A former Mossad officer has alleged the Israeli spy agency has its own “passport factory” to create or doctor passports for use in intelligence operations.
Relations between Australia and Israel are under strain after three Australian passports were apparently used by suspects in the killing of top Hamas leader Mahmoud Al Mabhouh in Dubai last month.
Dubai police say they are 99 per cent sure Mossad was behind the operation to smother Mabhouh with a pillow in his hotel room.
Victor Ostrovsky, a case officer at Mossad for several years in the 1980s, says he has no doubt Australian passports have been forged or fraudulently used for similar operations in the past.
“They need passports because you can’t go around with an Israeli passport, not even a forged one, and get away or get involved with people from the Arab world,” he said.
“They’ll shy away right away. So most of these [Mossad] operations are carried out on what’s called false flag, which means you pretend to be of another country which is less belligerent to those countries that you’re trying to recruit from.
“If they can obtain blank passports, which they have in the past from Canada, from England, they do. If not, they just manufacture them.”
He says a company within Mossad headquarters is dedicated to forging passports.
“They create various types of papers, every kind of ink. It’s a very, very expensive research department,” he said.
He says the manufactured passports are almost identical to the originals.
“If they create a passport at a top level for use of that nature … I don’t think anybody will be able to find the difference,” he said.
Mr Ostrovsky says fraudulent Australian passports have been used regularly.
“Consider the fact that Australians speak English and it’s an easy cover to take, very few people know very much about Australia,” he said.
“You can tell whatever stories you want. It doesn’t take much of an accent to be an Australian or New Zealander, or an Englishman for that matter. And I know people had been under Australian cover not once [but] quite a few times. So why not use it?”
He says Mossad chooses which passports to forge based on the cover agents need and the operation they are involved in.
“At the time there were people that were asked … ‘If when you’re here in Israel we may need for security purposes to use your passport, would you allow us to do that?’” he said.
“And people would say ‘yes’. There were shelves upon shelves of real passports just waiting to be used.”
Mr Ostrovsky says there is no chance any of the 26 suspects could really be Mossad agents.
“No, absolutely not,” he said.
“Except for James Bond, who actually pronounces or announces his arrival at the scene by saying, ‘I’m Bond, James Bond’.
“Most people who work in the intelligence field don’t present themselves by their real name.”
Israel has long rejected Mr Ostrovsky’s claims and tried to stop his book from being published.
This morning Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmour told ABC NewsRadio there was no proof of any link between Israel and Mabhouh’s death.
“No evidence was presented by the Dubai police that links Israel to the incident in Dubai,” he said.
“Since there is no evidence of that nature and since the Dubai police have so far not presented any ultimate evidence, we don’t think that we should respond to anything.”
Information Clearing House” — The principle propaganda mouthpiece of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO), the Daily Alert (DA), has come out in full support for Israel’s practice of extra-judicial, extra-territorial assassination.
In the face of world-wide governmental condemnation (except from the Zionist-occupied White House and US Congress), the PMAJO slavishly backs any brutal murder committed by the Israeli secret police anywhere in the world and at anytime. The recent assassination of Hamas leader, Mahmoud Mabhouh, in Dubai is a case in point. The PMAJO has defended all of Mossad’s criminal actions leading up to the murder, including extensive identity theft and the stealing or falsification of passports and official documents from several European countries, presumably allied to the Zionist state. Among the Mossad agents who entered Dubai to kill Mabhouh, twelve agents used stolen or forged British passports, three Australian, three French, one German and six Irish. These agents assumed the identity of European citizens in order to commit murder in a sovereign nation.
Once again the PMAJO demonstrate that its first loyalty is to the Israeli secret police, even when they violate the sovereignty of major US allies. No doubt the PMAJO would readily support the Israeli Mossad, even if it were shown to have used U.S. documents to assassinate Mabhouh. In fact, two of the 26 Israeli assassins, carrying fake Irish and fake British passports, are known to have entered the United States after the killing and may still be here.
The position adopted by the Daily Alert and the PMAJO in defense of Israel’s international terrorist act followed several lines of attack, which will be discussed below. These include: (1) blaming the victim, (2) claiming that extra-judicial, extra territorial murders are legal, (3) minimizing the murder of ‘one’ individual, (4) deflecting attention from the Zionists by blaming ‘other Arab’s, (5) favorably comparing Mossad assassinations to US killings in Afghanistan, (6) trivializing and relativizing world condemnation, (7) citing “self-defense”, (8) praising the high tech ‘operational details’ of the assassination and (9) discrediting the Dubai police investigators rather than the Israeli perpetrators.
Abridged articles, cited in the Daily Alert, have appeared in the op-ed pages of several US, UK, Canadian and Israeli newspapers, as well as in rightwing magazines like Forbes and Commentary. The mainline Zionist propaganda technique is to avoid any discussion of Israel’s egregious crimes against sovereignty, due process, international law and the personal security of individuals. In doing so, the Daily Alert adopts the propaganda techniques common to all totalitarian regimes practicing state terrorism.
(1) Blaming the Victim
On February 22, the Daily Alert (DA) headlined two articles, which were entitled: “Killed Hamas Official betrayed by Associates says Dubai Police Chief” and “Hamas: Assassinated Operative put Himself at Risk”. The DA forgot to mention that Israeli secret police had been tracking their prey for over a month (having failed to assassinate him on six previous attempts) and that the Dubai Police Chief was not blaming Hamas officials but was in the process of accumulating evidence, witness statements, videos and documents proving the Israeli identities of the assassins. Needless to say, if we were to accept the American Zionists’ argument that any leading opponent of Israel, who travels without an army of bodyguards, is “putting himself at risk”, then we must acknowledge that ours is a lawless world where Israeli hit squads are free to commit murder anywhere, any time.
