concerns about Pyongyang’s nuclear threat.

Developing countries supported Amano’s rival, South African Abdul Samad Minty, who was considered ready to challenge the U.S. and the other nuclear powers on issues such as disarmament. They are generally supportive of Iran’s claims to having a right to nuclear power.

An initial session in March ended inconclusively, and Thursday’s meeting went down to the wire, with Amano, 62, winning only in the fourth round.

That and the fact that Amano barely eked out his victory, just clearing the required two-thirds majority, reflected a continuing divide between the two camps. The divisions have served as an obstacle in one of its key tasks — probing nations suspected of secret, possibly weapons-related, nuclear activities.

While Amano was born after the U.S. nuclear strikes that ravaged Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, he alluded to those events in brief comments to reporters, suggesting that as a “national coming from Japan” he would work particularly hard to reduce the threat from atomic arms.

Expanding on that theme in recent comments to Austrian daily Die Presse, he said he was “resolute in opposing the spread of nuclear arms because I am from a country that experienced Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Now his country’s chief delegate to the IAEA, Amano was previously his country’s senior official for disarmament and related issues.

Amano will be taking control of the IAEA at a particularly difficult time. Its nuclear investigations of Iran and Syria are both deadlocked, and it has no overview of North Korea, which is forging ahead with its nuclear arms program.

———–

Saturday, July 4, 2009

VIENNA (Kyodo) Amano was voted in as first Asian head of IAEA in sixth round of ballots.  Yukiya Amano, Japan’s ambassador to the Permanent Mission to the International Organizations in Vienna, was elected the next director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Thursday.

Yukiya Amano

Amano, 62, won against South Africa’s Abdul Samad Minty after six rounds of voting, making him the first IAEA chief from Asia.

“I am very pleased with this support,” Amano told journalists after the final vote, adding that as the next director general he will do his utmost to enhance the welfare of human beings, ensure sustainable development through the peaceful use of nuclear energy and try to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

“For that, the solidarity of all the member states, countries from North and South, from East and West, is absolutely necessary,” he said.

Amano also said he will demonstrate Japan’s efforts to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

He will take the helm at the nuclear watchdog in December, after formal approval at its annual general meeting in September.

Challenges facing him after taking up the post will be the Iranian nuclear issue and the nuclear threat of North Korea, which conducted a second nuclear test recently.

Luis Echavarri from Spain dropped out of the voting process after the first round as he garnered the fewest votes.

Neither Amano nor Minty could secure enough votes in each of the four following rounds to achieve the necessary two-thirds majority, with Amano falling just one vote short.

However, in the sixth round, which was a straight yes and no vote on Amano, he finally managed to get a two-thirds majority, with 23 countries voting in favor and 11 voting against. One of the 35 countries eligible to vote abstained.

Thursday’s balloting was the second attempt to find a successor to Mohamed ElBaradei, who will leave office after 12 years at the head of the organization when his term expires in November.

Amano, who is married and speaks English and French fluently, joined the Foreign Ministry in 1972 and was appointed deputy director of its Disarmament Division in 1982.

He held several different positions in the ministry, including director of the Nuclear Energy Division and director general for the Disarmament, Nonproliferation and Science Department, before being appointed to represent Japan at the International Organizations in Vienna in 2005.

Japan backing was vital: The government was quick Friday to pledge full support to newly elected International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano, and may also make a financial endowment to the nuclear watchdog.

Israel struggles to adapt to a changing picture of Iran.
By Philip Stephens
The Financial Times July 2 2009

No one watches events in Iran more closely than Israel. Tehran has long been the abiding preoccupation, some would say obsession of political discourse in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Now the story line has changed.

At first glance the violent repression deployed by Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s regime in the wake of last month’s presidential election has been grist to the mill. The images of beaten and bloodied demonstrators have described vividly to a global audience Israel’s long-held view of the Iranian theocracy. Yet the implications do not all run in the same direction. The apparent fixing of the poll result and the subsequent crushing of dissent has also made the case for more rather than less engagement by the west.

Before one or two of my regular correspondents of a neo-conservative leaning accuse me of going soft on an authoritarian Islamist regime with nuclear ambitions, I should say that this point was made to me this week in Tel Aviv by a shrewd member of the Israeli diplomatic establishment and sometime adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – no friend of the ayatollahs, in other words.

The reaction of western governments to Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s determination to remain in power suggests a different course. The Group of Eight rich nations has issued a strong – by diplomatic standards – denunciation of violence against demonstrators. I am sure I was not alone in seeing a certain irony in Russia’s signature on a document affirming individual liberties. That aside, the condemnations of the suppression of peaceful protest – including those of the European Union and the US administration – were surely right in their rejection of Tehran’s flimsy efforts to blame the west for the flowering of Iranian democracy.

Mir-Hossein Moussavi, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s opponent, was not offering the radical departure in Iranian politics that some Republicans in Washington have chosen to imagine. The presidential contest was a power struggle within Iran’s revolutionary family.

That said, the popular reaction to the apparent vote-rigging has indeed changed the game. The authority of the regime has suffered irrecoverable damage. Few of those who took to the streets will believe that it was all an American, or even more unlikely, a British plot.

This observation was offered to me by another Israeli. Isaac Herzog, the Labour minister for welfare and social services in the government coalition, recalled the occasions when his famous father visited the Shah’s Iran during the 1960s. Chaim Herzog would report back that the Shah was living on borrowed time: the ruler had grown too distant from the ruled.

The same can now be said of the gulf between Mr Ahmadi-Nejad and Iran’s youthful middle classes, although, as with the Shah, the end may be some time in coming.

The earlier point made by the Israeli diplomat was that Iran was no longer the country the west had thought, or wanted to think, it was. The post-election scenes on the streets of Iranian cities would surely strengthen those who argued that the way to encourage Iran’s return to the international community was through engagement – by embracing the ambitions of the protesters rather than shutting them out along with the regime. No one could pretend that Iran was the monolith that is North Korea.

As for suggestions that Israel is ready to bomb Iran to prevent Mr Ahmadi-Nejad from getting his hands on nuclear weapons, the issue was now more complicated. “How do you bomb Neda?” the diplomat said, in a reference to Neda Salehi Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose death on the streets of Tehran has become a symbol of the regime’s repression.

Mr Netanyahu would doubtless dispute this analysis, but the Israeli prime minister’s views no longer carry weight. Until my discussions this week with Israeli politicians and scholars from across the political spectrum I had not realised quite how comprehensively he had wrecked his own foreign policy.

If Mr Netanyahu had started out with a single strategic objective it was to engage Barack’s Obama’s administration in a joint project to put an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. As an academic sympathetic to the prime minister’s predicament put it, he wanted above all from Washington “a credible policy on Iran”.

No matter that no one quite knew what such a policy would have amounted to; focusing on Iran would have allowed the prime minister to put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the back-burner and sidestep international pressure to accept a two-state solution.

That was the plan. And what has happened? Mr Obama upturned the argument: a deal between Israel and the Palestinians was promoted in Washington as part of the broad regional initiative necessary to deal properly with Iran. Worse, from Mr Netanyahu’s perspective, Israeli-US relations have been reduced to an increasingly bitter argument about his refusal to halt settlement building on the West Bank.

As for Iran, the US president has indeed stepped back from immediate engagement. Doubtless he has been influenced by those who argue that restoring relations with Tehran would “legitimise” Mr Ahmadi-Nejad. Much the same argument was heard a few decades ago about détente with the Soviet Union.

But Mr Obama’s options remain open, as do those of European leaders. They should listen carefully to the voices in Iran who want the country to join the modern world.

Before visiting Israel I heard a prominent, Tehran-based academic put the case well. The policy of isolating Iran, he said, played into the hands of the regime by allowing it to demonise the US and its allies and forestall, in the name of national security, the opening up of society.

Breaking into this vicious circle will not be easy. It will require from Mr Obama a willingness to expend more political capital in explaining that diplomacy is not a synonym for defeatism. Engagement may well fail to persuade Iran to give up its quest for full mastery of the nuclear cycle – an ambition, incidentally, that the ayatollahs inherited from the Shah. It might just persuade Tehran not to build a bomb. In any event, the alternatives are all worse – unless, of course, Mr Obama feels he should take some foreign policy advice from Mr Netanyahu.

 philip.stephens at ft.com

 http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=3…

ARAB WORLD BLOGGERS MORE WARY OF THEIR LEADERS THAN OF ISRAEL
30 June 2009

“Democracy in the Arab World”

BY ODEN YARON

Ordinarily, we in Israel examine the Arab world from the political and security point of view. From that perspective it often looks monolithic and in many cases quite threatening. A study published this month by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University tried to map the blogosphere in the Arab world and reveals once again the extent to which our perceptions are one-dimensional.

Support for terror, for example, is almost entirely absent from the texts published in blogs originating in the Arab world. Researchers John Kelly, Robert Faris and John Palfrey found that only 1 percent of the more than 4,000 blogs examined supported terror activity, whereas 19 percent openly opposed terror. It would seem that these findings, along with others throughout the study, could indicate that American policymakers’ fear concerning the use of the Internet to spread hate and support for terror are a bit exaggerated.

As support, the authors also refer to the trend studies at the Pew Research Center that show a consistent decline in support for suicide attacks in places like Lebanon - from a support rate of 74 percent in 2002 down to 32 percent in 2008.

“This is not to say,” write the authors, “that anti-Western ideas are absent, or that groups like Hamas and Hezbollah do not have significant support, but that these ideas are countered by others, and support of Al Qaeda and civilian attacks is very rare…”

The authors also say that they “do not argue that extremist Web sites do not exist; certainly they do and our research does not address their impact. However, academic studies and media reports that focus exclusively on terrorist use of the Web can leave the impression that this is a dominant form of discourse in the Arabic language Internet, and could lead to ill-informed policy responses, which could intentionally limit the diverse, open and often civically-minded political, cultural, and religious discussions that take place in blogs and other Internet spaces.”

Mapping the Arabic blogoverse

The researchers had the help of Arabic-speakers to read and identify the characteristics of 4,000 blogs. Among other things, the researchers found that the vast majority of the bloggers are young men - about 75 percent of them under the age of 35, and of this group 45 percent are between 25 and 35 years old. According to the study, only 9 percent of the bloggers in the Arab world are older than 35. The researchers also found that more than 60 percent of the bloggers are men and only 34 percent are women (a number were unidentified). However, in Saudi Arabia, for example, it emerged that the proportion of women was especially high: about 46 percent.

The study also made use of a special technology to map the Arab blogosphere in a way similar to a previous study of the Iranian blogosphere. To this end, the researchers mapped 35,000 blogs in 18 countries and examined their links to each other and other blogs. Thus, by examining the internal connections among the sites, they created clusters.

One of the patterns that stood out in the study is the clustering into countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon. At the same time, the researchers also identified groups of blogs written in English and French - mostly in North Africa but also in Syria - which the researchers have called a bridge to the wider world.

Within the countries there was also a sorting into groups. In Egypt, for example, where they found the largest number of bloggers, there are clusters of bloggers identified with or close to the Muslim Brotherhood as well as a large cluster of secular reformists who have little love for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak

A smaller Israeli blip

Researchers were interested to discover that most of the writers are more interested in domestic political issues than in regional wars. Criticism of local leaders is the most common political topic the researchers encountered, and the next most common is not hatred for the United States or Israel but rather posts critical of terror.

In Lebanon, the researchers found criticism of local political leaders in more than 50 percent of the blogs but also a broad measure of support. In Syria, by comparison, the chances that a blogger would express support for the regime are especially low.

The bottom line is that a vast majority of the bloggers write about themselves and their lives. But make no mistake: Criticism of Israel and the United States does exist and is reinforced by events in the news. The film on YouTube to which the most blogs linked was extremely critical of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. The second most popular was a video of the shoe thrown by an Iraqi journalist at former U.S. president George W. Bush.

The researchers said they were surprised to find the extent to which Web 2.0 sites have been integrated into the Arab bloggers’ everyday activity. Indeed, it emerged that links to sites like Wikipedia and YouTube are more common than links to the major news sources in their countries.

Despite their tone of optimism regarding the political variety and relative openness in the blogs, the researchers are in no hurry to declare that the Internet will bring about a democratic revolution in the Arab world. They noted two contradictory theories about the way the Internet can nurture public discourse in Arab countries.

On the one hand, they noted Israeli-American Harvard law school Prof. Yochai Benkler’s “view of the networked public sphere as a boon for individual autonomy and freedom, breaking elite strangleholds on democratic discourse and drawing diverse interests and talents into a common arena.”

On the other hand, they noted, University of Chicago law school Professor Cass Sunstein warns in his book “Republic.com 2.0″ that the possibility the Internet offers for uniting into groups of the like-minded does not contribute to the creation of a global village. Instead, it contributes to increasing fragmentation of society and the loss of the common denominator that, along with other things, is essential for the existence of a democracy, he wrote.

The researchers also remarked that, as in Egypt, Iran and Syria, bloggers have been arrested or blocked and they add that technology is not serving only pro-Western forces.

“The Internet does not just promise (or threaten) to change the balance of power among players on the field,” cyber researcher Clay Shirky has argued, “it changes the field and changes the players too.” However, from the perspective of the Berkman Center researchers, the most important thing to remember is that the field is not only black and white and that the Islamic extremists are just one aspect of it. At least in the blogosphere, they still sit on the margins.

See Related: IRAN

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND NEWS MEDIA ARE AFRAID TO CONFRONT ISLAM - SAN FRANCISCO SENTINEL OPINION

Heart health at the tip of your finger
By Karin Kloosterman
July 01, 2009

 http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enDi…;

Whoopi Goldberg tried the EndoPAT heart test on her finger during a recent episode of The View and came out smiling. After 15 minutes, the Israeli developed device was able to give her heart a passing grade. At least for the next seven years.

Developed by Itamar Medical, an Israeli company traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, the EndoPAT has been popular not only with celebrities, but also gets a seal of approval from America’s doctors, and prestigious medical institutions like the Mayo Clinic.

