The Voice of the White House for August 18th 2006

Washington, D.C. “It seems that huge numbers of viewers, both domestic and foreign, have looked at the posting I made on intercepted official Israeli conversations and I can imagine the hysteria in Tel Aviv…and Washington over this.

And, I am so happy to tell you, there is more to come!

On Monday the 22nd, I will be devoting a good deal of space to the 9/11 tragedy. We know from intercepts, which foreign government helped organize and execute this and who in our government at that time was aware of it. I can assure my readers that this is not the usual lunatic fringe fictions about plasmoid clouds or Russian missiles.

The truth is always less exciting than some blogger’s wet dream.

A bit of current history here. Bush, ever obedient to the wishes of Israel, agreed to block any attempt to establish a cease fire in Lebanon until the mighty IDF crushed the Hezbollah and was able to occupy, on a permanent basis they decided, enough southern Lebanese territory to keep Hezbollah from lobbing rockets into Israel.

Bush was initially gloating around here that the all powerful IDF would crush the "weak rag heads" in a “few days.” As it turned out, Hezbollah defeated the Israeli military on the ground in savage fighting and then a terrified Israel rushed to Bush, via their Ambassador here, to beg him, whining like hell, to force through an immediate cease fire before “everything here falls apart.” Bush and Congoleeza Rice, once Stanford’s notorious Date Rape Queen and latterly our beloved and useless Secretary of State, rushed in panic to the once denigrated UN and pushed through a frantic cease fire.

But given his nutty personality, Bush is now trumpeting around his “confidential inner circle conferences,” that Hezbollah was ‘soundly defeated’ by the IDF!

Those here, or informed others in D.C. know that both Bush and Israel have taken a terrible, terrible propaganda defeat over this. They were both once terrifying manifestations of raw force, keeping the world frightened of their anger, and retribution, but now Bush is seen as a paper tiger in a rainstorm.

The Israeli defeat will, without a doubt, prove to be a disaster in our occupation of an Iraq where American military units are being mortared in their green zone on a daily basis (not reported domestically, of course) and a terrible civil war is now in full swing.

Emboldened by the Hezbollah victory, the resistance people in Iraq are redoubling their murderous attacks on American soldiers and this is a trend that shows no sign of abating.

He threatened North Korea with “immediate military retaliation” if she launched any missiles. They launched sixteen and nothing happened.

He has continued to threaten Iran if she does not stop her atomic development program. Iran has not only laughed in his face but openly supported the Hezbollah with weapons and money.

We here all know that Bush has shown that America can do nothing but threaten and pretty soon, the rest of the world will treat all of us like a Punch and Judy show. Remember this in November, why not?  

Desert of Trapped Corpses Testifies to Israel's Failure
August 15, 2006
by Robert Fisk
lndependent/UK
 

They made a desert and called it peace. Srifa - or what was once the village of Srifa - is a place of pancaked homes, blasted walls, rubble, starving cats and trapped corpses. But it is also a place of victory for the Hizbollah, whose fighters walked amid the destruction yesterday with the air of conquering heroes. So who is to blame for this desert? The Shia militia which provoked this war - or the Israeli air force and army which has laid waste to southern Lebanon and killed so many of its people?

There was no doubt what the village mukhtar thought. As three Hizbollah men - one wounded in the arm, the other carrying two ammunition clips and a two-way radio - passed us amid the piles of broken concrete, Hussein Kamel el-Din yelled to them: "Hallo, heroes!" Then he turned to me. "You know why they are angry? Because God didn't give them the opportunity of dying."

You have to be down here with the Hizbollah amid this terrifying destruction - way south of the Litani river, in the territory from which Israel once vowed to expel them - to realise the nature of the past month of war and of its enormous political significance to the Middle East. Israel's mighty army has already retreated from the neighbouring village of Ghandoutiya after losing 40 men in just over 36 hours of fighting. It has not even managed to penetrate the smashed town of Khiam where the Hizbollah were celebrating yesterday afternoon. In Srifa, I stood with Hizbollah men looking at the empty roads to the south and could see all the way to Israel and the settlement of Mizgav Am on the other side of the frontier. This is not the way the war was supposed to have ended for Israel.