(2) Extra-Judicial, Extra territorial Murder is “Legal” (At least if the killers are Mossad)
The February 22 and February 24 issues of the DA include two articles arguing that Israel’s practice of extra-judicial, extra-territorial murder is legal. One article is entitled, “The Legality of Killing of Hamas Mahmoud al Mabhoud” and the other, “The Proportionate Killing of Mahmoud al Mabhoud”. These avoid any reference to international law, which emphatically rejects cross-border, state-sponsored murders. Legality, for the PMAJO, is whatever the Israel’s secret police apparatus deems expedient in pursuit of its goal of eliminating leaders who oppose its colonial occupation and expropriation of Palestinian lands. If Israel’s extra-judicial, extra-territorial murder of an adversary in Dubai is legal, why not assassinate opponents in the US, Canada, England or any other country where they might travel, live, work or write? What if the critics and opponents of Israel decided that it was now “legal” to murder Israel’s supporters wherever they lived citing the Daily Alert’s definition of legality? We would then find ourselves in a lawless world of “legal” murder and totalitarian cross-border surveillance.
(3) Minimizing the Murder
The Feb 22, 24, and 25 issues of the Daily Alert deflect attention from the Mossad murder by making comparison to the hundreds of Afghan civilians killed by US drone attacks. The claim is that “targeting individuals” is less a crime than mass killings. The problem with this argument is that for decades Mossad has “targeted” scores of opponents overseas and killed thousands of Palestinians in the occupied territories (where they work with the domestic secret police, Shin Bet, and the military, IDF). Moreover, this argument linking Israel’s extra judicial assassinations with US colonial killing of Afghans is hardly a defense of either. By implicating the US in its defense of state terror, Israel is holding up the worst aspects of American imperialism as a standard for its own political behavior. One state’s crimes are no justification for another’s.
(4) Blaming the Arabs: Deflecting Attention from Israel
The DA Feb. 22 article entitled “The Assassination Heard Around the World” insinuates that the murder was a “result of a Hamas power struggle” or by one of “many Arab groups who loathes the Islamist Hamas”.
In other words, all the forged or stolen European passports of Israeli dual citizens, and the Dubai security videos of Mossad operatives in various costumes, not to mention the jubilant affirmation by top Israeli leaders of the killing, was in reality ‘Arab tricks’. This crude propaganda ploy by the most prominent Jewish American organization reveals their own descent into a fantasy land of self-delusion, possible only in the closed world of US Zionist politics.
(5) Technical Proficiency
The DA published several articles praising the technical details of the Mossad assassination in Dubai, an aspect of the operation, with which few Israel security experts would agree. The Feb. 24 DA article entitled, “Assassination Shows Skillful Planning” chastises Israel’s critics for not recognizing the high quality of the “operational aspects” of the killings and recommends its “lessons for all intelligence services around the world”. Like sociopaths and serial killers, US Zionists openly promote Israeli death squad techniques to all fellow state terrorists. In the DA, professional techniques of assassination are far more important than universal moral repugnance of political murders.
(6) Discrediting the Investigators While Defending the Perpetrators
The DA on Feb. 25 cited a long and tendentious attack on the Dubai police, published in Forbes Magazine, which ridiculed their meticulous investigations uncovering Mossad’s roles in the murder. In this article, the Dubai authorities were condemned for uncovering Israeli involvement while not investigating the source of the murder victims’ … Iraqi passport! Instead of encouraging the Dubai police pursuit of justice, the Daily Alert published a long diatribe implicating Dubai in the attacks of 9/11/2001, its continued trade with Iran, its ‘involvement’ in international terrorism etc. There was no mention of Dubai’s relatively friendly position to Israel and Israelis prior to Mossad’s blatant violation of its sovereignty.
Conclusion
The American Zionist propaganda campaign in defense of Israeli state terror and, specifically, Mossad’s murder of a Hamas leader in Dubai, relies on lies, evasions and specious legal arguments. This “defense” violates all precepts of a civilized society as well as the most recent American federal laws prohibiting all forms of support for international terrorism. The PMAJO can pursue its defense of Mossad’s acts of international terrorism with impunity in the US because of its power over the US Congress, the Obama White House and the American mass media. This ensures that only its version of events, its definition of legality and its lies will be heard by legislators, echoed by Zionist activists and embellished by its solemn defenders in academic and journalistic circles. To counter the American Zionist defense of Israel’s practice of extra-territorial, extra-judicial executions by the Mossad, we need American writers and academics to step forward. It is time to expose their flimsy arguments, bold-face lies and audacious immorality. It is time to speak out against their impunity, before another Israeli secret police murder takes place, possibly inside the USA itself and with the shameless complicity of Zionist accomplices.
The authorities in Dubai have found clear evidence that the Mossad assassination team received support from European Zionists. The hotels, air tickets and expenses were paid with credit cards issued in the US. Two of the killers may be in the US now. Will a time come when American Zionists, who are unconditional public defenders of Mossad killings, cross the line between propaganda for the deed to become accomplices of the deed? The robust American Zionist defense of Mossad’s overseas assassinations does not augur well for the security of Americans in the face of Israel’s willing U.S. accomplices.
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Haaretz“ — Dubai’s police chief plans to seek the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the head of the Mossad over the killing of a Hamas leader in the emirate, Al Jazeera television reported on Wednesday.