Earning FDA status in 2003, the EndoPAT can measure the health of your heart using two small probes that hook up to each index finger. While there are other tests on the market like ultrasound tests to help clinicians assess if a patient has the early onset of heart disease, the EndoPAT looks further into the future — up to seven years, sensing whether or not your arteries are losing elasticity.

Like a blood pressure test on your finger

“The test I’m talking about - a 15 minute test - is a probe on the finger and basically it works the way you take blood pressure,” says Dr. Dov Reuven, the company’s CEO. “We do the same thing and measure the stress of the arteries in the fingertips.”

Used over 150,000 times in the US, the recent vote of confidence from the Mayo Clinic, which tested the EndoPAT on an independent study of healthy volunteers - part of the Framingham Heart Study — tells doctors that it’s a good addition to their toolkit for assessing heart disease.

“That’s the beauty of this. That’s why it is revolutionary,” Reuven tells ISRAEL21c. “The EnoPAT is the easiest detector of this disease. All other devices work within about one, two or three years. There is a test in the US that looks for carotid plaque. The point is once there is a buildup of plaque, it is too late in the cycle. A patient is not going to turn around that much. Ours can already see arteries that are less distensible.”

This means that people who may get a clean bill of health from doctors, can look deeper into their future, to know if they are at risk for heart attack seven years down the road. If you discover you are at risk, a regimen for improving health can be developed with a doctor. Changing one’s diet and exercise, or taking statins, may be a course of action.

Applications in understanding erectile problems

It also has become an interesting test for understanding erectile dysfunction, and can help a doctor decide whether or not to prescribe erection-enhancing drugs like Cialis, says Reuven.

The same device that tests for heart health can also tell urologists whether or not to prescribe medicine. “It could protect them from malpractice,” says Reuven.

Essentially, using this device doctors have a much better way now to control a patient’s health to determine if they are at risk of a heart attack. “The importance of the Mayo Clinic story is that today when you go to your physicians or cardiologist, they will ask you seven questions, or risk factors for heart disease, like cholesterol levels, if you smoke, or are overweight,” says Reuven.

Sometimes there are people who are considered completely low risk based on these basic questions, but nevertheless are at risk for heart disease. The study examined 240 people who are “specimens of health”, tacking them over time, and recording cardiac events, such as chest pains or heart attacks.

The efficacy of the test was confirmed by doctors at Mayo. The clinic writes: “Results of a Mayo Clinic study show that a simple, non-invasive finger sensor test is ‘highly predictive’ of a major cardiac event, such as a heart attack or stroke, for people who are considered at low or moderate risk, according to researchers.”

Mayo’s seal of approval

The device is now available at doctors’ clinics in the US, including the clinic of The View’shouse doctor Dr. Stephen Lamm.

Endorsing the product, Lamm says he uses it on every patient, translating to about 200 times a month.

On the show, Whoopi scored a 1.9, “and she was excited,” says Reuven. “The real truth is the arterial sclerosis process starts early on in life. This will become part of the screening and treatment process,” he adds, mentioning that China is taking a serious look at the device too. “They can’t afford heart bypasses and stents.”

The EndoPAT has applications in wellness and holistic medicine as a means to quantify if a treatment is working.

The company has a second device, a product that functions like a mini sleep lab used to detect the severity of sleep apnea. Called the WatchPAT it resembles a ski or diving watch. It removes the need for people to spend uncomfortable nights in a sleep lab.

Traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, the largest investor in Itamar Medical is Medtronic. The company employs about 160 people worldwide.

 http://www.bechollashon.org/resources/ne…

Francesca Biller-Safran

Japanese-Jew Doesn’t “Oy Veh” So Much Since Obama.

By Francesca Biller-Safran
Huffington Post
Published: June 4, 2009

As a Japanese-Jew, I have historically used self deprecating humor at my own expense as a way to explain and defend to others who I was and to feel accepted.

My cultural confusion can be summed up in this anonymous quote, “There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?”

Until recently I believed “everything” was my fault.

And I would certainly be the last person I would ever want to visit, with all of my kvetching to anyone kind enough to listen. “Oy Veh,” I would lament. “No one accepts me; I am neither a truly Japanese or Jewish soul, so I will just sit here alone in the dark, eating a knish in my kimono.”

But gratefully, since Obama has become president, not only do I feel more comfortable as the multiracial shikseh that I am, but engage in thoughtful conversations about my heritage and background, without jokes, defense or much self-deprecation.

I only hope that I conduct myself with an ounce of the class, genus and moral fortitude the president has displayed when continually questioned about his cultural identity.

In his keynote 2004 speech to the Democratic Convention, Obama said, “In a sense I have no choice but to believe in this vision of America. As a child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of race.”

I too was born in Hawaii and attended University High School in Hawaii a few years before Obama just a couple miles from his school, Punahoe High, whose students I shared long bus rides with from remote areas in order to get a good education; a value that my parents, like his, believed was invaluable.

Like my mother and father, Obama’s parents are from two different cultures, yet he never feels the need to defend or justify his background, rather, he consistently responds to questions and assumptions with dignity and forethought.

When asked during the presidential campaign what he considered his ethnicity to be, Obama answered simply that he is an American from two equally rich and diverse cultures.

In a 2004 speech, Obama said, “My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential.”

As a blend of cultures with a Jewish-Russian, Irish father and Japanese-Hawaiian mother, I too have faced continual questions as to what I considered my race, people, culture and ethnicity to be.

I was given several names, including three middle names, all five on my birth certificate. One is named after my Jewish great grandmother, Beatrice, the other a Japanese name, Yukari, and the third, Caitlin, named after the wife of my father’s favorite poet, Dylan Thomas. My first name is named after a man — the Italian Renaissance painter, Piero Della Francesca, with his last name chosen for my first.

Who was I, where did I come from, was I merely a mistake, an experiment, and how I might actually exist as a identifiable human — have been relentless questions that have sewn experiences throughout my culturally odd and unasked for politically patch-worked life.

This sentiment from an anonymous quote defines the neurotic dichotomy of my life, “To find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.”

One searing memory I experienced involves a boy who told me on the schoolyard there was no such thing as a Japanese-Jewish person. Afterwards, I ran all the way home from this boy with the piercing blue eyes and looked into the mirror wondering if I really didn’t exist at all; at least in any real identifiable sense that mattered.

This was just one comment amongst countless surreal exclamations that secured my stalwart allegiance to defining myself as a person from different cultures, but never defined by them.

In his keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention, Obama said, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.”

I can assume the President Obama has heard countless comments denying his existence as a fortified American as well, but was intrepid enough to remain an honorable candidate despite cultural ignorance on the part of others.

This is the essential definition for any strong person; the ability, will and might to face oppression and hatred and march forward anyway.

No one thought it was truly possible that a man who was Black may become president yet, no one. Some hoped, some feared, some dreamed, and many imagined a courageous, ambitious reality, but not one of us truly believed with full breadth that this young country was ready to make such a fearless and autonomous leap for the betterment of us and for the world.

Like Obama’s parents, the marriage of my parents confounded some, upset others and was dismissed by the rest.

My father was raised in Los Angeles and then attended The University of Hawaii not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He came back with an education and a wife, who was a second-generation Japanese-American known as the Nisei generation, who grew up as a farmer on the coffee plantations of Kona, Hawaii.

My Japanese-American uncles were part of the 442nd Infantry, also known as The Purple Heart Battalion, the most highly decorated fighter pilots in United States History. This includes some 4,000 Bronze stars and nearly 9,500 Purple Hearts.

In this period, many Japanese-Americans were interned throughout the U.S, with land taken away, families torn apart and lives devastated, not unlike Jewish family members of my husband’s during the Second World War with more tragic results.

A lot of anti-Japanese sentiment existed at this time, and yet my parents married, with whispers heard loudly as shouts and bombs from some family, while others chose to keep quiet with disdain; perhaps even more devastating.

Martin Luther King said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

My parents had four children during the 1950’s and 60’s, and thankfully we were raised in Southern California, a region more liberal and tolerant of interracial marriage than many other parts of the country.

A visceral account of the confused cultural identity I experienced in a Japanese-Jewish household can be summed up in the following quotes, the first from a Japanese emperor, “Generally speaking, the way of the warrior is the resolute acceptance of death,” and the second from Woody Allen, “It’s not that I’m afraid to die; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

At least as a writer, my life experiences give me more material to work with than my mother’s hundreds of antique kimonos combined with all the chuppah’s this side of Golden Gate Bridge.

A perfect example of conflicting philosophies learned during childhood includes Buddha’s lesson that “Life as we know it ultimately leads to suffering,” while we were told simultaneously that although Jesus was indeed a suffering member of our tribe, we should never actually worship him.

But nevertheless, I have made it, I have arrived, and I am as they say in Yiddish, I’m “Nisht geferlech,” which basically means “Not so shabby.”

Surely President Obama must realize this profound effect he has had on a nation who soldiers so many different religions, races and cultures while speaking in native tongues more freely understood now at least now in spirit, if not yet comprehended in each syllable, syntax or inflection.

And because we now have a president with a different story than president’s past, who holds his head high with his own proud blend of integral cultural being, each language and culture that is different is now more highly revered, as is each person’s individual journey.

Each story sheds an even broader and brighter light on a nation that not only endures, but empowers; not only inspires but includes, and not only validates, but values each lesson, paragraph and infinitesimal anecdote that boasts the value of us all.

This is now an axiomatic concept for the country, one that is only beginning to change America’s story and each person willing to tell their cultural rhythms on their own.

For this one Japanese-Jewish woman who always thought she was strange; even once given the title of “Shikseh Princess” at a Bar Mitzvah by some nice Jewish boys, my story has now changed for the better and interestingly enough, still interesting all the same.

Finally I can stop commiserating with Woody Allen when he said, “My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.” Except those rare moments when I begin to doubt the integrity and veracity of my own personal story that is just as valuable as anyone else’s.

In his book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote, “This is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can say what we think; write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door.”

The doors for us all now open with greater ease and determination, and the answers and questions we hear on the other sides of each door are purely reflective of a nation that is now more unified in its diversity, and more open to discussion, depth, profundity and inclusion.

Originally published here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/francesca-…

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 http://bechollashon.org/resources/newsle…

Judge Sotomayor, a mythic ‘Hispanic’

The supposedly racial term was pushed by Nixon to lump distinct Spanish-speaking groups into one voting bloc. There’s no such thing, and the judge should be appointed on her merits.

By Jonathan Zimmerman
LA Times
Published: June 12, 2009

Here’s a good argument for putting Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court: She’s knowledgeable, respected and deeply experienced. As a federal judge for nearly two decades, she’s heard thousands of cases and written hundreds of opinions.

And here’s a lousy argument for confirming Sotomayor: She would be the first “Hispanic” on the court.

I put the term in quotation marks because it’s a recent invention, dating to the 1970s and ’80s. Before then, when Sotomayor was growing up with her Puerto Rican family in New York City, she was not Hispanic.

And words make a difference. As many commentators have reminded us since President Obama nominated Sotomayor, judges are inevitably shaped by their life experiences. But these experiences are themselves shaped — and, sometimes, distorted — by the terms that we use to describe them.

How did Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, Panamanians, Nicaraguans and Guatemalans all become Hispanic?

Amid the African American civil rights struggle of the 1960s, many of these groups joined hands to demand voting rights, bilingual education and social services. Here they received a big assist from an unlikely source: Richard Nixon. Eager to bring Mexicans and other Latino immigrants into the Republican fold, Nixon also saw them as a potential bulwark against black political aspirations.

“All Spanish-speaking Americans share certain characteristics — a strong family structure, deep ties to the church, which makes them open to an appeal from us,” wrote one GOP campaign strategist on the eve of Nixon’s 1972 presidential reelection bid. “The Democratic Party is under suspicion for favoring politically potent blacks at the expense of the needs of Spanish-speaking people.”

So Nixon threw his weight behind bilingual education, which has since become a bête noire for the GOP. He also ordered the Census Bureau to add a query on its 1970 form asking whether respondents were “Hispanic,” hoping to further solidify this new voting bloc.

Census Bureau officials balked, noting — correctly — that the term lacked scientific and historical precision. They also worried that respondents wouldn’t recognize it. So the most commonly used census form in 1970 asked respondents if they were of “Spanish” origin, not whether they were Hispanic.

All that would change in 1977, when the Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to classify Americans as one of four races — white, black, American Indian/Alaskan Native or Asian/Pacific Islander — and also to distinguish between two ethnic categories, “of Hispanic origin” and “not of Hispanic origin.” Since then, the census has asked people their race and whether they’re Hispanic, which is not listed as a “race” per se.

Increasingly, however, Americans thought of it as such. Government agencies used “Hispanic” alongside “Asian” and “black,” making Hispanic into a de facto racial category. Businesses and educational institutions counted Hispanics — or, sometimes, “Latinos” — as a race in diversity and affirmative action reports.

Not surprisingly, then, Hispanics became more likely over time to identify themselves as a separate race too. In the mid-1990s, 60% of the respondents to a study of more than 5,000 Latin American immigrants self-identified as “white,” for example, but only 20% of their children did so.

That’s an unprecedented development, as the United States had continuously absorbed people formerly identified in the census as from nonwhite races into the white majority. Jews, Italians and Slavs were all once classified as separate races; now, they’re white. But Hispanics are moving in the opposite direction — from white to nonwhite. In our minds, at least, they’ve become a minority race.

The language of race is a unifying one, blinding us to the irreducible diversity that a single category can contain. Consider Sotomayor’s now infamous comment that a “wise Latina woman” would render a better judicial decision than a white male. While GOP antagonists accused Sotomayor of reverse racism and Democrats rushed to her defense, nobody pointed out that wise Latina women come in all shapes, sizes and ideologies. Would a wise Cuban woman in South Florida see eye-to-eye with a wise Mexican woman in San Diego, or with a wise Salvadoran woman in Washington, D.C.? Probably not.