Far from humiliating Iran and Syria - which was the Israeli-American plan - these two supposedly pariah states have been left untouched and the Hizbollah's reputation lionised across the Arab world. The "opportunity" which President George Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, apparently saw in the Lebanon war has turned out to be an opportunity for America's enemies to show the weakness of Israel's army. Indeed, last night, scarcely any Israeli armour was to be seen inside Lebanon - just one solitary tank could be glimpsed outside Bint Jbeil and the Israelis had retreated even from the "safe" Christian town of Marjayoun. It is now clear that the 30,000-strong Israeli army reported to be racing north to the Litani river never existed. In fact, it is unlikely that there were yesterday more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers left in all of southern Lebanon, although they did become involved in two fire-fights during the morning, hours after the UN-ceasefire went into effect.

Down the coast road from Beirut, meanwhile, came a massive exodus of tens of thousands of Shia families, bedding piled on the roofs of their cars , many of them sporting Hizbollah flags and pictures of Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's chairman, on their windscreens. At the massive traffic jams around the broken motorway bridges and craters which litter the landscape, the Hizbollah was even handing out yellow and green "victory" flags, along with official notices urging parents not to allow children to play with the thousands of unexploded bombs that now lie across the landscape. At least one Lebanese child was killed by unexploded ordnance and another 15 were wounded yesterday.

But to what are these people returning? Haj Ali Dakroub, a 42-year old construction manager, lost part of his home in Israel's 1996 bombardment of Srifa. Now his entire house has been flattened. "What is here that Israel should destroy all this?" he asked. "We don't deny that the resistance was in Srifa. It was here before and it will be here in the future. But in this house lived only my family. So why would Israel bomb it?"

Well, I did happen to notice what appeared to be the casing of a missile hanging from the balcony of a much-damaged house facing the rubble of Ali Dakroub's home. And a group of Hizbollah militiamen, one of them with a pistol tucked into his trousers, walked past us nonchalantly and disappeared into an orchard. Was this, perhaps, where they kept some of their rockets?

Mr Dakroub wasn't saying. "I am going to rebuild my home with my two sons," he insisted. "Israel may come back in 10 years and destroy it all over again and then I'll just rebuild it all over again. This was a Hizbollah victory. The Israelis were able to defeat all the Arab countries in six days in 1967 but here they could not defeat the resistance in a month. These resistance men would come out of the ground and shoot back. They are still here."

"Come out of the ground" is an expression I have heard several times these past four weeks and I am beginning to suspect that many of the thousands of guerrillas did indeed shelter in caves and basements and tunnels, only to emerge to fire their missiles or to use their infra-red rockets on the Israeli army once it made the mistake of sending troops into Lebanon on the ground. And does anyone believe that the Hizbollah will submit to their own disarmament by a new international force of UN and Lebanese troops once - if - it arrives? There was a symbolic moment yesterday when Lebanese soldiers already based in southern Lebanon joined Hizbollah men in Srifa to clear the rubble of a house in which the bodies of an entire family were believed buried. Lebanese Red Cross and civil defence personnel - representatives of the civil power which is supposed to claw back its sovereignty from the Hizbollah - joined in the search. The mukhtar, who so blatantly regarded the Hizbollah as heroes, is also a government representative. And at the entrance to this shattered village still stands a poster of Nasrallah and the Iranian President Ali Khamenei.

Far from driving the Hizbollah north across the Litani river, Israel has entrenched them in their Lebanese villages as never before.

Lebanon war cost Israel $1.6bn
August 15, 2006
Julian Borger in Jerusalem
Guardian Unlimited

Israel's month-long war against Hizbullah has cost the country $1.6bn (£850m), or about 1% of GDP, according to initial government estimates. About a third of that went directly to the army.