Dahi Khalfan Tamim “said he would ask the Dubai prosecutor to issue arrest warrants for … Netanyahu and the head of Mossad,” the television said. It did not give details.
Tamim has said he is “almost certain” Israeli agents were involved in the killing of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh at a Dubai hotel in January, calling for Mossad’s boss, Meir Dagan, to be arrested if it is proved responsible. Tamim said on Monday Mossad had “insulted” Dubai and Western countries whose fraudulent passports were used by suspects in the assassination.
Dubai has asked the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to look into prepaid cards issued by the Meta Financial Group’s MetaBank which the suspects used, a United Arab Emirates newspaper said.
Citing an FBI source, The National newspaper said the investigation would look into any Israeli involvement in the killing.
“Thirteen of the 27 suspects used prepaid MasterCards issued by MetaBank, a regional American bank, to purchase plane tickets and book hotel rooms,” the newspaper said, quoting Dubai police.
MetaBank said it followed proper procedures when it issued the cards.
Authorities told the bank that the suspects appeared to have used stolen passports to get employment with U.S. companies, MetaBank said in a statement on Tuesday. The companies paid the employees with prepaid cards issued by MetaBank and other banks.
MetaBank said it had launched its own review of the matter, and had so far found that it followed all bank and regulatory requirements.
The suspects authorities had identified were not on any list that would indicate their identities were fraudulent, it said.
The UAE, a U.S.-allied Arab state that backs the Palestinian drive for an independent state and an end to Israeli occupation, has no diplomatic relations with Israel.
But it has established low-level political and trade links in recent years, with some Israeli officials attending events in the Gulf Arab state. Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer competed in the Dubai Championships last month.
Members of the hit squad used fraudulent passports from Britain, Ireland, Germany, France and Australia. Residents of Israel with the same names as the suspects, holding dual nationalities, have said their identities appear to have been stolen.
The passport abuse has drawn criticism from the European Union, and some of the governments involved have summoned the Israeli ambassadors to their countries to protest
The Times” — IN early January two black Audi A6 limousines drove up to the main gate of a building on a small hill in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv: the headquarters of Mossad, the Israeli secret intelligence agency, known as the “midrasha”.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, stepped out of his car and was greeted by Meir Dagan, the 64-year-old head of the agency. Dagan, who has walked with a stick since he was injured in action as a young man, led Netanyahu and a general to a briefing room.
According to sources with knowledge of Mossad, inside the briefing room were some members of a hit squad. As the man who gives final authorisation for such operations, Netanyahu was briefed on plans to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a member of Hamas, the militant Islamic group that controls Gaza.
Mossad had received intelligence that Mabhouh was planning a trip to Dubai and they were preparing an operation to assassinate him there, off-guard in a luxury hotel. The team had already rehearsed, using a hotel in Tel Aviv as a training ground without alerting its owners.
The mission was not regarded as unduly complicated or risky, and Netanyahu gave his authorisation, in effect signing Mabhouh’s death warrant.
Typically on such occasions, the prime minister intones: “The people of Israel trust you. Good luck.”
Days later on January 19, Emirates flight EK912 took off from the Syrian capital Damascus at 10.05am. On board, as Mossad had anticipated, was Mabhouh, who was also known by the nom de guerre of Abu al-Abd. The Israelis suspected he planned to travel from Dubai to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas to arrange for an arms shipment to Gaza.
As the Airbus A330 rose into the wintry sky and headed south, Mabhouh, an athletic 49-year-old, could see the minarets of the ancient city — his home since he had been deported from Gaza by Israel more than 20 years before.
He had made the trip to Dubai several times before on Hamas business and had little reason to think that in less than 12 hours he would be dead.
From a highway below a Mossad agent watched the departure of EK912. Knowing from an informant at the airport that Mabhouh, who was travelling under an assumed name, had boarded the flight, the agent sent a message — believed to be to a pre-paid Austrian mobile phone — to the team in Dubai. Their target was on his way.
A few hours later, as the world now knows, Mabhouh was murdered in his hotel room — and the Israeli spy agency nearly got clean away. For days the death appeared to be from natural causes.
When suspicions did arise, it was only because of Dubai’s extensive system of CCTV cameras that the work of the assassination team was revealed.
The cameras recorded the hit-team’s movements, from the moment its members landed in Dubai to the moment they left. Last week their photographs were released by the Dubai police and splashed across the world’s newspapers and television screens.
Mossad is now deeply embarrassed. Its use of the identities of British, French, German and Irish nationals as cover for agents to carry out the hit has angered western governments. In the ensuing diplomatic fall-out, sources close to Mossad said yesterday that it had suspended similar operations in the Middle East, mainly because of fear that heightened security would put its agents at greater risk. Dagan’s job is also on the line.
Howver. few believe that Mossad will give up the secret war it has long waged against Israel’s enemies.
Mossad has had a reputation for ruthlessness since it hunted down the Black September terrorists who massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Time and again its vengeful arm has reached out across the Arab world and into Europe, too, smiting enemies.
Under Dagan’s leadership, such operations have increased. Dagan differs markedly from his predecessor, the London-born Ephraim Halevy, a nephew of the late writer and philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
Halevy was dubbed the “cocktail man” for his long chats with foreign diplomats. He shrank from brutal covert operations. Eventually the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, removed him and appointed Dagan in his place.
The new chief soon began to restore Mossad’s reputation for lethal operations. The tone of his directorship is set by a photograph on the wall of his modest office in the Tel Aviv headquarters. It shows an old Jew standing on the edge of a trench. An SS officer is aiming his rifle at the old man’s head.