Even worse, the idea of race tricks us into seeing “Hispanic” as a biological category rather than a cultural one. I frequently do an exercise with my students, asking them how a scientist would identify their race. The most common reply is also the most troubling one: via a blood test. In fact, that would tell you the opposite: We all come from the same ancestor, in East Africa, and we’re all mongrels. The blood test does not identify your “race,” which primarily exists only in our minds.

As a child, Sotomayor was probably classified as white; now she’s Hispanic. But her DNA is the same. The only thing that has changed is the way we look at her. Belying every shard of evidence, we continue to believe that races are different under the skin.

So let’s hope that the Senate confirms Sotomayor, one of the most qualified nominees in the history of the Supreme Court. Then let’s welcome her as the first person of Puerto Rican descent on the court, not as the first “Hispanic.”

If you think the words don’t matter, you haven’t been listening.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University and is the author of the just-published “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”

Originally published here: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-o…

Musicians from Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Norway, and the United States, joined together to promote Middle East peace.

Itamar Eichner in Yedioth Ahronoth, June 29, 2009.

 http://www.israelpolicyforum.org/blog/mu…

In a pastoral farm near Oslo, capital of Norway-far from the eyes of the media-a group of Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian musicians gathered this past week, and tried to make music together for the sake of peace.

Behind this initiative stands a Norwegian peace activist.  He invited musicians from the region for a joint 10-day workshop.  Participants from Israel included Kobi Oz, Aya Korem, Ohad Hitman and Mika Sadeh.

Three musicians came from the Palestinian Authority, and four arrived from Jordan.  They were joined by Norwegian and American musicians.

For 10 days, the musicians wrote songs together.  The Israelis learned to sing in Arabic, the Palestinians and Jordanians learned to sing in Hebrew.  They are slated to present the result on Saturday night [June 27] in a concert to be held in Oslo with the participation of about 1,000 people.

“Peace in the Middle East is important to us, and we think that musicians in the region have a great responsibility to promote peace.  After all, young people listen much more to musicians than to politicians,” he added.

PRESS RELEASE:  June 29, 2009

New Hope For Peace: What America Must Do To End the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Four American Statesmen Speak Out in a New DVD

Presented by Landrum Bolling

Four American statesmen, Jimmy Carter, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be resolved with a comprehensive U.S. presidential initiative.

Speaking as President Obama’s diplomacy is unfolding, the four leaders say the time is right for a new U.S. initiative in New Hope for Peace.  This 20-minute DVD is presented by Landrum Bolling with cooperation from the Foundation for Middle East Peace and Mercy Corps International.

Drawing on their long experience, the four statesmen explain that solutions that would meet the basic needs of Israelis and Palestinians are well known and that both want peace but have been thwarted by hard-line minorities. They believe that strong U.S. presidential leadership can help bring a two-state peace through a comprehensive peace plan and sustained mediation. They predict that the international community would welcome and support such a U.S. initiative.

The overwhelming majority of Israelis and Palestinians want peace… The President should make his policies clear on settlements, home demolitions, Israel security, and East Jerusalem… Jimmy Carter

The vast majority of the Israelis are tired of being a nation perpetually at war…they want to see a secure peace agreement, and so do the Palestinians… Hard liners on both sides are the biggest obstacles to peace…You have to talk to your enemies… James Baker
We must play a more active role…We need to act decisively and comprehensively…The President needs to step up and say “this is the American proposal.” …it will turn around the psychological atmosphere in the Middle East.  Brent Scowcroft
Two decent peoples are locked in a mortal embrace…they cannot move toward peace unless someone helps… It takes an impartial, energetic outside mediator… there is only one candidate…the U.S., and more specifically the President.  Zbigniew Brzezinski
Preview New Hope for Peace on YouTube.  Copies are available on request from the Foundation for Middle East Peace.  (202-835-3650,  info at fmep.org. 1761 N Street, NW, Washington DC 20036, www.fmep.org)

Algae Farm Aims to Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel.

By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times, June 28, 2009

Algenol Biofuels
Algenol grows algae in troughs filled with saltwater that becomes saturated with carbon dioxide.

Dow Chemical and Algenol Biofuels, a start-up company, are set to announce Monday that they will build a demonstration plant that, if successful, would use algae to turn carbon dioxide into ethanol as a vehicle fuel or an ingredient in plastics.

Because algae does not require any farmland or much space, many energy companies are trying to use it to make commercial quantities of hydrocarbons for fuel and chemicals. But harvesting the hydrocarbons has proved difficult so far.
The ethanol would be sold as fuel, the companies said, but Dow’s long-term interest is in using it as an ingredient for plastics, replacing natural gas. The process also produces oxygen, which could be used to burn coal in a power plant cleanly, said Paul Woods, chief executive of Algenol, which is based in Bonita Springs, Fla. The exhaust from such a plant would be mostly carbon dioxide, which could be reused to make more algae.

“We give them the oxygen, we get very pure carbon dioxide, and the output is very cheap ethanol,” said Mr. Woods, who said the target price was $1 a gallon.

Algenol grows algae in “bioreactors,” troughs covered with flexible plastic and filled with saltwater. The water is saturated with carbon dioxide, to encourage growth of the algae. “It looks like a long hot dog balloon,” Mr. Woods said.

Dow, a maker of specialty plastics, will provide the “balloon” material.

The algae, through photosynthesis, convert the carbon dioxide and water into ethanol, which is a hydrocarbon, oxygen and fresh water.

The company has 40 bioreactors in Florida, and as part of the demonstration project plans 3,100 of them on a 24-acre site at Dow’s Freeport, Tex., site. Among the steps still being improved is the separation of the oxygen and water from the ethanol. The Georgia Institute of Technology will work on that process, as will Membrane Technology and Research, a company in Menlo Park, Calif. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an Energy Department lab, will study carbon dioxide sources and their impact on the algae samples.

Algenol and its partners are planning a demonstration plant that could produce 100,000 gallons a year. The company and its partners were spending more than $50 million, said Mr. Woods, but not all of that was going into the pilot plant. The company had applied to the Energy Department for financing under the stimulus bill, but would build a pilot plant with or without a grant, he said.

With a stimulus grant, he said, the division of spending would be slightly more than 50 percent from the private sector, although the normal level was 20 percent. The project would create 300 jobs, he said, adding that Algenol and Dow were “incredibly hopeful” of getting the grant, partly because they had a combination of an innovative start-up company, a major company with extensive experience in industrial processes, a university and a national laboratory.

At Dow, Peter A. Molinaro, a spokesman, said that the ethanol was “intriguing to us as a feedstock, because the chemistry is simple.” Dow is already working on using ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane as a replacement for natural gas as an ingredient in plastics.

When Congress created a tax subsidy for ethanol, it raised the price for nonfuel users like Dow, he said. “We’re looking at options, and this is one,” he said.

————

See also:

“The Alga Dunaliella” editors - Ami Ben-Amotz, Jurgen E.W. Polle, D.V. Subba Rao, Science Publishers, Enfield (NH), Jersey, Plymouth, printed in India, 2009 - 555p. - www.scipub.net

IRAN REGIME GAINING THE EDGE OVER PROTESTERS.
27 June 2009

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad smiles.

BY NAZILA FATHI and MICHAEL SLACKMAN

TEHRAN — The direct confrontation over Iran’s presidential election was effectively silenced Friday when the main opposition leader said he would seek permits for any future protests, an influential cleric suggested that leaders of the demonstrations could be executed, and the council responsible for validating the election repeated its declaration that there were no major irregularities.

Rather than address the underlying issues that led to the most sustained, unexpected challenge to the leadership since the 1979 revolution, the government pressed its effort to recast the entire conflict not as an internal dispute that brought millions of Iranians into the streets, but as one between Iran and outside agents from Europe, the United States and even Saudi Arabia.

It was a narrative that spoke both to the leadership’s belief that it had beaten back the popular outburst, and to the fragility of the calm. “There has been too much violence to forget about it,” said an expatriate Iranian analyst who is not being identified because he has relatives in Iran and is afraid of reprisals against them.

Although the government appeared to have the upper hand, political analysts said it was too soon for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to declare his troubles over. Though it seemed increasingly likely he would be sworn in for a second term by early August, there was no guarantee how that term would unfold or whether competitors within the system — who have a different vision of Iran — would work against him.

Even before he faced a challenge to his legitimacy, Mr. Ahmadinejad was often castigated by Parliament for his troubled handling of the economy, and there had been talk of trying to impeach him. Several of his ministers quit the government in protest over his economic policies. “There are quite a few people sitting on the fence watching to see which way the wind will blow,” said Ali M. Ansari, a professor of Iranian history at St. Andrews University in Scotland. “Information is very hard to come by, but there seems to be much back-room negotiating predicated on the fact normality should first return to the country.”

Throughout the crisis, events in Iran have focused on two camps: the opposition, led by Mir Hussein Moussavi, a former prime minister, and the camp surrounding Mr. Ahmadinejad, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the military and security agencies. But there is a third group of more pragmatic military and security figures who have competed with Mr. Ahmadinejad but are believed to remain close to Ayatollah Khamenei.

Two of the most influential in that group are the mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, a former commander in the Revolutionary Guards, and the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, the nation’s former chief nuclear negotiator. Both ran for president four years ago and want to run again, and have at times been sharp critics of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s stewardship. Political analysts have described them as loyal to the leader and committed to Islamic government, but eager for a more modern state integrated with the rest of the world. Mr. Larijani resigned as nuclear negotiator in part because he favored engagement over confrontation.

During the electoral crisis both made statements demonstrating their independence from Mr. Ahmadinejad — and their objection to some aspects of the crackdown. The mayor called for allowing legal protests. The speaker said that it was improper for the Guardian Council, which is supposed to monitor the elections, to side with Mr. Ahmadinejad. Mr. Larijani also said that the majority of the people did not believe the government’s contention that Mr. Ahmadinejad had won with 63 percent of the vote.

“It’s an odd dynamic,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The person they have to be loyal to, the supreme leader, has thrown his weight behind this person they despise. Ghalibaf is one of these people, like Larijani, and others had been on the fence, and if there is a tipping point they could go the other way.”

The government continued to try to frame any opponents as traitors to the nation. The Friday Prayer ceremony is a political and religious ritual held in a large hall at Tehran University and broadcast all over the country. Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a stout, turbaned cleric who frequently delivers the Friday speech, hewed to the hard party line. He urged that those who led protests be convicted for taking up arms against people, an offense punishable by death.

“I want the judiciary to punish leading rioters firmly and without showing any mercy to teach everyone a lesson,” he said.

A few hours earlier, the Guardian Council repeated its claim that the election had been fair. “There has been no fraud in the election,” said the council’s spokesman, Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, acknowledging that the review process was not technically completed. He said the council had checked discrepancies reported by Mr. Moussavi, but that they had not borne out.

Mr. Moussavi immediately posted a report containing a long list of irregularities on his Web site, an action that barely registered against the might of the state machine. But he also signaled that the street phase of the protests was ending, saying on his Web site that he would try to seek permits for future protests — permits the government has consistently refused.

While protesters were aided at first by technology — primarily the Internet and text messaging — the government deployed its control of state television and news outlets to sweep away competing narratives.

“It is still possible that the information age will crack authoritarian structures in Iran,” wrote Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East program for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But it is far more likely that the government will be able to use that technology to secure its own rule.”

Mr. Moussavi may have little room to maneuver, but he has refused to surrender altogether. He is being closely monitored by security agents. Members of Parliament who are aligned with Ayatollah Khamenei met with Mr. Moussavi on Wednesday and tried to press him to relent.

“Mr. Moussavi still wants the election results nullified,” Ismail Kossari, one of the members of Parliament, told the ILNA news agency.

“We told him that his demand was unreasonable and immoral and he shouldn’t have repeated his demand after the supreme leader’s statements at the Friday prayers,” Mr. Kossari was quoted as saying.

Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Michael Slackman from Cairo. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris, Mona el-Naggar from Cairo, and Sharon Otterman from New York.

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IRAN: The End of the Beginning?

 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/20…

BY TRITA PARSI, REZA ASLAN as published in foreignpoicy.com,  JUNE 26, 2009

Iran’s popular uprising, which began after the June 12 election, may be heading for a premature ending. In many ways, the Ahmadinejad government has succeeded in transforming what was a mass movement into dispersed pockets of unrest. Whatever is now left of this mass movement is now leaderless, unorganized — and under the risk of being hijacked by groups outside Iran in pursuit of their own political agendas.

In 1999, students in Iran demonstrated against the closing of reformist newspapers. The unrest lasted a few days and was brutally suppressed. The demonstrators were almost exclusively students. No other segments of society joined their ranks in any meaningful numbers. With their limited appeal to other segments of society, the demonstrators failed to grow in numbers and attain their political objectives.

The demonstrations following the Iranian election on June 12 share few if any characteristics of the student uprising of 1999. What we have witnessed taking place in Iran is a mass movement attracting supporters from all walks of life, all demographics, all classes, and even all political backgrounds. Even supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have expressed discomfort with the developments in Iran, arguing that they voted for Ahmadinejad because they thought he would be a better president, and not because he would be a better dictator.

Indeed, the post-election demonstrations have neither been an uprising of intellectuals and students nor die-hard anti-regime elements from northern Tehran. Instead, the masses that poured in the streets included large numbers of people who often have been loyal to the Iranian government and who in many ways have a stake in its survival. (We can call them Iran’s political middle, or its swing voters.) This is precisely why this movement has constituted such a threat to the Iranian government — not once since 1979 has such an alliance of Iranians come together.

Knowing very well that the opposition’s ability to attract Iranians of all backgrounds constituted a major threat to the government, the Iranian authorities moved quickly to peel away layer after layer of people from the movement to reduce it to a much smaller and more manageable core of regime — not Ahmadinejad — opponents. The Ahmadinejad government’s tactics were predictable: It combined a most brutal clampdown on protesters with propaganda alleging that the opposition movement was orchestrated by foreign elements and exiled opposition groups.