Most analysts believe the ceasefire arrived just in time to stop the conflict putting a significant brake on Israel's high growth rate, although the economy is vulnerable to any resumption in the fighting.

However, the total bill is unlikely to exceed the approximately $2.5bn Israel receives each year in aid from the US - $2.2bn of that in military grants.

At least 6,000 houses or businesses in the north were destroyed or damaged during the fighting. Much of the region's fruit harvest rotted on the trees because farm laborers spent the month in their shelters. More than a million people were displaced from the north and about a quarter of the region's small businesses had to be saved from bankruptcy by emergency government support, according to Oded Feller, the president of the Chamber of Commerce for Haifa and the north.

On top of that, 30,000 reservists left their jobs around the country when they were called up.

Most importantly, tourism died completely in the northern beach resorts and around the Sea of Galilee and was badly hit in the rest of the country. Even if fighting does not break out again, there are likely to be ripple effects on tourism into next year at least.

With the truce holding for the time being, the Tel Aviv stock market has already recovered to within 2% of its pre-war level and the shekel has also bounced back.

The 5% growth rate of the past three years could be slowed, but perhaps by less than 1%, government economists hope.

"In a couple of months, we can recoup half the losses. The factories will work overtime," said Shraga Brosh, the head of the Manufacturer's Association of Israel.

Foreign investment, which has fuelled the high growth of recent years, is expected to double this year to about $12bn, mostly in the form of acquisitions of Israeli start-ups, he said. "Right now, there is no negative reaction. Those people who plan to invest in Israel are keeping their investment here. People believe the economy is strong."

According to Mr. Brosh, the damage would have been much more serious if the war had gone on even a few weeks longer, and such economic considerations may have played a role in the government's decision to accept the UN ceasefire.

Israel's capacity to sustain confidence will depend on whether the truce represents the start of a lasting peace on the northern border or only a lull before the next round in the Arab-Israeli struggle.

The tourist industry is the economy's canary - the first to succumb to the impact of instability - and it has taken a beating. The number of foreign tourists arriving in the second half of the year is expected to halve, a loss that would represent 0.4% of GDP.

"We're getting no future bookings whatsoever. Nobody is coming here," said Mark Feldman, the managing director of Zion Tours in Jerusalem.

There have been a few "solidarity tours" by pro-Israeli groups to help prop up the industry, and there are even "Katyusha tours" of the north.

But Mr Feldman said the tours accounted for little more than 5% of the war losses.

"The economic effects have yet to be felt, and the long-term ramifications are very, very serious," he said. "As British and German companies start planning for 2007, Israel will be omitted from the brochures. So I can't give a figure for loss of income tomorrow."

For Arabs, Lebanon war smashes Israeli army image
August 14, 2006
by Tom Perry
Guardian/UK

BEIRUT, Aug 14 (Reuters) - Guerrillas fire rockets and Israeli soldiers weep. Hizbollah's television station tries to convince viewers that the Middle East's strongest army is far from invincible.

For many Arabs, the claim is more than propaganda. They see Israeli casualties in south Lebanon as evidence of the weaknesses in an army long held in awe by its neighbors.

At least 116 Israeli soldiers have been killed in more than a month of fighting between Hizbollah and the Jewish state, which has poured thousands of troops into Lebanon to drive the guerrillas from the border and stop rocket fire into Israel.

Israel says its army has killed about 520 of their fighters. Hizbollah has said 80 have been killed.

Israeli forces for weeks faced fierce battles with Hizbollah fighters in the south, in some places just a few kilometres from the border, and could not stop the guerrillas' rocket fire.

"They have overcome fear of the Israelis, which is very common in the Middle East and is a part of the Israeli military doctrine," Timur Goksel, former spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping force in south Lebanon, told Reuters.

Israel's capture of the Sinai peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in six days in 1967 showed the Jewish state's military supremacy over its neighbours. The war is still known by Arabs as "The Naksa", or "The Setback".