“This old Jew was my grandfather,” Dagan tells visitors. The picture reflects in a nutshell his philosophy of Jewish self-defence for survival. “We should be strong, use our brain, and defend ourselves so that the Holocaust will never be repeated,” he once said.
One hit he masterminded was in Damascus two years ago against Imad Mughniyeh, a founder of Hezbollah and one of the world’s most wanted terrorists. Mughniyeh was decapitated when the headrest of his car seat exploded — close to the headquarters of Syrian intelligence.
Six months later, Mossad, in co-operation with special forces, struck again at the heart of the Syrian establishment. General Mohammed Suleiman, Syria’s liaison to North Korea’s nuclear programme, was relaxing in the back garden of his villa on the Mediterranean shore.
His bodyguards were monitoring the front of the villa. Out to sea a yacht sailed slowly by. No noise was heard, but suddenly the general fell, a bullet through his head.
One of Dagan’s most recent concerns has been the rise of the Iranian threat to Israel, both directly and through its links with Hamas. It is in that context that the operation to eliminate Mabhouh should be understood.
Preparations appear to have been in train for months. When Mabhouh landed in Dubai, Mossad agents were waiting for him. They had flown in from Paris, Frankfurt, Rome and Zurich in advance using their forged passports, some based on the details of British nationals living in Israel who were unaware their identities had been stolen. The agents had also obtained credit cards in the name of the identities they had stolen.
Yesterday Dhahi Khalfan, the Dubai police chief, said investigators had found that some of the passports had been used in Dubai before. About three months ago it appears Mossad agents using the stolen identities followed Mabhouh when he travelled to Dubai and then on to China. About two months ago they followed him on another visit to Dubai.
In January, after he had landed and collected his luggage Mabhouh headed for the exit and a taxi for the short ride to the nearby Al-Bustan Rutana hotel. A European-looking woman in her early thirties waiting outside saw him leave and sent a message to the head of the team.
Dubai is a hub of international commerce and intrigue. Scores of Iranian agents are active there and its hotels are often used as meeting places for spies and covert deals. The main concern of the Mossad squad was to corner Mabhouh, alone if possible.
They divided into several teams, some for surveillance of the target and others to keep a look-out, and one for the hit. Some changed their identities as they moved about the city, putting on wigs and switching clothes.
When Mabhouh checked in to the hotel, at least one Mossad agent stood close to him at the front desk trying to overhear his room number. Then two others, dressed in tennis clothes, followed him into the lift to confirm which room he was going to.
According to an Israeli report yesterday he specifically asked for a room with no balcony, presumably for security reasons. The Mossad team booked the room opposite.
Mabhouh left the hotel in early evening, tailed by two of the Mossad team. Hamas also knows where he went and whom he met, but is not saying.
The Dubai police have not released CCTV footage showing exactly what happened next in the hotel, but the available evidence and sources point to two possibilities.
One is that while Mabhouh was out, the hit team entered his room and lay in wait. To do this they would have needed a pass key or would have had to tamper with the lock. It is known that while Mabhouh was out someone had tried to reprogramme the electronic lock on the door to his room.
However, they may have failed to gain entry. If so, the second possibility is that one of the team lured Mabhouh into opening the door after he had returned to his room. Perhaps a woman agent, pictured in CCTV footage in the hotel wearing a black wig, knocked on the door posing as a member of the hotel staff, allowing the hit team to force their way in.
Exactly how Mabhouh was killed remains unclear. The Dubai police said he was suffocated; other sources say he was injected with a drug. But at first sight there was no evidence of foul play.
When the killers left they relocked the door and left a “Please do not disturb” sign on it. Within hours the Mossad agents were flying out of the emirate to different destinations, including Paris, Hong Kong and South Africa.
Nobody suspected anything was wrong until the following day when Mabhouh’s wife called Hamas officials to ask about her husband. He wasn’t answering his mobile phone, she told them. The hotel management was alerted and the room entered.
THERE were no signs of struggle or any violence to Mabhouh, who appeared to be asleep. When he couldn’t be woken, a doctor was summoned from a nearby hospital.
In the room some medicine for high-blood pressure was found — planted by Mossad, say Israeli sources — and the doctor decided that the Palestinian had died of natural causes, possibly from a heart attack. In Gaza and Damascus 40 days of mourning began.
Mossad appeared to have got away with it, though some in Hamas had their suspicions that Mabhouh had been poisoned. They well-remembered a previous Mossad plot in 1997 in which an Israeli agent blew poison into the ear of one of its leaders on a visit to Jordan — an operation authorised by Netanyahu during a previous term as prime minister. The Hamas leader, Khaled Mashal, survived only because two agents were caught — and Jordan demanded that an antidote be handed over.
Some Palestinians also suspect that Yasser Arafat, the long-standing leader who died in 2004, was poisoned, though there has never been any evidence to prove it.
When results of Mabhouh’s post-mortem came through, they were still inconclusive. Yesterday one source claimed that burns from a stun gun were found on his body and that there were traces of a nosebleed, possibly from being smothered. However, no firm evidence of exactly how Mabhouh died, either from natural causes or foul play, emerged.
The uncertainty alone was enough for Hamas to declare that Israel had killed their man. The police investigated, CCTV images were gathered and and the affair began to unravel.
One well-informed Israeli source said: “The operative teams were very much aware of the CCTV in Dubai, but they have been astonished at the ability of the Dubai police to reconstruct and assemble all the images into one account.”