The Mousavi camp sought to counteract these measures and retain its ability to attract a diverse array of Iranians by grounding its slogans and resistance in the language and symbolism of the revolution itself. Mousavi, in a direct challenge to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, presented himself and the movement as the guardians of the revolution, and protesters in the street recycled slogans from the 1979 era, including the chant “Allahu Akbar.”
Although successful at first, the discipline has clearly broken down. This should be no surprise — the movement is by now in effect leaderless. A source close to Mousavi says that the first and second circle of people around Mousavi have all been arrested or put under house arrest. Mousavi himself has limited ability to communicate with his team and his followers. The lack of leadership is visible on the streets, where demonstrators exhibit unparalleled will and courage, but lack direction and guidance.

Indeed, the lack of organization and execution is perhaps the most convincing evidence that the anti-Ahmadinejad movement is completely homegrown and void of any attempt to emulate the velvet revolutions of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. What is driving people to the streets is their sense of frustration and anger — not a well-devised plan and training in clever nonviolent resistance techniques.

The leadership vacuum does not bode well for the movement’s prospects of success, particularly when it comes to attracting those Iranian swing-voters to its side once more. And this creates openings for external meddling — just not the kind you think.

Exiled opposition groups, whose political agenda sharply differs from that of the protesters in Iran — indeed, many of these groups urged people not to vote in the elections — have sought to fill the vacuum left by a beheaded and directionless indigenous movement. Though the outrage of these exiled groups against the Iranian government’s brutal violence is genuine, their efforts to impose themselves on the political scene have caused great frustration among opposition elements inside Iran. At a time when the movement in Iran is paralyzed, efforts by exiled groups — groups that scorned the protesters only weeks ago for choosing to participate in the elections — to fill the leadership vacuum are viewed as nothing less than a maneuver to hijack the movement.

This is playing right into the hands of the Ahmadinejad government, precisely because it would weaken, if not eliminate, the indigenous movement’s trump card: its ability to attract the Iranian swing-voters back to its side. If the exiled opposition groups and their neo-conservative backers in the United States prevail in aiding the Ahmadinejad government, what started out as the largest Iranian mass movement since 1979 may end up as little more than the student demonstrations of 1999. Which is to say, an instance of hopes raised, then dashed.

Trita Parsi is president of the National Iranian American Council and author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S. Reza Aslan is the author of How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror.
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Uri Avnery

27.6.09
  Between Tel Aviv and Tehran

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Iranian citizens pour into the streets in order to protest against their government! What a wonderful sight! Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz that he envies the Iranians.

And indeed, anyone who tries these days to get Israelis in any numbers into the streets could die of envy. It is very difficult to get even hundreds of people to protest against the evil deeds or policies of our government – and not because everybody supports it. At the height of the war against Gaza, half a year ago, it was not easy to mobilize ten thousand protesters. Only once a year does the peace camp succeed in bringing a hundred thousand people to the square – and then only to commemorate the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

The atmosphere in Israel is a mixture of indifference, fatigue and a “loss of the belief in the ability to change reality”, as a Supreme Court justice put it this week. A very dramatic change is needed in order to get masses of people to demonstrate for peace.

FOR MIR-HOSSEIN MOUSAVI hundreds of thousands have demonstrated, and hundreds of thousands have demonstrated for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That says something about the people and about the regime.

Can anyone imagine a hundred thousand people gathering in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to protest against the official election results? The police would open fire before a thousand had assembled there.

Would even a thousand people be allowed to demonstrate in Amman against His Majesty? The very idea is absurd.

Some years ago, the Saudi security forces in Mecca opened fire on unruly pilgrims. In Saudi Arabia, there are never protests against election results – simply because there are no elections.

In Iran, however, there are elections, and how! They are more frequent than elections in the US, and Iranian presidents change more often than American ones. Indeed, the very protests and riots show how seriously the citizens there treat election results.

OF COURSE, the Iranian regime is not democratic in the way we understand democracy. There is a Supreme Guide who fixes the rules of the game. Religious bodies rule out candidates they do not like. Parliament cannot adopt laws that contradict religious law. And the laws of God are unchangeable - at most, their interpretation can change.

All this is not entirely foreign to Israelis. From the very beginning the religious camp has been trying to turn Israel into a religious state, in which religious law (called Halakha) would be above the civil law. Laws “revealed” thousands of years ago and regarded as unchangeable would take precedence over laws enacted by the democratically elected Knesset.
To understand Iran, we have only to look at one of the important Israeli parties: Shas. They, too, have a Supreme Guide, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who decides everything. He appoints the party leadership, he selects the party’s Knesset candidates, he directs the party faction how to vote on every single issue. There are no elections in Shas. And in comparison with the frequent outbursts of Rabbi Ovadia, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a model of moderation.

ELECTIONS DIFFER from country to country. It is very difficult to compare the fairness of elections in one country with those in another.

At one end of the scale were the elections in the good old Soviet Union. There it was joked that a voter entered the ballot room, received a closed envelope from an official and was politely requested to put it into the ballot box.
“What, can’t I know who I am voting for?” the voter demanded.

The official was shocked. “Of course not! In the Soviet Union we have secret elections!”

At the other end of the scale there should stand that bastion of democracy, the USA. But in elections there, only nine years ago, the results were decided by the Supreme Court. The losers, who had voted for Al Gore, are convinced to this very day that the results were fraudulent.

In Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan and now, apparently, also in Egypt, rule is passed from father to son or from brother to brother. A family affair.

Our own elections are clean, more or less, even if after every election people claim that in the Orthodox Jewish quarters the dead also voted. Three and a half million inhabitants of the occupied Palestinian territories also held democratic elections in 2006, which former President Jimmy Carter described as exemplary, but Israel, the US and Europe refused to accept the results, because they did not like them.
So it seems that democracy is a matter of geography.

WERE THE election results in Iran falsified? Practically no one of us – in Tel Aviv, Washington or London – can know. We have no idea, because none of us – and that includes the chiefs of all intelligence agencies – really knows what is happening in that country. We can only try to apply our common sense, based on the little information we have.
Clearly, hundreds of thousands of voters honestly believe that the results were faked. Otherwise, they would not have taken to the streets. But this is a quite normal among losers. During the intoxication of an election campaign, every party believes that it is about to win. When this does not happen, it is quite sure that the results are forged.
Some time ago, Germany’s excellent 3Sat television channel broadcast an arresting report about Tehran. The crew drove through the main street from the North of the city to the South, stopping frequently along the way, entering people’s homes, visiting mosques and nightclubs.

I learned that Tehran is largely similar to Tel Aviv at least in one respect: in the North there reside the rich and the well-to-do, in the South the poor and underprivileged. The Northerners imitate the US, go to prestigious universities and dance in the clubs. The women are liberated. The Southerners stick to tradition, revere the ayatollahs or the rabbis, and detest the shameless and corrupt North.

Mousavi is the candidate of the North, Ahmadinejad of the South. The villages and small towns – which we call the “periphery” – identify with the south and are alienated from the north.
In Tel Aviv, the South voted for Likud, Shas and the other right-wing parties. The North voted for Labor and Kadima. In our elections, a few months ago, the Right thus won a resounding victory.
It seems that something very similar happened in Iran. It is reasonable to assume that Ahmadinejad genuinely won.

The sole Western outfit that conducted a serious public opinion poll in Iran prior to the elections came up with figures that proved very close to the official results. It is hard to imagine huge forgeries, concerning many millions of votes, when thousands of polling station personnel are involved. In other words: it is entirely plausible that Ahmadinejad really won. If there were forgeries – and there is no reason to believe that there were not – they probably did not reach proportions that could sway the end result.

There is a simple test for the success of a revolution: has the revolutionary spirit penetrated the army? Since the French Revolution, no revolution has succeeded when the army was steadfast in support of the existing regime. Both the 1917 February and October revolutions in Russia succeeded because the army was in a state of dissolution. In 1918, much the same happened in Germany. Mussolini and Hitler took great pains not to challenge the army, and came to power with its support.

In many revolutions, the decisive moment arrives when the crowds in the street confront the soldiers and policemen, and the question arises: will they open fire on their own people? When the soldiers refuse, the revolution wins. When they shoot, that is the end of the matter.

When Boris Yeltsin climbed on the tank, the solders refused to shoot and he won. The Berlin wall fell because one East-German police officer refused at the decisive moment to give the order to open fire. In Iran, Khomeini won when, in the final test, the soldiers of the Shah refused to shoot. That did not happen this time. The security forces were ready to shoot. They were not infected by the revolutionary spirit. The way it looks now, that was the end of the affair.

I AM not an admirer of Ahmadinejad. Mousavi appeals to me much more.
I do not like leaders who are in direct contact with God, who make speeches to the masses from a balcony, who use demagogic and provocative language, who ride on the waves of hatred and fear. His denial of the holocaust – an idiotic exercise in itself – only adds to Ahmadinejad’s image as a primitive or cynical leader.

No doubt, he is a sworn enemy of the state of Israel or – as he prefers to call it – the “Zionist regime”. Even if he did not promise to wipe it out himself, as erroneously reported, but only expressed his belief that it would “disappear from the map”, this does not set my mind at rest.

It is an open question whether Mousavi, if elected, would have made a difference as far as we are concerned. Would Iran have abandoned its efforts to produce nuclear weapons? Would it have reduced its support of the Palestinian resistance? The answer is negative.

It is an open secret that our leaders hoped that Ahmadinejad would win, exacerbate the hatred of the Western world against himself and make reconciliation with America more difficult.

All through the crisis, Barack Obama has behaved with admirable restraint. American and Western public opinion, as well as the supporters of the Israeli government, called upon him to raise his voice, identify with the protesters, wear a green tie in their honor, condemn the Ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad in no uncertain terms. But except for minimal criticism, he did not do so, displaying both wisdom and political courage.

Iran is what it is. The US must negotiate with it, for its own sake and for our sake, too. Only this way – if at all – is it possible to prevent or hold up its development of nuclear weapons. And if we are condemned to live under the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb, in a classic situation of a balance of terror, it would be better if the bomb were in the hands of an Iranian leadership that keeps up a dialogue with the American president. And of course, it would be good for us if - before reaching that point - we could achieve, with the friendly support of Obama, full peace with the Palestinian people, thus removing the main justification for Iran’s hostility towards Israel.
The revolt of the Northerners in Iran will remain, so it seems, a passing episode. It may, hopefully, have an impact in the long run, beneath the surface. But in the meantime, it makes no sense to deny the victory of the Iranian denier.

###

Professor Dr. Aryeh Eldad is head of the plastic surgery and burns unit at the Hadassah Medical Center hospital in Jerusalem. He studied medicine at Tel Aviv University, where he earned his doctorate. He served as the chief medical officer and was the senior commander of the Israeli Defense Forces medical corps for 25 years, and reached a rank of Tat Aluf (Brigadier General). He is renowned worldwide for his treatment of burns and won the Evans Award from the American Burns Treatment Association.

Eldad was born in Tel Aviv in 1950. He is married with five children. His father, Israel Eldad, was a well known Israeli public thinker and formerly one of the leaders of the underground group Lehi.

Eldad is now a resident of Kfar Adumim on the West Bank, a Brigadier-General (reserves) in the Israel Defense Forces, a Professor at Hadassah Medical Center and a Member of the Knesset (Parliament).

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Political career: Eldad is a Revisionist Zionist who believes in the ideas of Zionist philosopher Zeev Jabotinsky. Eldad supports the right of Jews to live in any part of the Land of Israel and opposes any surrender of Israeli sovereignty to the PLO. Eldad opposes the creation of any Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan River and called its possibility a “disaster”. The creation of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria would lead, Eldad believes, to a Hamas-run center of terror within three days of Israeli transfer of the land.

Eldad was first elected to the Knesset on the National Union list in 2003, and chaired the Ethics Committee. Prior to the scheduled Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank in August 2005, Eldad was the only member of parliament to call for non-violent civil disobedience as a tactic in the struggle against the government. Eldad even walked the few hundred kilometers between the now evacuated community of Sa-Nur (in the northern West Bank) to Neve Dekalim in order to attract attention to the opposition of the Withdrawal plan.

In the February 2006 dismantlement of the Amona outpost Eldad was injured during the confrontation between demonstrators and police, as was his ally MK Effi Eitam. The event caused a storm of criticism on both sides, as interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert accused them of inciting the crowd to attack the police, while they accused Olmert and the police of reckless use of force.

After being re-elected in 2006, in August 2007 Eldad established and headed a 10-member Homesh Knesset caucus met for the first time. The caucus’ mandate is to work to promote the re-establishment of Homesh - with the aim of eventually re-establishing all the settlements dismantled in 2005.

In November 2007 he announced the formation of a new secular right-wing party named Hatikva. Ultimately the party ran as a faction of the National Union in the 2009 elections, with Eldad in third place on the alliance’s list. He retained his seat as the Union won four mandates.

In 2008 he submitted a bill to the Knesset proposing that Hebron’s Arab residents be removed “in order to protect the Jews of Hebron”, and in 2009 penned the proposal that Palestinian Arabs be given Jordanian citizenship - a proposal that drew a formal protest from the Jordanian foreign minister.

———

We write the above because we received from Prof. Eldad MK his reaction to the Netanyahu Bar Ilan speech. We found that he makes many interesting points though clearly no suggestions for how to solve the Middle East conflict. He makes the same argument as Prime Minister Golda Meir did in her time - the historic truth that the Palestinians were not a nation - but then while following Israeli leaders accepted the reality that the Palestinians did become a nation - be it as copy cats to the Zionist arrival or the rejection by the Arab World - they clearly are a Nation today in search of a land - just like the Jews are in their return to the Eretz Israel (Land of Israel) of old. With above as a correction to the Eldad missive, we are on the side of President Obama as we understand his effort to find a way to tame the Middle East rage, and the only solution that we see before us is indeed the solution that preserves a Jewish Nation placed on part of that old land of yore, while ceding parts of that land to the Arabs living there and accepting the fact that they deemed to call themselves Palestinians, in the same spirit as we accept the Macedonians as a Nation, and accept the name they chose for themselves. This is our position at www.SustainabiliTank.info and we bless on Israelis like former MK Uri Avneri who saw what was coming already 60 years ago, and we wish that a person with obviously humane character, and a good Jew, like Prof. Eldad, will also join the effort at finding a solution.