Some Arab media have called the Lebanon conflict the sixth Arab-Israeli war, although it is different from previous conflicts because Israel is fighting a guerrilla group.

Although Israel could beat any Arab army in a conventional war, the Lebanon conflict has exposed weakness in a guerrilla war, analysts say.

"BLED WITH TIME"

"There's no doubt that the impression for the Arab public is that Israel is not a legendary power and it can be bled with time," said retired Egyptian general and military analyst Kadry Said.

Israeli army officers have said they were held back, while Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit has criticised Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for producing "humiliating defeat".

Hizbollah attacks helped drive Israel from south Lebanon in 2000 after 22 years of occupation. That withdrawal encouraged Palestinians to take up arms later that year in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, analysts say.

"2000 is seen as a Hizbollah campaign that succeeded and this will be seen more as an Israeli campaign that failed," said International Crisis Group Senior Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani. "This was a war in which Hizbollah was supposed to be devastated and wiped out and look where we are now."

Hizbollah's strength this time will also give a morale boost to Palestinians. But more important could be its impact on the wider Arab world, especially in Egypt and Jordan, where some sections of public opinion oppose peace deals made by their governments with Israel, Rabbani said.

"People will look at this and say if this group, which is blacklisted on half the planet is able to do this, then how come our own leaders who possess actual states with real militaries, are not even prepared to do one percent of this," Rabbani said.

"It will show that it is possible to say no to Israel and the U.S. and to emerge stronger rather weaker."

Stocks Scandal Spells Doom of Embattled Israeli Army Chief

August 16, 2006 Agence France Presse
by Marius Schattner

Israel's army chief, under fire for selling shares hours before launching an offensive in Lebanon, was looking set to become the first head to roll in the outcry over the state's handling of the month-long war.

Israel's media have piled opprobrium on Dan Halutz since the Maariv newspaper revealed Tuesday that he had sold shares hours before the start of the Israeli offensive in Lebanon on July 12.

The story, confirmed by Halutz himself, has focused the anger of many in a country struggling to come to terms with the less than decisive outcome of its war against the fundamentalist Hezbollah militia sparked on July 12.

"There's an old Romanian saying that goes like this: 'the country is burning, but grandma is combing her hair.' The country was on fire, and all that interested Halutz was his investment portfolio," member of parliament Colette Avital said Tuesday.

Resignation calls have come from parliament but also from the highest circles of the defence establishment.

Defence Minister Amir Peretz, also under fire for his performance since the start of the war on July 12, defended the army chief's "loyalty and dedication".

"His attention is entirely devoted to the war and the success of the army's missions," said Peretz in a statement.

"This regrettable affair would never have captured so much attention had the Lebanon campaign ended with clearcut victory" for Israel, said Mark Heller, an analyst with the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies.

"It is possible that the general made mistakes, but he certainly isn't the only one, whether at the political or military echelons," he told AFP.

Newspapers pilloried Halutz Wednesday, using the scandal to vent their anger at the man whose forces suffered unexpected setbacks at the hands of well-armed Hezbollah militiamen.

Maariv's editorial writer Ben Caspit was confident that the public's perception of a general who tries to save his stocks portfolio whilst sending his troops to the front lines would spell the end of his career.

"He entered this war as a prime minister designate. He is leaving it on a stretcher," he wrote.

The appointment last year of the former air force chief to the position of chief of staff had received a lukewarm reception within the ranks of the military, where some senior officers argued that a pilot was ill-suited for the top job.

Halutz was often criticised for being arrogant and over-estimating the air force.

The reproach returned to haunt him over the past month as it gradually emerged that Israel's fighters jets were failing to inflict enough damage on Hezbollah, which continued to rain rockets on northern Israel until the last day of the war.

When he was still air force chief, Halutz had ignited a controversy in 2002 when he said he had not lost any sleep over the death of 14 civilians in a strike of a top Palestinian militant in Gaza.

The sale of his shares caused a bigger stir.