For Israel, the fallout has been considerable and the reverberations continue. The real owners of the stolen or forged passports, several of them Britons living in Israel, have complained that they were innocent victims of a murder plot.
The Mossad agents who used their names have been put on Interpol’s wanted list, and the real individuals are worried that they will now always be associated with the murder of a Hamas official.
Dubai can no longer avoid being embroiled in the Arab- Israeli conflict. It is calling for an international arrest warrant to be issued against Dagan and says it will release more information confirming that this was a Mossad killing.
In Britain there were initial suspicions that the government had been tipped off about the operation, or had even quietly condoned it. William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, demanded to know when the Foreign Office had first found out that British passport holders were involved in the affair.
A spokesman for the Foreign Office insisted there was no mystery or cover-up. “Suggestions that the government had prior warning or was in some way complicit in this affair are baseless,” he said.
“The Dubai authorities told us of the role of British passports on February 15 and we were able to tell them the passports in question were fraudulent the very next day.” This account was backed up by a statement from Dubai’s police chief.
However, the broader question of Britain’s response to Israel’s activities remains unresolved.
Gordon Brown has announced an investigation by the Serious Organised Crime Agency into the identity theft, and David Miliband, the foreign secretary, is expected to address the House of Commons on the issue tomorrow.
Israel is a key ally for Britain in the Middle East and an even closer ally of the Americans. Brown and Miliband will hope that the affair will fade away, though the pro-Arab lobby will try to ensure the matter is not easily buried.
Hugo Swire, MP and chairman of the Conservative Middle East Council, said: “These allegations against the Israeli government need to be answered. This is not something that can just be swept under the carpet. You cannot conduct foreign policy at this extremely sensitive time by this sort of illegal behaviour.”
In Israel the reaction is mixed. Few shed tears over the death of one of Hamas’s top men, but there is dismay that Mossad may have damaged the country’s reputation abroad. Though in time the furore will no doubt blow over, critics of Dagan have renewed their demands for him to go.
The mastermind of Mossad may yet find himself a casualty of his own secret war.
Additional reporting: Jonathan Oliver
Copyright 2010 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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Press TV” — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly authorized the assassination of senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh early January in Tel Aviv.
According to a report published by
Times OnlineNetanyahu held a meeting with Mossad chief Meir Dagan in early January inside the briefing room of the headquarters of the spy agency where “some members of a hit squad” were also present.
Citing Mossad sources, the report said “as the man who gives final authorization for such operations, Netanyahu was briefed on plans to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.”
Sources said Mossad had received intelligence that the Hamas commander was planning a Dubai trip and they started preparing for an operation to assassinate him.
“The team had already rehearsed, using a hotel in Tel Aviv as a training ground without alerting its owners,” according to the report.
Thanks to Dubai’s extensive system of CCTV cameras, the work of the assassination team was revealed.
Dubai police released the identities of 11 people carrying European passports, including six Britons, three Irish and two French and German, who allegedly were Mossad agents carrying fake European documents.
Interpol has issued “red notices” for the 11 suspects to help find and arrest them anywhere in its 188 member countries.
Dubai police also threatened earlier to arrest Netanyahu, if it determined that Mossad was behind the assassination.
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Deliberate Attacks against the Civilian Population
Factual Findings narrated by Ross Vachon
Factual and Legal findings narrated by Noam Chomsky
Live Testimonies relevant to the Goldstone Report’s Findings
The video also contains live testimonies of Khalid, Kawthar and Samar Abd Rabbo before the UN Fact Finding Mission headed by Justice Richard Goldstone. For more information on this video, please go to www.goldstonefacts.org
Part 2
Part 3
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I very much doubt that Hong Kong can be said to host a US base or US troops. Apart from embassy guards and spies there were no troops there when the t…
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
Thank you for allowing me to come from the United States and participate in this rally for peace.
My country has been hijacked by a criminal cabal intent on using the hard-earned dollars of the American people for war, occupation, and empire.
As a result, the national leadership of my country, both Democratic and Republican, became complicit in war crimes, torture, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace.
As a Member of Congress from the Democratic Party, I drafted Articles of Impeachment against George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice. Later, when Democrats voted to support more war rather than take care of the needs of the people, I declared my independence from them and all national leadership; the Green Party nominated me to run for President, which I did on a platform of truth, justice, peace, and dignity.
I watched as Candidate Barack Obama came here to Germany to speak. I saw tears on the faces of many in the crowd who believed that, finally, there was something worth believing in again. That America had turned a page from its evil playbook that had so outraged and disappointed the world. That good was finally about to triumph over evil.
I know that beleaguered people all over the world, victims of cruel and deadly military, economic, imperial policies finally could believe in hope and change. And America could be believed in again.
Everywhere I went all over the world there were pictures of Barack Obama, slogans “Yes, We Can,” and the words “Hope” and “Change” plastered everywhere.
And after eight years of George W. Bush, Barack Obama seemed to be the man the world was waiting for.
So when the Candidate became the President, we held our breath in anticipation.
That torture and rendition; spying on innocent, dissenting Americans; war and occupation; crimes against the U.S. Constitution and crimes against the peace would end and that the United States would finally join the community of nations.
Sadly, one year into the Presidency of Barack Obama, that is not the case.
On our front door step we have witnessed U.S. complicity in the overthrow of President Zalaya in Honduras and the hostile takeover of Haiti by 20,000 troops with guns sent in when the devastated people needed food, doctors, and heavy lifting equipment.
President Obama is expanding U.S. troop presence in Colombia, threatening the people’s gains in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba, and Nicaragua.