Having said the above, we nevertheless add immediately that we agree with him in his criticism of pseudo-Jews that he mentioned, that helped even create the foundations of the Nazi reality that eventually cost the Jewish people 6 million lives. On our website, in our effort to see a better world for all - a World of Sustainability thinking - we were at loggerheads with Jewish Washington lobby that put oil first and never lifted their voice for the real interests of America or the Jewish people of Israel.

Now, with this further qualifier, we proceed posting that Eldad missive, and leave our readers decide by themselves what to accept and what to reject in the hope that the reading can then help create an acceptable synthesis that  produces an acceptable solution.

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Demilitarized Palestinian State?

by Prof. MK Arieh Eldad
 
Once upon a time, there was such a state.

“I don’t think there’s a Palestinian nation. There’s an Arab nation. I don’t think there’s a Palestinian nation. That’s a colonial invention. Since when were there Palestinians? I think there’s only an Arab nation. Until the end of the 19th century, Palestine was the southern part of Greater Syria.” If I had said this, I would undoubtedly be called a Jewish nationalist, a racist, and worst of all - detached from reality.  Yet, note well, these words were spoken by former MK Dr. Azmi Bishara in an interview with Yaron London several years ago.  Bishara is a leader of Israeli Arab citizens who openly identify with the enemy, and who was forced to flee Israel under suspicion of aiding Hizbullah in wartime.

When Benjamin Netanyahu delivered his Bar-Ilan speech, he could have used these words.  He could have ripped the mask of deception from the terrible historical lie that we have taken to our hearts as if it were written on the Tablets of the Law given at Sinai.  “Two States for Two Nations” has become holy dogma and anyone who challenges its validity is suspected of blasphemy.

But even if we assume that Netanyahu wished to speak in terms acceptable to Europe and the United States, rather than to fight a battle which he considered lost, still it would have been better had he not deceived his listeners with the scam known as “a demilitarized state.”

When I heard the speech, my initial reaction was: “There ain’t no such animal.”  Of course, I don’t mean nano-states such as Andorra or the Vatican, which have themselves chosen not to maintain an army.  There is no real state in the world defined as a demilitarized state.  And Netanyahu did not make do with a misleading general statement, he went into details: the state won’t have missiles and rockets and planes, and will not be able to sign treaties.
 
The more I listened to this and said to myself that there is no such thing, I was reminded of something quite bothersome.  Was there once such a state?  And then one of my friends reminded me there had been.

“It will be forbidden to Germany to maintain or build fortifications… in this territory (West of the Rhine)…. It is forbidden for Germany to maintain an army…. the German army will not include more than seven infantry divisions…. It is forbidden for Germany to import or export tanks or any other military hardware…. The German naval forces will be limited and are not to include submarines.  The armed forces of Germany will not include any air forces…. In the political realm, Germany is forbidden to enter into any treaty with Austria.”

So it was written and sealed in the Treaty of Versailles.  The treaty was signed on June 28, 1919, as part of the Paris Peace Conference following the First World War. Essentially, Germany became a demilitarized state and was also limited from a political perspective.
 
So what happened?  Did the “demilitarized” status prevent the Second World War and, worst of all, the destruction of European Jewry?

By 1922, an agreement between Russia and Germany had been signed in the Italian city of Rapallo.  The agreement was open and met the terms of the Versailles Treaty, but the conference that prepared it was secret; and there, Soviet Russia and Germany agreed on joint establishment of weapons factories, poison gas and ammunition.  German army officers were sent to Russia to be trained in the use of weapons that were forbidden to be maintained in Germany. In Germany, civilian factories were refurbished into arms factories, funded, as it were, by private individuals, not the state.

When I heard about the widespread activity of Jews in the Obama court and about the extreme anti-Israeli stance they are taking, and about the anger of the extreme Left in Israel over Netanyahu’s speech - in that he did not express a willingness to take in Arab refugees, give away Jerusalem and dismantle settlements, all as a prepayment for negotiating with the enemies of Israel - I again thought of the Rapallo Treaty.  It was the Jewish foreign minister of Germany, Walther Rathenau, who stood behind the agreement that years later gave Nazi Germany its powerful war machine.  And it was Erhard Milch, the son of a Jewish father, who subverted the Versailles Treaty and, in the guise of civilian aeronautic companies and flying clubs, established Lufthansa, which during the war became the Luftwaffe, the German air force that in weeks overcame Poland and France and bombed London in the Blitz.  The Jewish people can be trusted to bring forth warped members who will arm the “demilitarized Palestinian state”, if one should ever come to be.

The lesson being that there is no political power that can prevent a sovereign state from doing whatever it wants.  Netanyahu knows that if ever a Palestinian state should, Heaven forbid, be established, Israel will not be able to declare war on it if it should choose, for instance, to sign an international tourism agreement with Cyprus or a transfer-of-technology agreement with Iran. If pipes are manufactured in Tulkarm, Israel will not be able to start a war that can be justified in the eyes of the world if steel cutters turn the pipes into Kassam rockets.  Since nothing other than Israeli force could possibly preserve demilitarization, Netanyahu is deceiving the people of Israel and promising them something that cannot be delivered.

But all of the above is not the main thing.  The main thing is that Netanyahu has recognized the right of Arabs to establish a sovereign state in our homeland.  None of his conditions and reservations can hide this abomination.  Whoever recognizes the right of his enemy to establish a state in his homeland has abandoned all principle and all that is left to do is argue over the price. Whoever has left his religion and changed his faith cannot insist on observing the commandments of what is no longer his faith.  Whoever has abandoned his patrimony has no basis on which to insist on continuing to build on its lands.

U.S. Officials Leaked a False Story Blaming Iran.

By Gareth Porter*
EXCLUSIVE-PART 3

WASHINGTON, Jun 24 (IPS) - In March 1997, FBI Director Louis Freeh got what he calls in his memoirs “the first truly big break in the case”: the arrest in Canada of one of the Saudi Hezbollah members the Saudis accused of being the driver of the getaway car at Khobar Towers.

Hani al-Sayegh, then 28 years old, had arrived in Canada in August 1996 after having left Saudi Arabia, by his own account, in August 1995, for Iran and Syria. The Canadian government charged him with being a terrorist, based on claims by the Saudi regime.

In order to be transferred to the United States without facing deportation to Saudi Arabia, where he was believed to face the death penalty, al-Sayegh had to agreed to a plea bargain under which he would admit to having proposed an attack on U.S. personnel, for which he would have to serve up to 10 years in prison.

In fact, the only thing al-Sayegh had actually admitted to, according to FBI sources, was having proposed an attack on one AWACS plane that had been turned over to the Saudi Air Force - a proposal he said had been rejected. Both before and after being brought to Washington, moreover, Al-Sayegh steadfastly denied any knowledge of the Khobar Towers bombing.

Despite that consistent denial by al-Sayegh, a Washington Post story on Apr. 14, 1997 quoted U.S. and Saudi officials as saying that al-Sayegh had met two years earlier with senior Iranian intelligence officer Brig. Gen. Ahmad Sherifi and that Iran was the “organising force” behind the Khobar bombing. That story, leaked by officials supporting the Saudi version of the Khobar story, cited Canadian intercepts of al-Sayegh’s phone conversations in Ottawa before his arrest as allegedly incriminating evidence.

The story leant further credence to the general belief in Washington that Iran had masterminded the bombing, mainly because U.S. intelligence had observed the surveillance of U.S. military and civilian sites in Saudi Arabia by Iranians and their Saudi allies in 1994 and 1995.

What al-Sayegh actually told FBI agents in a series of interviews in Ottawa and Washington, however, contradicted the leaked story, according to sources familiar with those interviews.

Al-Sayegh admitted having carried out the surveillance of one military site other than Khobar for the Iranians, but insisted that it was not to prepare for a possible terrorist bombing but to identify potential targets for Iranian retaliation in the event of a U.S. attack on Iran.

His testimony was consistent with what Ambassador Ron Neumann, who was director of the Office for Iran and Iraq in the State Department’s Bureau of Near East Affairs from 1991 through 1994, had been saying about the Iranian reconnaissance of U.S. targets.

While most official analysts were ready to believe that Iran was plotting a terrorist attack against the United States, Neumann recalls that he had discerned a pattern in Iranian behaviour: every time U.S.-Iran tensions rose, there was an increase in Iranian reconnaissance of U.S. diplomatic and military faculties.

“The pattern could be taken as hostile but it could equally have been defensive,” says Neumann, meaning that the Iranians viewed such reconnaissance of possible U.S. targets as part of their deterrent to a U.S. attack.

Hani al-Sayegh would have been a strange choice for driver of the getaway car at Khobar Towers. A frail man whose frequent asthma attacks repeatedly interrupted his interviews with the FBI, al-Sayegh recounted to investigators he had entered military training with the Iranian IRGC, but had been told by his IRGC handler after one particularly disastrous exercise that his asthma made him unfit for military operations.

FBI veteran Jack Cloonan, who was talking with the agents interviewing al-Sayegh that spring and summer, told al-Sayegh’s immigration lawyer, Michael Wildes, that he was convinced al-Sayegh had not participated in the operation, according to notes in the diary Wildes kept on the case.

Hani al-Sayegh continued to deny either that he was involved or the Iranians had anything to do with Khobar, and as a result was deported to Saudi Arabia in 1999 - despite the widespread assumption within the FBI that he would be beheaded on his return.

Freeh had no case against the Iranians and their Saudi allies unless he could get access to the Saudi Shi’a detainees. In the memoir “My FBI”, Freeh charged that President Bill Clinton refused to press Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah for access to those prisoners and then asked him for a contribution to the future Clinton presidential library at a meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel in September 1998.

That account is disputed, however, by numerous Clinton administration officials. Freeh, who was not present, cites only “my sources”, strongly suggesting that he got it from the self-interested Prince Bandar.

Freeh claimed that former President George Bush had then interceded with Abdullah at Freeh’s request, resulting in a meeting between Freeh and Abdullah at Bandar’s Virginia estate Sep. 29, 1998. At that meeting, Abdullah offered to allow the FBI to submit questions to the detainees and observe the questions and answers from behind one-way glass.

But what Freeh left out of the story is that Abdullah’s new offer came at a time when the Saudis felt a greater need to appease Washington on the Khobar Towers investigation than they had previously.

In May 1998, the CIA had learned that Saudi intelligence had broken up an al Qaeda plot to smuggle Sagger anti-tank missiles from Yemen into Saudi Arabia about a week before a scheduled visit to Saudi by Vice-President Al Gore and had not informed U.S. intelligence about the incident.

Then, on Aug. 7, 1998, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania had been bombed 10 minutes apart. The CIA had quickly ascertained that al Qaeda was responsible for the bombings, with the result that U.S. intelligence began to focus more on bin Laden’s operations in Saudi Arabia.

Gore had met with Abdullah on Sep. 24, and had pressed hard for access to an important al Qaeda finance official, Madani al Tayyib, who had been detained by the Saudi government the previous year, but kept away from U.S. intelligence.

The Saudi regime had long acted to keep the United States away from the bin Laden trail in Saudi. During the Afghan War, high-ranking Saudi officials, including interior minister Prince Nayef himself, had worked closely with bin Laden. And those ties had apparently continued even after the Saudi government revoked bin Laden’s citizenship, froze his assets, and began cracking down on some anti-government Islamic extremists in 1994.

Evidence soon appeared that the regime had allowed Saudi supporters of bin Laden to finance his operations through Saudi charities, while encouraging bin Laden to focus on the U.S. military rather than the regime.

9/11 Commission investigators later learned that, after bin Laden’s move from Sudan to Afghanistan in May 1996, a delegation of Saudi officials had asked top Taliban leaders to tell bin Laden that if he didn’t attack the regime, “recognition will follow”.

Meanwhile, Nayef was resisting CIA requests for bin Laden’s birth certificate, passport and bank records.

The CIA had been sharing its own intelligence on bin Laden with the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police, including copies of National Security Agency interceptions of the cell phone conversations of suspected al Qaeda officials. Then the militants suddenly stopped using their cell phones, indicating they had been tipped off by the Mabahith.

In early 1997, the CIA’s bin Laden station even issued a memorandum for CIA Director George Tenet, who was about to travel to Saudi Arabia, identifying Saudi intelligence as a “hostile service”.

By late September 1998, the Saudi regime was feeling the heat from the Clinton administration for its failure to cooperate on bin Laden’s operations in Saudi Arabia. Abdullah’s proposal was a way to demonstrate cooperation on terrorism while helping Freeh promote the Saudi line on Khobar Towers.

(*This is the third of a five-part series, “Khobar Towers Investigated: How a Saudi Deception Protected Osama bin Laden”. The series was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.)

—————————-

FBI Ignored Compelling Evidence of bin Laden Role

By Gareth Porter

EXCLUSIVE-PART 4 *

WASHINGTON, Jun 25 (IPS) - Osama Bin Laden had made no secret of his intention to attack the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia. He had been calling for such attacks to drive it from the country since his first fatwa calling for jihad against Western “occupation” of Islamic lands in early 1992.

On Jul. 11, 1995, he had written an “Open Letter” to King Fahd advocating a campaign of guerilla attacks to drive U.S. military forces out of the Kingdom.

Bin Laden’s al Qaeda organisation began carrying out that campaign later that same year. On Nov. 13, 1995 a car bomb destroyed the Office of the Programme Manager of the Saudi National Guard (OPM SANG) in Riyadh, killing five U.S. airmen and wounding 34.

The confessions of the four jihadists from the Afghan War to the bombing, which were broadcast on Saudi television, said they had been inspired by Osama bin Laden, and one of them referred to a camp in Afghanistan which was associated with bin Laden.