The army chief sold shares worth 26,000 dollars on July 12 at noon, three hours after the Hezbollah border attack which left eight soldiers dead and two in the hands of the Lebanese militia.

A day later, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's TA-25 index had lost 8.3 percent.

Halutz did not deny he had sold his shares but charged he was the victim of a smear campaign.

"They've made me into a Shylock... I've gone into a tailspin, but I'll pull out," he was quoted as saying by Wednesday's newspapers.

“Falsehood is an amorphous monster, conceived in the brain of knaves and brought forth by the breath of fools. It's a mortal pestilence, a miasmic vapor that passes, like a blast from hell, over the face of the world and is gone forever. It may leave death in its wake and disaster dire; it may place on the brow of purity the brand of the courtesan and cover the hero with the stigma of the coward; it may wreck hopes and ruin homes, cause blood to flow and hearts to break; it may pollute the altar and disgrace the throne, corrupt the courts and curse the land, but the lie cannot live forever, and when it's dead and damned there's none so poor as to do it reverence.” ~William Cowper Brann

And all the sons of Congressmen! And the two adorable 100 Proof Bush daughters! (Ginna and Tonic)

"As democracy is perfected, the office of  president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." ~H.L. Mencken

“That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” ~Theodore Roosevelt

"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them.  There is almost no kind of outrage, torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, and bombing of civilians, which does not change its moral color when it is committed by our side.  The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." ~George Orwell

"Under the Bush administration, openness and accountability have been replaced by secrecy and evasion of responsibility. They abuse their power, conceal their actions from the American people, and refuse to hold officials accountable." ~Senator Edward M. Kennedy

“George W.Bush is deeply interested in Deep Space Exploration. His next project will be to circle Uranus and search for Kingons…..”
~Dallas Herald

“A government official is a man who has risen from obscurity to something worse.” ~Pat Robertson

"The voters decide nothing.  Those that count the votes decide everything." ~J.V. Stalin

“The Senior White House staff is living proof that Pentecostal mongoloids regularly cohabit with chimpanzees, frogs and Norway rats”
~Dr. Myron Kalbfuss, Biology Department, Stanford University
 

America’s Enemies!

There are four entities who represent the most dangerous enemies to American liberties since George III.

They are:

1.The Neocons or Likudists who owe their personal allegiance to another country and now completely control our foreign policy. They lied and deceived us into the Iraq war and are demanding that more and more American soldiers die to preserve their own country and ideals.

2.The Christian Evangelical right who is trying to force the United States into becoming a theocracy under their rule. They know in their hearts that they alone can restructure a secular humanist America into their idea of Heaven on Earth.

3. An element of American society that call themselves Patriots and are obsessively militaristic and great admirers of the corporate or fascistic state. Many of these have been very minor members of the American military and as a counterbalance to their reserve or rear area tours of duty, are rabidly in favor of draconian military action, the bloodier the better. Usually these drumbeaters are too old or too fat to fight and have no sons of draft age.

4. George W. Bush, who is the worst president in the history of the United States and directly responsible for the huge death tolls in Iraq, is determined to rule the United States until God puts a stop to him and is even more determined to force the American people into becoming obedient, Christian and self-sacrificing lemmings who worship at his shrine and march in step.

We gather information, on a daily basis, from many websites. There are a number of publications that are well worth viewing for their intelligent reporting of national and international news. All of those sources, listed below, are daily newspapers with the exception of the Asia Times. The latter is a very well written site with in-depth articles that are worth reading.

The New York Times:  www.nytimes.com
The Washington Post: www.washingtonpost.com
The Christian Science Monitor: www.csmonitor.com
The Guardian: www.guardian.co.uk
Seattle Post-Intelligencer:  www.seattlepi.nwsource.com
Asia Times www.atimes.com

Note: Very little of the information in this edition of TBR news has come from the mainline American media. It is just not there. Most of it has come from foreign sources and the Internet. Most of our sources can be seen on the main page.

 "People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief of the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility  ~Eric Hoffer “The True Believer”