President Obama has drones killing innocent people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And Administration lawyers are trying to figure out how to legally kill U.S. citizens. You even have U.S. assassination teams on German soil!
Sadly, President Obama is guilty of every item I cited in my Articles of Impeachment against President Bush.
Both Tony Blair and President Obama justify war in Afghanistan by citing the tragedy of the September 11th attacks in New York and on the Pentagon. But my government has not told the truth about what really happened that day. Just like they lied to start a war against Iraq.
So what are we to do? Let us work together on behalf of truth, justice, peace, and dignity. I will struggle in the U.S. and I will struggle with you:
Not one more dime for war.
We can’t give in and we can’t give up. We must take our countries back.
International Peace Conference, Keynote Address
By Cynthia McKinney
The most recent official report on employment states that 85,000 U.S. jobs were lost in the month of December. Everything I have read indicates that things are going to get a lot worse in the United States before they get better.
Already, the United States has slipped to 7th in the world’s best places to live, behind France, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, and New Zealand. The U.S. place in the world will slip more than that in the future if the brakes are not put on current trends.
The United States is rapidly becoming a country even more divided:
Over 31% of Puerto Ricans live in poverty, making them the poorest ethnic group in the U.S. Meanwhile the war on Latinos continues with police harassment, racial profiling, and deportations of the undocumented–for driving, if you can believe that.
Approximately 166 legal cases winding their way through U.S. courts target Palestinians in the United States who were trying to help Palestine, and they are being prosecuted with new laws that would have been unthinkable a generation ago—like the Secret Evidence Act. My sister, Lynne Stewart, an activist lawyer of conscience, sits in a U.S. prison right now because she dared to represent a Muslim cleric who ran afoul of the U.S. What a message that sends to other lawyers committed to the notion that everyone at least deserves a fair trial.
According to United for a Fair Economy, whose work I adore, Black unemployment is now at 14.7 percent compared to 8.7 % for whites. And in 2007, for every dollar of white wealth, a black family had just one dime.
From the sub-prime banking scam alone, because of mortgage foreclosures, Blacks and Latinos are currently experiencing the greatest loss of wealth in recent U.S. history because 53% of blacks and 47% of Latinos were saddled with sub-prime mortgages, as compared to only 26% of whites. The greedy banking class were in a feeding frenzy, feeding on black and brown hopes to become a part of the American Dream.
According to a recent study, U.S. schools today are more segregated than in the 1950s. In our most diverse state, California, one-half of black and Asian students attend segregated schools, as do one fourth of Latino and Native American students.
And, young black girls are experiencing unwanted sterilizations and other complications because of forced vaccinations with an experimental drug in these schools.
In 1954, the Supreme Court found that segregation inherently meant “unequal.”
Correspondingly, schools in low-income areas are highly unequal with not even the slightest remediation of the root societal causes that strongly affect student performance.
This of course feeds quite nicely into the prison-industrial complex that is a nice money-maker for those with the disposable income to invest in the private prisons of the U.S., or are lucky enough to have a business that contracts with the prisons to employ U.S. inmates for pennies an hour.
Yes, the United States, imprisoning more people than any country on the planet, has become an incarceration nation, but only for certain people. Be suspected of being a Latino driving without a drivers license and you can get stopped and deported for having one tail light bulb that’s out; but Presidents George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama can order the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents all over the planet and they walk around free without the worry of even a citizen’s arrest, let alone a warrant from a real, legal Tribunal.
Incredibly, Whites whose fortunes were sinking in the pile of unkept political promises and debilitating U.S. national debt were proselytized to by special interest media that hatred of the “other” was OK. There was little national outrage when Pat Robertson said that Hugo Chavez should be assassinated and then, more recently, when this man of the cloth opined that Haitians suffered so much because they made a deal with the devil to throw off French slavery.
Incredibly, while a record number of Blacks are seeking emergency food assistance, and people of color are losing not only their homes, but their dreams too, FOX News and CNN propagandize that it is those “others,” those people of color who are responsible for the drowning of White America. And that includes President Obama who, one Southern Baptist preacher prayed to God should die. I wonder, who is his God?
True to fashion, the news that is watched by most people in the United States refuses to tell the people the truth of the conditions facing too many in our country and why.
However, according to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, certain Whites also constitute part of the problem: according to her they are environmentalists and white supremacists. Interestingly, hatred spewing from the likes of special interest television hosts seems OK as long as they buy into the Republican/Democrat political paradigm and stay there.
Napolitano’s enemies of the state, White supremacists and environmentalists, left that conformist paradigm over two generations ago. And I believe that any of us who leave that paradigm, and begin to think for ourselves and then act politically on our own independent, critical analysis can begin to put our country on the road to real independence from the special interests that have overtaken every aspect of our governmental, legal, and political apparatus, and like a parasite, has sapped the life from our body politic.
But leaving the acceptable political order puts us in the crosshairs of those whose position and power come from it.
And because the United States today is a rudderless, leaderless, divided society coming apart at the seams, now is the time more than ever that we need to employ what public schools in this country stopped supplying long ago: critical thinking about where we want to stand as a community of nations and where we in the United States want to stand as a country.
And this brings me to the real winners in the midst of this socio-economic collapse. Most people spend so much time looking at the losers in such a scenario, and we must care about the innocent victims that pay the ultimate price in the grand political power plays of our day. But, we must not neglect taking the time to study who it is that is actually sneaking off with the stolen merchandise.
There are real winners and they are the ones whom George Bush called his base: that is, the haves and the have mores.