“It was a backhanded reference to bin Laden,” says veteran FBI agent Dan Coleman.

The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh immediately requested that the FBI be allowed to interrogate the suspects as soon as their arrests were announced in April. But the Saudis never responded to the request, and on May 31, the embassy was informed only an hour and half before that the four suspects would be beheaded.

When the bomb exploded at Khobar Towers on Jun. 25, 1996, Scott Erskine, the agent in charge of the Riyadh bombing investigation, was about to return to the United States after another frustrating meeting in which Saudi officials were not forthcoming about whom they were going to prosecute. When FBI Director Louis Freeh visited Khobar a few days after the bombing, he was told not to expect any more information on the Riyadh bombing.

Instead of insisting that the Clinton administration put more pressure on the Saudis to cooperate on the possibility of links between the two bombings, Freeh quietly decided to drop the investigation of the Riyadh bombing entirely. The case was put on “inactive” status, according to two former FBI officials, meaning that no more actions were to be taken, even though it had not been formally closed.

Bin Laden made it more difficult to ignore his role, however, by publicly claiming responsibility for both the Riyadh and Khobar bombings. In October 1996, after having issued yet another fatwa calling on Muslims to drive U.S. soldiers out of the Kingdom, bin Laden was quoted in al Quds al Arabi, the Palestinian daily published in London, as saying, “The crusader army was shattered when we bombed Khobar.”

And in an interview published in the same newspaper Nov. 29, 1996, he was asked why there had been no further operations along the lines of the Khobar operation. “The military are aware that preparations for major operations require time, in contrast with small operations,” said bin Laden.

He then linked the two bombings in Saudi Arabia explicitly as signals to the United States from his organisation: “We had thought that the Riyadh and Khobar blasts were a sufficient signal to sensible U.S. decision-makers to avert a real battle between the Islamic nation and U.S. forces,” said bin Laden, “but it seems that they did not understand the signal.”

According to Coleman, one of the FBI’s top investigators on al Qaeda, bin Laden always took credit for terrorist actions he had planned but not for those he had not planned. For example, bin Laden issued no claim about the World Trade Centre bombing and told his former business agent turned FBI informer, Jamal al-Fadl, that he had nothing to do with it, Coleman says.

The Riyadh and Khobar bombings even had a common operational feature. As noted by the head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA, Michael Scheuer, in both cases, the vehicle was not parked so as to bring the entire building down. If the team executing the Khobar bombing had parked parallel to the security fence rather than backing up to it, says Scheuer, it would have destroyed the entire building. The same thing had happened in the OPM SANG bombing.

The bin Laden unit of the CIA had collected concrete intelligence on bin Laden’s role in planning the Khobar Towers bombing. In mid-January, 1996, according to the intelligence compiled by the unit, bin Laden traveled to Doha, Qatar, where plans were discussed for attacks in eastern Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden arranged for 20 tonnes of high explosive C-4 to be shipped from Poland to Qatar, two tonnes of which were to be sent to Saudi Arabia, the report said.

Bin Laden specifically referred to operations targeting U.S. interests in the triangle of cities of Dammam, Dhahran and Khobar in Eastern Province, using clandestine al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia, according to the intelligence reporting.

FBI agents working on the Khobar case simply rejected any evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in Khobar, however, because the decision had already been made that the Shi’as were responsible.

David Williams, then the FBI agent in charge of counter-terrorism for the Bureau, recalls that he had read intelligence reports suggesting bin Laden’s involvement in the bombing, but says he had done so “with a suspicious eye”.

The FBI investigators dismissed the relevance of the evidence linking bin Laden to the Riyadh bombing. As one former FBI official explained the logic of that position to IPS, the Khobar Towers bombing was completely different from the Riyadh bombing seven months earlier: it was in an area of Eastern Province where Shi’a oppositionists were predominant and where al Qaeda had no known cell.

The facts, however, told a different story. The city of Khobar itself was predominantly Sunni, not Shi’a, and the triangular area of the three cities had a large population of veterans of the Afghan War who were followers of bin Laden. As the London-based Palestinian publication reported in August 1996, the six jihadis who confessed to the bombing were all from an area called Al Thoqba near Khobar.

One of the veteran jihadis detained after the bombing, Yusuf al-Ayayri, who was then the actual head of al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula, was from Dammam and knew the jihadi community in that region very well, according to Norwegian specialist on al Qaeda Thomas Hegghammer.

The FBI and CIA knew nothing about bin Laden’s movement in that part of Saudi Arabia, however, because they were completely dependent on Saudi intelligence for such information. A CIA memorandum dated Jul. 1, 1996 said the Agency had “little information” about the “location, size, composition or activities” of opposition cells in Saudi Arabia.

Interviews with FBI officials involved in the investigation make it clear that they were not interested in evidence linking bin Laden to the bombing, because they understood their task to be limited to getting whatever information they could from Saudi officials.

Williams says he didn’t question the Saudi account of the Khobar plot, because, “You start to believe the people who are your interlocutors.”

Asked about the evidence that bin Laden was behind the plot, another FBI official with substantive responsibility for the investigation told IPS, “I didn’t get involved in that aspect. That wasn’t my job.”

(*This is the fourth of a five-part series, ” Khobar Towers Investigated: How a Saudi Deception Protected Osama bin Laden”. The work on this series was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

David BromwichProfessor of Literature at Yale
Posted: June 24, 2009  on Huffington Post.

He writes:

Iran Was an Easier Enemy Before We Saw Their Faces - If you want to kill with a clean conscience, the faces of the enemy had better be blank. Start to see them as human beings and it becomes harder to blockade and bomb them, to mine, and pollute, and “destabilize.” President Clinton had no imagining of the disease he would bring to the innocent in Sudan by the “surgical” missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in 1998. George W. Bush had a happy warrior’s notion of the fury he would unleash on Falluja when he gave the order to destroy that city after the election of 2004. The Sudan bombing was treated by the American press as a distraction from a sex scandal. The second siege of Falluja–tens of thousands of houses crushed or cratered–was hardly covered at all.

The faces of the people, and not “the face of the enemy.” The difference between the abstract and the individual is decisive for imagination. It is the faces that are indelible, as we saw in the streets of Tehran, whether the men and women were holding up cell phones or placards written black on green, or waving a bloodied shirt or bandage; or holding a rock, as some in Iran did, and as the members of other crowds, less kindly portrayed in the American press, have been known to do. It isn’t the face of the enemy that we see in these pictures. No, these are people much like ourselves, who don’t want to die at the hands of their government–or at the hands of ours, either, for that matter.

We know them from the messages they have sent by Twitter; by the evidence of their large and small sacrifices; by their expressed loyalty to a God whom they invoke in prayers against the abuse of power by their leaders. The faces are peculiar, personal, and counter to expectation; they show an energy of original purpose. I want to live as much as you do, they say.

The large plans for good wars need to reduce the enemy to an abstraction before the bombing feels right. The most famous of American war promoters, John McCain, has a simple and emphatic ability to abstract–Iraq, Gaza, Georgia, Iran, it is all one to him. They turn him on and fire him up. Wars, he thinks (and was raised to think), are simply the spectacular way that we settle our affairs in this world. But successful abstraction is a mental trick that is not possible to everyone.

The secular prophets for the bombing of Iran have always known how to perform this trick. They knew long before they fell in love with a fraction of the Iranian people. McCain himself, and Charles Krauthammer and Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman and Alan Dershowitz–all are friends of Iran, as they see it. Friends of the Iran of their minds, which will some day replace the enemy Iran. The proof of their friendship is their eagerness to secure a blockade and to bomb.

And how these prophets of war loved the protests! Here was the real Iran, yearning to be surgically struck. We will bring these Iranians their freedom, said McCain and the rest, by killing their country. So let us cheer them now, and metaphorically shake their hand by satellite image, before we bomb them for their own sakes.

There was an odd thing, though. With the swell of vicarious protest–the pulse of resistance beating for Iran in American hearts that haven’t for years protested against an abuse of American power–none of the Iranians was saying what the men of our war party took them to be saying. The Iranians were not saying: “Please, America, heed our call, and lay down sanctions against us. Starve and debilitate, murder us with ‘black ops’ and lecture and bomb us into your idea of civilization.” They seemed to say none of those things. Their message was short and their faces said only what faces can say: “Here we are; we, too, are Iran. Now watch us–we know what we’re about.”

In the absence of local clients in the theatre of action–all of Iran seems to offer nothing on the lines of Ahmad Chalabi, no-one that Americans can call our own–the McCain gesture has been reduced to a strut. The sham is revealed by the fact that the people who criticize Barack Obama for saying too little today cannot cite the name of a single Iranian dissident who wants the United States to say more (let alone to take an active role). There is not one politician in that country of 70 million who wishes the United States to be his special backer. On the contrary: an American endorsement is death to an Iranian politician. We are, after all, the casualties of our history: our access to oil in the days when Iranians enjoyed no such access, our support for Iraq in its war with Iran, our training of the Shah’s secret police, the Savak, in methods of torture whose victims number between 25,000 and 100,000.

Nor does the curious contrast under the apparent alignment escape the notice of the more observant Iranians today. The American-Iranian journalist Kouross Esmaeli, for example, said on Monday in an interview with Amy Goodman:

The Iranians know Senator John McCain as the man who sang “Bomb, bomb Iran” during the elections of last year. The man holds no credibility as far as supporting Iranians or seeming like he’s got the best interests of the Iranians at heart. . . .President Obama’s stand, I think, has been the most sensible, and it’s amazing that the President of the United States is taking such a sensible stand. . . . Everyone I’ve talked to in Iran has said the same thing, that we do not need any symbol of Western, especially American, interference in Iran’s internal politics. And the fact that America does not have diplomatic relations with Iran really ties its hands as far as how far he can go in really supporting Iran.

This judgment by an Iranian dissident was recently echoed by Joe Klein–a journalist who knows that the war party have democracy most on their lips when they have destruction in their hearts. The bluster of Senator McCain in support of resistance abroad, said Klein, is a self-indulgence at this point. Senator McCain, if he’s going to talk about this, should also talk about the fact that the United States supported Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war for eight years. Every one of those protesters out in the streets, every last one of them believes the United States supplied Saddam Hussein with the poison gas that has debilitated tens of thousands of Iranian men.

To call McCain’s recent statements self-indulgent is charitable. They are the convenient reflex of a hothead, whose alternations between principle and opportunism would be dizzying if the two postures were not so often indistinguishable.

A striking feature of the American coverage of the protests has been the omission of the word Israel. For it is to Israel, and especially the ministries that have governed Israel since 2001, that we in America owe our sense that the overthrow of the present regime in Iran is an exigent concern for us. The idea–absurd on the face of it–that Iran is a “suicide nation” and that its nuclear research must consequently be stopped at once and by violent means, has re-appeared in recent days. The idea of the suicide nation is meant to stimulate the crime of war that it excuses; but like all such abstract ideas, it is untestable and therefore impossible to defeat by rational argument.

The best reply to those who would show support of the good Iran by a military strike against the bad Iran was given last week by an Israeli journalist, Zvi Bar’el, in Haaretz:

Suddenly, there appears to be an Iranian people. Not just nuclear technology, extremist ayatollahs, the Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad, and an axis of evil. All of a sudden, the ears need to be conditioned to hear other names: “‘Mousawi’ or ‘Mousavi,’ how is it pronounced exactly?”; Mehdi Karroubi; Khamenei (”It’s not ‘Khomeini’?”). . . .Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators did not pour into the streets due to American intervention or threats from Israel. They want a better Iran for themselves, not for Obama or Benjamin Netanyahu. They will be the ones to determine what qualifies as a better Iran.

This is the crux of the confusion that we have stumbled upon. The grand enemy that was neatly packaged into a nuclear, Shi’ite-religious container has come apart at the seams. On the one hand, it threatens, while on the other hand it demonstrates for democracy. On one street, it raises a fist against America, and in another alley, streams of protesters march for human rights. For goodness’ sake, who is left to bomb?

The question is finely framed. But it needs to be followed by another question. Who wants to bomb?

The answer, in Israel, is those whose idea of Israeli security is to create a devastation all around Israel. The answer in America is those who have an appetite for wars. But a shockingly small number of them have ever set foot into the trouser leg of a military uniform. McCain is an exception, but McCain bombed the Vietnamese from a tremendous height. He witnessed, once, the effects of napalm, and said he preferred not to think about it again. (That is another meaning of abstraction.) So let us say it plainly. The abstract men of power who have now set up as critics of Barack Obama for his want of aggression, the new special friends of “the real Iran”–their warmth, their zeal, their passion all depend on the ability or deformation that allows them to turn a chosen enemy into an inhuman blank.

In America, we have also heard more seductive and moderate-sounding appeals from those who speak of “regime change” as a thing that outside forces can help Iran to achieve. This goes with the ethic of Romantic interventionism which has a nineteenth-century prehistory in the writings and actions of Byron and Gladstone, among others. But we cannot reawaken the old imperial idealism at this moment without the imperialism out of which it naturally grew.

All vicarious politics is sick–the more eager, excited, and fraternal, the more prone to self-deception. The vicarious politics of liberation only adds a dimension of self-righteousness to the fault Edmund Burke detected in the politics of all revolutions: “The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror.” But the reformers of Tehran know well enough what they are about; they know in spite of (perhaps at odds with) the help with which we would encumber them. They are not calling it revolution. And whatever they end up doing, we should not try to name it or clinch its meaning for them.

—————

The above is amazing on many levels but for those that might indeed fear a nuclear weapon in the hands of the present beastly leaders of Iran, the Israelis, and the Arab World, this article will provide for nightmares unless the real Iranians we saw in the streets on TV manage to win the budding Iranian internal tug of war. We shall watch, but the time is not unlimitted.

Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: The New York Times online June 23, 2009 - in print - a different version appeared June 24, 2009.
WASHINGTON — Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but the material may never find its way into court because of legal and diplomatic obstacles.

A German intelligence report described bank transfers made in the early 1990s by Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz and other members of the Saudi royal family to a charity that was suspected of financing militants’ activities in Pakistan and Bosnia {this paragraph was deleted from the print edition}.

The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers’ copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.

The Saudis and their defenders in Washington have long denied links to terrorists, and they have mounted an aggressive and, so far, successful campaign to beat back the allegations in federal court based on a claim of sovereign immunity.

Allegations of Saudi links to terrorism have been the subject of years of government investigations and furious debate. Critics have said that some members of the Saudi ruling class pay off terrorist groups in part to keep them from being more active in their own country.

But the thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents compiled by lawyers for the Sept. 11 families and their insurers represented an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence.

Internal Treasury Department documents obtained by the lawyers under the Freedom of Information Act, for instance, said that a prominent Saudi charity, the International Islamic Relief Organization, heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, showed “support for terrorist organizations” at least through 2006.

A self-described Qaeda operative in Bosnia said in an interview with lawyers in the lawsuit that another charity largely controlled by members of the royal family, the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, provided money and supplies to the terrorist group in the 1990s and hired militant operatives like himself.

Another witness in Afghanistan said in a sworn statement that in 1998 he had witnessed an emissary for a leading Saudi prince, Turki al-Faisal, hand a check for one billion Saudi riyals (now worth about $267 million) to a top Taliban leader.

And a confidential German intelligence report gave a line-by-line description of tens of millions of dollars in bank transfers, with dates and dollar amounts, made in the early 1990s by Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz and other members of the Saudi royal family to another charity that was suspected of financing militants’ activities in Pakistan and Bosnia.

The new documents, provided to The New York Times by the lawyers, are among several hundred thousand pages of investigative material obtained by the Sept. 11 families and their insurers as part of a long-running civil lawsuit seeking to hold Saudi Arabia and its royal family liable for financing Al Qaeda.

Only a fraction of the documents have been entered into the court record, and much of the new material is unknown even to the Saudi lawyers in the case.

The documents provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. And the broader links rely at times on a circumstantial, connect-the-dots approach to tie together Saudi princes, Middle Eastern charities, suspicious transactions and terrorist groups.

Saudi lawyers and supporters say that the links are flimsy and exploit stereotypes about terrorism, and that the country is being sued because it has deep pockets and was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers.

“In looking at all the evidence the families brought together, I have not seen one iota of evidence that Saudi Arabia had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks,” Michael Kellogg, a Washington lawyer representing Prince Muhammad al-Faisal al-Saud in the lawsuit, said in an interview.

He and other defense lawyers said that rather than supporting Al Qaeda, the Saudis were sworn enemies of its leader, Osama bin Laden, who was exiled from Saudi Arabia, his native country, in 1996. “It’s an absolute tragedy what happened to them, and I understand their anger,” Mr. Kellogg said of the victims’ families. “They want to find those responsible, but I think they’ve been disserved by their lawyers by bringing claims without any merit against the wrong people.”

The Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment.

Two federal judges and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already ruled against the 7,630 people represented in the lawsuit, made up of survivors of the attacks and family members of those killed, throwing out the suit on the ground that the families cannot bring legal action in the United States against a sovereign nation and its leaders.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide this week whether to hear an appeal, but the families’ prospects dimmed last month when the Justice Department sided with the Saudis in their immunity claim and urged the court not to consider the appeal.

The Justice Department said a 1976 law on sovereign immunity protected the Saudis from liability and noted that “potentially significant foreign relations consequences” would arise if such suits were allowed to proceed.

“Cases like this put the U.S. government in an extremely difficult position when it has to make legal arguments, even when they are the better view of the law, that run counter to those of terrorist victims,” said John Bellinger, a former State Department lawyer who was involved in the Saudi litigation.

Senior Obama administration officials held a private meeting on Monday with 9/11 family members to speak about progress in cracking down on terrorist financing. Administration officials at the meeting largely sidestepped questions about the lawsuit, according to participants. But the official who helped lead the meeting, Stuart A. Levey, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, has been outspoken in his criticism of wealthy Saudis, saying they have helped to finance terrorism.

Even if the 9/11 families were to get their trial in the lawsuit, they might have difficulty getting some of their new material into evidence. Some would most likely be challenged on grounds it was irrelevant or uncorroborated hearsay, or that it related to Saudis who were clearly covered by sovereign immunity.

And if the families were to clear those hurdles, two intriguing pieces of evidence in the Saudi puzzle might still remain off limits.

One is a 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint Congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks. The secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers, and the Saudis themselves urged at the time that it be made public. President George W. Bush declined to do so.

Kristen Breitweiser, an advocate for Sept. 11 families, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center, said in an interview that during a White House meeting in February between President Obama and victims’ families, the president told her that he was willing to make the pages public.

But she said she had not heard from the White House since then.

The other evidence that may not be admissible consists of classified documents leaked to one of the law firms representing the families, Motley Rice of South Carolina, which is headed by Ronald Motley, a well-known trial lawyer who won lucrative lawsuits involving asbestos and tobacco.

Lawyers for the firm say someone anonymously slipped them 55 documents that contained classified government material relating to the Saudi lawsuit.

Though she declined to describe the records, Jodi Flowers, a lawyer for Motley Rice, said she was pushing to have them placed in the court file.

“We wouldn’t be fighting this hard, and we wouldn’t have turned the material over to the judge, if we didn’t think it was really important to the case,” she said.

IAI to help build quieter, greener and cleaner aircraft
By Karin Kloosterman
June 24, 2009

Carbon offsetting your flight is one way to help reduce the amount of greenhouse gases entering the air. But experts in the transportation industry know that it’s necessary to start from the ground up — by making planes, trains and automobiles more environmentally friendly as part of their engineering.

Taking on a major partnership in the European Union’s flagship project - the $1.6 billion Clean Sky Joint Technology Initiative together with large European partners, Israel’s aviation giant Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) is helping to make skies greener. The company is the only non-EU partner in the massive research and development project.

Although in planning for a couple of years, just six months ago the Israeli company started working on its tasks. Led by Dassault, a prominent European aerospace company, IAI is also greening the skies along with Airbus and Eurocopter.

“We are dealing with reducing the amount of hazardous manufacturing waste, recycling, reducing weight - which will reduce carbon emissions - and extending the life [of the aircraft], which reduces need for recycling,” says Arnold Nathan, the director of IAI’s R&D Engineering Division.

The be all and end all of green flight projects:

Funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program, Israel’s IAI is playing no small role: “This is the R&D product for the next seven years in Europe,” Nathan tells ISRAEL21c.

The goal, he says, is that after seven years the group members will have prototypes ready. Each of the six groups is taking on a different challenge, and all will contribute to making “ecologically-sound aircraft of the future,” says Nathan. IAI is a major player, and is focusing on design platforms.

“There are a couple of things IAI will be involved in,” he explains. “We are dealing with hazardous materials, chrome six - the chemical from the movie Erin Brockovich.” Used as a coating for corrosion protection, “everyone in the aircraft industry is using it and everyone wants to get away from it,” says Nathan. IAI is on the team hunting for a chrome six replacement which is more ecologically sound.

In another direction, IAI is looking into lighter aluminum alloys to lower fuel consumption, which results in less greenhouse gas emissions.

A third major project in the Clean Sky project is in composite materials, and finding ways to cut down on waste. The Boeing 787 and the Airbus 350 are all using more composite materials, explains Nathan. Made from cotton fabrics with epoxies, the process results in about 20-40 percent waste. And the waste is defined as hazardous to the environment.

Scrapping, recycling, extending aircraft life

In its mission, Clean Sky partners are looking into alternate ways to deal with the scrap, either through improved manufacturing methods, upfront planning, or recycling the waste efficiently. Using less energy in the manufacturing process, says Nathan, originally from Chicago, is also part of the environmental idea.

Additionally, IAI is focusing its R&D efforts on extending the life of an aircraft. “So if you make the life of an aircraft longer, you don’t have to deal with its waste and recycling,” says Nathan.

“We are really shooting to help the EU reach its 2020 goals – the ACARE — or Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe,” which by 2020 plans on reducing 50% of its CO2 emissions, 50% in external noise, and in general, greening the industry.

IAI plays a leadership role in four or five work packages. In one of six groups, each platform will come up with a serious significant piece of hardware by around 2013, two years before the project is supposed to end.

IAI is an Israeli aeronautics company involved in building aircraft. The company has partnered with Gulfstream in the US for building business jets. So far it has assembled about 70 business jets in Israel. The company also specializes in manufacturing the Arrow missile, and satellite and radar equipment through its various divisions.

Established in 1953, estimates suggest the company sees about $2 billion in sales annually, supplied by its workforce of about 1,500 people. Its products are developed from the skills and experience Israeli defense officials and researchers have acquired in order to help defend their country from hostile neighbors over the years.

Al Qaeda Excluded from the Suspects List.

{This by official Washington in an effort to blame President Bill Clinton and the Iranians and keep clean the Saudis. What will this mean for the investigation of the larger circle surrounding Prince Bandar and 9/11? - our comment}

By Gareth Porter*

EXCLUSIVE-PART I

WASHINGTON, Jun 22 (IPS) - On Jun. 25, 1996, a massive truck bomb exploded at a building in the Khobar Towers complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, which housed U.S. Air Force personnel, killing 19 U.S. airmen and wounding 372.

Immediately after the blast, more than 125 agents from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were ordered to the site to sift for clues and begin the investigation of who was responsible. But when two U.S. embassy officers arrived at the scene of the devastation early the next morning, they found a bulldozer beginning to dig up the entire crime scene.

The Saudi bulldozing stopped only after Scott Erskine, the supervisory FBI special agent for international terrorism investigations, threatened that Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who happened to be in Saudi Arabia when the bomb exploded, would intervene personally on the matter.

U.S. intelligence then intercepted communications from the highest levels of the Saudi government, including interior minister Prince Nayef, to the governor and other officials of Eastern Province instructing them to go through the motions of cooperating with U.S. officials on their investigation but to obstruct it at every turn.

That was the beginning of what interviews with more than a dozen sources familiar with the investigation and other information now available reveal was a systematic effort by the Saudis to obstruct any U.S. investigation of the bombing and to deceive the United States about who was responsible for the bombing.

* * *

The Saudi regime steered the FBI investigation toward Iran and its Saudi Shi’a allies with the apparent intention of keeping U.S. officials away from a trail of evidence that would have led to Osama bin Laden and a complex set of ties between the regime and the Saudi terrorist organiser.

The key to the success of the Saudi deception was FBI director Louis Freeh, who took personal charge of the FBI investigation, letting it be known within the Bureau that he was the “case officer” for the probe, according to former FBI officials.

Freeh allowed Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan to convince him that Iran was involved in the bombing, and that President Bill Clinton, for whom he had formed a visceral dislike, “had no interest in confronting the fact that Iran had blown up the towers,” as Freeh wrote in his memoirs.

* * *

The Khobar Towers investigation soon became Freeh’s vendetta against Clinton. “Freeh was pursuing this for his own personal agenda,” says former FBI agent Jack Cloonan.

A former high-ranking FBI official recalls that Freeh “was always meeting with Bandar”. And many of the meetings were not in Freeh’s office but at Bandar’s 38-room home in McLean, Virginia.

Meanwhile, the Saudis were refusing the most basic FBI requests for cooperation. When Ray Mislock, who headed the National Security Division of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, requested permission to go door to door to interview witnesses in the neighbourhood, the Saudis refused.

“It’s our responsibility,” Mislock recalls being told. “We’ll do the interviews.”

But the Saudis never conducted such interviews. The same thing happened when Mislock requested access to phone records for the immediate area surrounding Khobar Towers.

Soon after the bombing, officials of the Saudi secret police, the Mabahith, began telling their FBI and CIA contacts that they had begun arresting members of a little known Shi’a group called “Saudi Hezbollah”, which Saudi and U.S. intelligence had long believed was close to Iran. They claimed that they had extensive intelligence information linking the group to the Khobar Towers bombing.

But a now declassified July 1996 report by CIA analysts on the bombing reveals that the Mabahith claims were considered suspect. The report said the Mabahith “have not shown U.S. officials their evidence… nor provided many details on their investigation.”

* * *

Nevertheless, Freeh quickly made Iranian and Saudi Shi’a responsibility for the bombing the official premise of the investigation, excluding from the inquiry the hypothesis that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organisation had carried out the Khobar Towers bombing.

“There was never, ever a doubt in my mind about who did this,” says a former FBI official involved in the investigation who refused to be identified.

FBI and CIA experts on Osama bin Laden tried unsuccessfully to play a role in the Khobar Towers investigation. Jack Cloonan, a member of the FBI’s I-49 unit, which was building a legal case against bin Laden over previous terrorist actions, recalls asking the Washington Field Office (WFO), which had direct responsibility for the investigation, to allow such I-49 participation, only to be rebuffed.

“The WFO was hypersensitive and told us to f*ck off,” says Cloonan.

The CIA’s bin Laden unit, which had only been established in early 1996, was also excluded by CIA leadership from that Agency’s work on the bombing. Two or three days after the Khobar bombing, Cloonan recalls, the agency “locked down” its own investigation, creating an encrypted “passline” that limited access to information related to Khobar investigation to the handful of people at the CIA who were given that code.

The head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Centre, Michael Scheuer, was not included among that small group.

Nevertheless, Scheuer instructed his staff to put together all the information the station had collected from all sources - human assets, electronic intercepts and open sources - indicating that there would be an al Qaeda operation in Saudi Arabia after the bombing in Riyadh the previous November.

The result was a four-page memo which ticked off the evidence that bin Laden’s al Qaeda organisation had been planning a military operation involving explosives in Saudi in 1996.

“One of the places mentioned in the memo was Khobar,” says Scheuer. “They were moving explosives from Port Said through Suez Canal to the Red Sea and to Yemen, then infiltrating them across the border with Saudi Arabia.”