President Obama has hastened approximately 23.7 trillion of our hard-earned dollars to them. Therefore, the real purpose of our political activity must be to thwart the wholesale theft of a nation under the guise of “Hope,” “Change,” and “Yes we Can.”
That is the only purpose our political activities must now be geared toward.
It means then, that, those of us who have stepped outside of the “acceptable” political paradigm must be willing to break bread with one another and find common ground on which we can operate. My experience has been that such interactions only enhance future opportunities for positive political interactions.
A careful read of the COINTELPRO papers will reveal that the biggest fear inside the government was that the interests of those who pulled the strings would get totally engulfed and swallowed up by Black people and White people coming together during that time, of the civil rights movement and beyond, and successfully pressing for a full justice agenda that encompassed both domestic AND foreign policies. If they were afraid of that then, I guarantee you they are still afraid of it, now.
Secondly, the leadership of this new movement cannot be the leadership that is responsible for the death of the truth, justice, and peace movements inside the United States.
Going to the same people who caused the problem by abandoning their publicly-stated convictions is not going to get us closer to the truth or peace.
This means that we might have to thin our ranks, but we will at least know that those deep in the trenches with us are not sleeping with the enemy.
Finally, we need a voting bloc that places peace and the budget priorities of peace and people’s needs above any other special interest. This voting bloc will not support any candidate running for office from The War Party. Because it should be crystal clear to everyone who cares about peace that we can’t get from here to where we want to be by doing what those who are responsible for this mess want us to do. We’ve got to do something different in order to take our country back and make our country better.
The fact is that unless we are willing to step outside of the box of political conformity, we will continue to get what we’ve always gotten.
Now, finally for the record, let me say that I left Congress, not because I wanted to, but because the special interests and the War Party wanted me out.
What could I have possibly done to raise their ire?
Well, for the twelve years that I was in Congress, I:
1. Filed articles of impeachment against George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleeza Rice;
2. Voted against every Pentagon appropriation, considering it immoral to spend so much money on war when millions of our children go to bed hungry every night;
3. Defied Congressional Democratic Party leaders, by holding a Congressional Hearing exploring the role of race and class in the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina and introduced legislation to punish law enforcement that prevented the mostly Black citizens fleeing the floodwaters from crossing over from New Orleans into its mostly White suburbs;
4. Wrote legislation to ban the importation of coltan from the Democratic Republic of Congo into the United States because of the horrific human rights abuses committed during its mining;
5. Was the first Member of Congress to ask the Bush Administration of the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States, what did it know and when did it know it; and I
6. Led the Congressional Black Caucus Task Force at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, defying President Bush’s boycott.
Currently, I am an endorser of the Brussels Tribunal that cooperated in the filing of a lawsuit in Spain against all the U.S. Presidents responsible for war crimes in Iraq.
I participate in the Malaysia Peace Organization’s efforts to criminalize war, establish a War Crimes Tribunal, and hold leaders accountable for their wars.
And in December of 2008, I tried to take humanitarian supplies to the people of Gaza after the start of Operation Cast Lead and the Israeli military rammed and destroyed our boat.
In June 2009, I tried to take crayons to the children of Gaza and the Israelis hijacked our boat, kidnapped us, took us to Israel, where I spent seven days in an Israeli prison.
I do with my body what I did with my Congressional office.
I left Washington because the pro-Israel Lobby was able to utilize all of its leverage inside both the Democratic and Republican parties target and oust me. They ousted me because I dared to believe that all human beings, including Palestinians, have human rights.
In 2007, at a peace rally in front of the Pentagon, I did what I am now asking one million U.S. voters to do: I declared my independence from a national leadership that had caused my country to become complicit in war crimes, torture, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace.
I joined the Green Party and in 2008, ran for President of the United States. I traveled the length and breadth of my country and now I travel the world carrying a message of truth, justice, peace, and dignity. I spent approximately 10 of the 12 months in 2009 outside of the country.
But, I’m being told now by my friends and supporters that it’s time to come back home. That the real heavy lifting is inside our country. That if we want life to be better for the people in the refugee camps all over the world, that we’ve got to change the policies coming out of Washington, D.C.
My very first campaign theme was “Warriors Don’t Wear Medals, They Wear Scars.” And I’ve borne my scars in public for all the world to see.
And honestly, sometimes, I wonder if it’s worth it. I take a look at where the world is and I say what could I possibly do to stop this.
And then, I think of the people of Gaza whom I saw after Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. I saw in Gaza, the indomitable spirit of humanity. Despite the pain, the murder, the killing, the destruction–I saw life. I experienced love.
But we don’t have to go to Gaza to gain inspiration to continue to struggle. If we just dare to look into the eyes of the homeless man looking for a warm bed, or the tired face of a mother on her way to work at 6:00 in the morning when it’s still dark, if we would just dare to love the nameless human beings whose lives turn on the policies that powerful politicians choose to support or ignore, I know we can become inspired. And in the process, spark some bit of hope in the desperate and the hopeless.
No one deserves to be hopeless.
So, I’ve come a long way to be with you. And I thank you for the invitation.
When we were organizing our “Emergency Anti-Afghanistan Escalation Rally” in front of the White House, one of my supporters reminded me of my own saying: ”We must never give in when we are right.”
Peace is right and we must never give up.
Thank you so much for giving me this time to share with you this evening.
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Global Research” – Professor Boyle’s intervention with the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute the Bush War Cabinet for international crimes is welcome news. Professor Boyle’s meticulously documented charges come shortly after news of a reward being set up in Great Britain for those who attempt citizens’ arrests of crebibly accused war criminal, Tony Blair.