A few days after receiving the bin Laden unit’s four-page memo, the head of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Centre, Winston Wiley, one of the few CIA officials who was privy to information on the investigation, came to Scheuer’s office and closed the door. Wiley opened up a folder which had only one document in it - a translated intercept of an internal Iranian communication in which there was a reference to Khobar Towers. “Are you satisfied?” Wiley asked.

Scheuer replied that it was only one piece of information in a much bigger universe of information that pointed in another direction. “If that’s all there is,” he told Wiley, “I would say it was very interesting and ought to be followed up, but it isn’t definitive.”

But the signal from the CIA leadership was clear: Iran had already been identified as responsible for the Khobar bombing plot, and there was no interest in pursuing the bin Laden angle.

In September 1996, bin Laden’s former business agent Jamal Al-Fadl, who had left al Qaeda over personal grievances, walked into the U.S. embassy in Eritrea and immediately began providing the best intelligence the United States had ever gotten on bin Laden and al Qaeda.

But the CIA and FBI made no effort take advantage of his knowledge to get information on possible al Qaeda involvement in the Khobar Towers bombing, according to Dan Coleman, one of al-Fadl’s FBI handlers.

“We were never given any questions to ask him about Khobar Towers,” says Coleman.

———————

(*This is the first of a five-part series, “Khobar Towers Investigated: How a Saudi Deception Protected Osama bin Laden”. The series was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.)

so far:

 http://www.ipsnews.net/new_focus/iran/

——————-

PART II

Saudi Account of Khobar Bore Telltale Signs of Fraud.

By Gareth Porter
EXCLUSIVE-PART 2 (*)

WASHINGTON, Jun 23 (IPS) - In the last week of October 1996, the Saudi secret police, the Mabahith, gave David Williams, the FBI’s assistant special agent in charge of counter-terrorism issues, what they said were summaries of the confessions obtained from some 40 Shi’a detainees.

The alleged confessions portrayed the bombing as the work of a cell of Saudi Hezbollah that had had carried out surveillance of U.S. targets under the direction of an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer before hatching a plot to blow up the Khobar Towers facility.

But the documents were curiously short of the kind of details that would have allowed U.S. investigators to verify key elements of the accounts. In fact, Saudi officials refused even to reveal the names of the detainees who were alleged to have made the confessions, identifying the suspects only by numbers one through six or seven, according to a former FBI official involved in the investigation.

Justice Department lawyers argued that the confessions were completely unreliable, and unusable in court, because they had probably been extracted by torture. At Attorney General Janet Reno’s insistence, both Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh said publicly in early 1997 that the Saudis had provided little more than “hearsay” evidence on the bombing.

There were also major anomalies in the alleged confessions of Shi’a plotters that should have aroused the suspicions of FBI investigators.

The Saudis claimed that on Mar. 28, 1996, Saudi guards at the Al-Haditha border crossing with Jordan had discovered 38 kilogrammes of plastic explosives hidden in a car driven by a Saudi Hezbollah member. That member not only admitted to his Saudi Hezbollah membership, according to the Saudi account, but led the secret police to three more Saudi Hezbollah members, who were allegedly arrested on Apr. 6, 7 and 8. .

What was peculiar about that account is that on Apr. 17, 1996, Saudi officials had announced that they had found explosives in a car at the border with Jordan on Mar. 29, and said that “a number of people” had been arrested. And four days later, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef had announced the arrest of four men in the bombing of the Office of the Programme Manager of the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh on Nov. 13, 1995. Their confessions were broadcast on Saudi television that same day.

In the announcement of the arrests, reported by the New York Times, Nayef referred to the arms smuggling attempt of Mar. 29, saying it was still not clear if the November blast in Riyadh and the smuggling attempt were related.

That statement had clearly implied that Saudi officials had reason to believe that there was a link between the jihadist network believed to have carried out the Riyadh bombing and those who had been caught after the Mar. 29 explosive smuggling attempt.

After the Khobar bombing, however, the Saudis began to link the interception of explosives in late March to the Shi’a they were saying had carried out the Khobar Towers bombing.

One day in July, according to a former Clinton administration official, Freeh came into the White House situation room livid with anger, telling officials there he had just learned that the Saudis had arrested a Saudi Hezbollah activist in March with concealed explosives and had discovered the Shi’a plot to bomb Khobar Towers.

Nayef’s statement suggesting a possible tie to the Riyadh bombing of the previous November was a deliberate deception of the United States, which the Saudis never explained to U.S. officials. “We asked why they didn’t tell us about this earlier and didn’t get an answer,” says Williams.

If the Saudis had actually arrested the four Saudi Hezbollah members who had been ordered to carry out the bombing, as they later claimed, it would have been known immediately to the rest of the Saudi Hezbollah organisation, which would obviously have called off the bomb plot and fled the country.

Further undermining the Shi’a explosives smuggling and bomb plot story is the fact that the Saudis had secretly detained and tortured a number of veteran Sunni jihadists with ties to Osama bin Laden after the bombing.

The Sunni detainees over Khobar included Yusuf al-Uyayri, who was later revealed to have been the actual head of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. In 2003, al-Uyayri confirmed in al Qaeda’s regular publication that he had been arrested and tortured after the Khobar bombing.

A report published in mid-August 1996 by the London-based Palestinian newspaper Al Qods al-Arabi, based on sources with ties to the jihadi movement in Saudi Arabia, said that six Sunni veterans of the Afghan war had confessed to the Khobar bombing under torture. That was followed two days later by a report in the New York Times that the Saudi officials now believed that Afghan war veterans had carried out the Khobar bombing.

A few weeks later, however, the Saudi regime apparently made a firm decision to blame the bombing on the Saudi Shi’a.

According to a Norwegian specialist on the Saudi jihadi movement, Thomas Hegghammer, in 2003 - shortly before al-Uyayri was killed in a shoot-out in Riyadh in late May 2003 - an article by the al Qaeda leader in the al Qaeda periodical blamed Shi’a for the Khobar bombing.

In a paper for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Hegghammer cites that statement as evidence that al Qaeda wasn’t involved in Khobar. But one of al-Uyayri’s main objectives at that point would have been to stay out of prison, so his endorsement of the Saudi regime’s position is hardly surprising.

Al-Uyayri had been released from prison in mid-1998, by his own account. But he was arrested again in late 2002 or early 2003, by which time the CIA had come to believe that he was a very important figure in al Qaeda, even though it didn’t know he was the leader of al Qaeda in the peninsula, according to Ron Suskind’s book “The One Percent Doctrine”.

In mid-March 2003, Suskind writes, U.S. officials pressed the Saudis not to let him go. But the Saudis claimed they had nothing on al-Uyayri, and a few weeks later he was released again. The head of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia and the Saudi secret police were playing a complex game.

The question of how the alleged plotters got their hands on roughly 5,000 pounds of explosives - the estimated amount in the truck bomb - was one of the central questions in the investigation of the bombing. But interviews with six former FBI officials who worked on the Khobar Towers investigation revealed that the investigation had not turned up any evidence of how well over two tonnes of explosives had entered the country.

Not one of the six could recall any specific evidence about how the alleged plotters got their hands on that much explosives. And one former FBI official who continues to defend the conclusions of the investigation flatly refused to tell this writer whether the investigation had turned up information bearing on that question.

If the Saudi Hezbollah group had actually been plotting to bring the explosives into the country by hiding them in cars, they would have had to get more than 50 explosives-laden cars past Saudi border guards who were already on alert. There is no indication, however, that any additional cars with explosives came across the border in the weeks prior to the bombing.

(*This is the second of a five-part series, ” Khobar Towers Investigated: How a Saudi Deception Protected Osama bin Laden”. The series was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.) (END/2009)

Why Condemn Israel But Not Iranian Government Brutality? - Ben Caspit and Ben-Dror Yemini, Maariv.

Where did all the people who demonstrated against Israel disappear to? Now of all times, when the Basij hooligans have begun to slaughter innocent civilians in the city squares of Tehran?

How can it be that when a Jew kills a Muslim, the entire world boils, and when extremist Islam slaughters its citizens, the world is silent? Imagine that this were not happening now in Tehran but in the West Bank. Policemen on motorcycles butchering demonstrators. A young woman downed by a sniper, dying before the cameras.

If there is a truly free world, let it appear immediately and impose sanctions on those who slaughter their own people.

There is a different Islam, even in Iran. There are millions of Muslims who support freedom, human rights, equality for women. These millions loathe Khamenei, Chavez and Nasrallah too. (Maariv-Hebrew)

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That is what we say - get the UN leaders take real measures. Do not wait for the impossible consesus but tell UN’s 38th floor that they do not earn their salaries and pomp if they do not show they have any guts. Mr. ban Ki-moon - this means you!

 From: Trita Parsi

What Obama must do now on Iran: Condemn violence, without picking sides.

By Trita Parsi
from the June 22, 2009 edition of  The Christian Science Monitor.

Washington - Tehran is being rocked. Convinced that the landslide victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad June 12 was a fraud, hundreds of thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets. Clashes with security forces have left at least 19 dead, according to the official count. Meanwhile, some US lawmakers have turned Iran’s seemingly stolen election into a political football with little regard for the repercussions their rhetoric may have for protesters in Iran.

“The president of the United States is supposed to lead the free world, not follow it,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday, echoing the sentiments of many senators and pundits. “He’s been timid and passive more than I would like.”
Accusing President Obama of weakness may generate some headlines, but it misses the point. A closer look reveals that the president’s approach has paved the way for the current stand-off in Iran and that he is supported by those seeking their rights in Iran.

Many have argued that the president shouldn’t side with any particular faction in Iran since doing so could backfire. Having the US on your side is not necessarily a good thing in Iran. Washington neither wants to make itself the issue in Iran, nor is it eager to help Mr. Ahmadinejad stage a comeback.
But two more salient points have been lost in the American debate. First, who makes the decision to help – the US, or the people America wishes to help?
Some neoconservatives and Republican lawmakers have called on Mr. Obama to side with Mir Hossein Mousavi, the centrist presidential candidate who ran on a reformist ticket. The recommendation was done, it appears, without consulting Mr. Mousavi to see if he believes that Obama’s endorsement is needed or helpful. This kind of reckless arrogance partly explains why political groups in Iran view America’s explicit support as a source of delegitimization.

America is viewed by many Iranians as only having its own interest in mind and as being incapable of providing genuine support. With Obama, this pattern has changed. The wishes of Iranians are now suddenly center stage. On Monday, even as its election authority reportedly acknowledged that the number of ballots cast in dozens of cities exceeded the number of eligible voters in those areas, Iran accused the West of “meddling.” Rather than listening to neoconservative critics or Republican lawmakers, White House staff say that they’ve been listening to signals from the Iranians themselves.
Those signals have been clear, and on most counts, the White House’s position has been on mark.

“The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States,” Obama said in an interview broadcast Monday on CBS’s “The Early Show.”

The Iranians want to make sure that the world knows and sees what is happening on the streets of Tehran and other cities. And they want the US to stay out of the fight – at least for now.

But here is one legitimate criticism , the Iranians are missing two words from Obama: “I condemn.” Protesters and political leaders I’ve spoken to in Iran want the US to speak out forcefully against the government’s human rights abuses and condemn the violence. Philosophical formulations about respecting the wishes of the Iranian people aren’t enough: The president should clearly condemn the Iranian government’s violations and use of brutal force against its own people.
After all, condemning violence is different from taking sides in Iran’s election dispute. Not only would it be compatible with American values, it would also reduce pressure on the president to entangle the US in Iranian politics. Clarity on the human rights front strengthens the president’s ability to avoid siding with any political faction in Iran.

Second, few in the US debate have taken note that Obama’s pro-engagement, anticonfrontation approach may have directly contributed to the developments in Iran. President George W. Bush sought to destabilize and bring about regime change in Iran for eight years through isolation, threats, and financial support for anti-Tehran groups. For all its labors, the Bush administration failed. The Iranian elite closed ranks, and hard-liners used the perceived threat from the US to clamp down on human rights defenders and pro-democracy activists.
Obama’s diplomatic outreach and removal of this threat perception has not necessarily created fissures among the Iranian elite in and of itself, but it has weakened the glue that created unity among Iran’s many political factions.

Imagine if the Bush administration still governed. Had they continued to issue threats and provoke confrontation with Iran Mousavi would probably not have disputed the voter fraud and called on his supporters to take to the streets. Due to the perceived national security threat, he would have swallowed his pride and anger, and asked his followers to do the same.It is because of the absence of an external threat that internal differences have been able to drive Iran’s political developments to the current standoff. Internally driven political change could neither have been initiated nor come about under the shadow of an American military threat. If America’s posture returns to that of the Bush administration, these indigenous forces for change may be quelled by the forces of fear and ultranationalism.

Obama should remain steadfast in his refusal to pick sides and to project a threat toward Iran that could be unifying for the Iranian government. The only change he needs to make is to add the word “condemn” to his vocabulary.

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Trita Parsi is president and cofounder of the National Iranian American Council and author of “Treacherous Alliances: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States.”

 With Iran so prominent in the news these days, and with the UN again so low in what concerns its potential for doing any good in matters such as North Korea or Iran, I thought to dig into www.SustainabiliTank.info archives to see what we wrote when the UN General Assembly passed without actual vote, January 26, 2007, the resolution forbidding the denial of the Holocaust which some thought it was a vote of Cain against Ahmadi-Nejad - but was it? In the best case this was a vote of 104 UN member states which leaves out 88 States. Our posting at the time tried to analyze the actual vote for which the UN organization refused to give us country lists - after all too many of the UN officials were not exactly enthused with that effort led by just several of the more advanced US members. Rereading that posting makes for an interesting wake-up call even today.

Also of interest, in the President’s the chair at the time at the UN Geneal Assembly sat an Arab Muslim woman -H.E. Sheikha Haya Rasheed Al Khalifa of the Royal Bahrain rulling family.

The UN Resolution Against Holocaust Deniers: A Litmus Test To The Integrity Of The UN.

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on January 27th, 2007
by Pincas Jawetz ( PJ at SustainabiliTank.com)

 http://www.sustainabilitank.info/2007/01…