All over the world, citizens are mobilizing to take action to demand accountability from those who have been committing with impunity the highest order of international crime. About a year ago I joined this global movement. At an invited presentation hosted by the Sociology Department at the
University of Winnipeg in March of 2009, I proposed that George W. Bush should be arrested during his forthcoming speaking engagement in CalgaryAlberta. I began the paper by criticizing the ICC for focusing all its attention on prosecuting African war lords while ignoring the blatent criminality being displayed at the highest levels of the feeding chain of military, political and economic power. The presentation went more of less viral on the Internet.
Professor Boyle’s intervention significantly increases the pressure that some of us have being trying to place on the ICC to enforce international criminal law against credibly accused war criminals in not only in
Africa, but also in North America, Europe and Israel.
When I first presented these ideas at the
University of Winnipeg, my host, Professor Heidi Rimke, and I were confronted by an organized group who surrounded us after my presentation and tried to associate my words with Nazi symbols. This surprising tactic spoke to me of the desperation and intellectual bankruptcy of the lobby seeking to prevent a real discussion of these vital matters strictly on their merits. Fortunately, there was a fairly strong reaction in Winnipeg and beyond that drew attention to the inappropriateness, to say the least, of such tactics to divert attention away from the need to address the culture of impunity that is permitting state-sponsored terror to proliferate in the name of the fraudulent Global War on Terror. As Professor Boyle indicates, this pattern of war crimes at the top is continuing and even accelerating during the presidency of Barack Obama.
As important as it is to show support for US and British-based initiatives to enforce the rule of law on the highest order of criminality, I humbly suggest that Canadians might want to get involved in similar initiatives unfolding in
Canada. When George W. Bush came to Calgary, law enforcement officials ignored my efforts along with those of Lawyers Against War to provide them with evidence that the former US president had violated international law as well as the Canadian Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act.
When it became apparent that police would not adhere to the Nuremberg Principles by arresting Bush, my friend and colleague, Splitting The Sky, attempted a citizen’s arrest.
An Attica Brother and Mohawk activist, Splitting The Sky had come to
Calgary carrying a letter from his lawyer, the former US Attorney-General Ramsay Clark, outlining the case why the former US president should be arrested. We held a press conference the day before Bush’s visit to inform the media of the existence of that letter.
Instead of arresting Bush the police arrested Splitting The Sky. The authorities jailed him and and charged the Mohawk activist with obstructing justice. STS’s trial is scheduled to take place in
CalgaryAlberta in early March of 2010, which as I write these words is only about five weeks away. The local media, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, has covered up the arrest and the circumstances behind it right up to this day. I lodged a formal complaint with the Ombudsman of the CBC, Vince Carlin, complaining about the public broadcaster’s biased and unprofessional coverage.
Since the arrest of STS former US Congresswoman, Green Party presidential candidate and international anti-war activist, Cynthia McKinney, has been outspoken in calling attention to the importance of the STS-Bush case. Last November, for instance, Ms. McKinney addressed an international conference entitled “Criminalizing War” at
Kuala Lumpur. Standing on the podium beside British MP, George Galloway, Ms. McKinney drew attention to the Canadian proceedings that she placed in the context of the history of COINTELPRO dirty tricks aimed at destroying the American Indian Movement
I have continued the agenda that Splitting The Sky and I started after he telephoned me about one year ago to inform me that George W.Bush was coming to Calgary in his first public speaking engagement following his presidency.
Along with Splitting The Sky, I attended the Bush-Clinton speaking event in
Toronto. I wrote about that episode in a widely disseminated article that appeared on many web sites, including that of Paul S. Graham of the Winnipeg Peace Alliance.
United States, Canada is a member of the International Criminal Court. If the government of Canada truly respected the jurisdiction and mission of this new and still untested court, it would have made sure that credibly accused war criminals George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and other members of the Bush War Cabinet were arrested when they have touched down on Canadian soil during previous months. But given the present composition of the Canadian government, there is no chance that it will respect international criminal laws that some of its own members, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, could and should be accused of violating.
Moreover all of those police officers who failed to arrest George Bush when they were presented with the possibility of doing so became complicit in violations of international law, including the Nuremberg Principles. Following orders does not provide a legitimate defense for officials who fail to uphold the rule of law when it comes to the responsibility of dealing with the highest order of international crime. Again and again we see evidence that the rule of law does not apply to those at the top of military, corporate, political and financial chains of command. Under these circumstances the idea that we live in societies governed by the rule of law has become a sad hoax.
The severity of the dangers that surround us as the 9/11 Wars continue kill and maim millions and on the frontiers of empire and to subvert our governments and societies here in the imperial heartlands of North America, Europe, Japan and Australasia has been well explained by Professor Boyle as well as by Canadian professors Peter Dale Scott, John McMurtry, Graeme MacQueen, Michael Keefer, and Michel Chossudovsky among others. Yesterday Professor Scott’s most recent observations on the lawlessness that permeates the highest levels of our governments was published at
Founder of the Peace Studies Centre and the Peace Studies program at McMaster University, Professor MacQueen, has added his voice to the mix. He has emphasized the importance for the peace movement of understanding “fraudulent trigger incidents.” Prof. MacQueen argues that key elements of the peace movement have gone astray. He accuses some of his fellow activists of refusing to research the case being developed of one of the world’s most vital and determined movements of civil society and falling back on uncritical acceptance of what he calls the “government explanation” of the 9/11 Wars. See
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