'Israel knew Iraq had no nuclear weapons'

By Laurie Copans

Jerusalem - A government critic said on Tuesday that Israel was aware before the war against Iraq that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, but Israel did not inform the United States.

Israel put itself on war footing before the US invasion last year, passing out gas mask kits to its citizens and then ordering them to open the kits, a step that eventually will cost millions, since components would have to be replaced.

But lawmaker Yossi Sarid, a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, said on Tuesday that Israeli intelligence knew beforehand that Iraq had no weapons stockpiles and misled US President George Bush.

'Israel didn't want to spoil President Bush's scenario'
In contrast, a lawmaker from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Likud Party said Israel had shared its doubts with the Americans.

During the first Gulf war in 1991, Iraq fired 39 Scud missiles at Israel, all with conventional warheads. Last year Israel appointed a stern general, Amos Gilead, as its liaison with the population. Gilead filled the airwaves with dire warnings of possible chemical or biological attacks from Iraq.

Sarid, who represents the dovish opposition Meretz Party, said it was just a costly show - Israeli intelligence knew the threat was "very, very, very limited."

"It was known in Israel that the story that weapons of mass destruction could be activated in 45 minutes was an old wives' tale," said Sarid, regarding a claim leading up to the war.

"Israel didn't want to spoil President Bush's scenario, and it should have," Sarid said.

Israeli critics say the government of Sharon maintained the state of alert for its own political reasons, to help galvanise public opinion in favour of harsh steps against the Palestinians.

The United States and Britain have launched inquiries into intelligence reports about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, used by leaders of both nations as part of their justification for the invasion. So far such weapons have not been found.

Likud lawmaker Ehud Yatom said Israel told the Americans that it was not sure that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

"Israel said apparently there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but we haven't seen anything with our own eyes," Yatom said. "But the great United States didn't have to rely on Israel." Yatom had a career in Israeli security before entering the parliament last year.

Another view came from Scott Ritter, who led United Nations weapons inspections in Iraq for seven years before resigning in 1998. He told an Israeli newspaper this week that Israel knew for years that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction.

"The Israeli intelligence reached this conclusion many years ago," Ritter told the Ynet Internet site, affiliated with the Yediot Ahronot newspaper. "Despite this, the security establishment instructed citizens to open their gas masks, a move that cost Israel billions."

Ritter, an ex-Marine officer, has been a vocal critic of Bush's Iraq policies.

When Ritter met with Israeli intelligence officials in 1998, they told him that Iraq had been reduced to the number six threat down from number one four years before, he said.

"In the end, if the Israeli intelligence knew that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, so the CIA knew it and thus British intelligence too," Ritter told Ynet. - Sapa-AP

Iraq war was good for Israel: Olmert

By Dan WilliamsWed Nov 22, 3:16 PM ET

The Iraq war was a boon for Israel's security, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Wednesday, voicing fresh endorsement for a Bush administration sapped by the unpopularity at home of its Middle East policies.

The mid-term election losses of U.S. President George W. Bush's Republican Party were widely considered a repudiation of his decision to topple Iraq's Saddam Hussein as part of a vision of democratizing the region and bolstering allies like Israel.

Olmert avoided explicit comment on the Republicans' fortunes during Washington talks with Bush earlier this month. But in a speech to visiting American Jews, Olmert made clear he had few regrets about the changes wrought by the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"I know all of his (Bush's) policies are controversial in America. There are some who support his policies in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, and some who do not," he said.

"I stand with the president because I know that Iraq without Saddam Hussein is so much better for the security and safety of Israel, and all of the neighbors of Israel without any significance to us," added Olmert, who was speaking in English.

"Thank God for the power and the determination and leadership manifested by President Bush."

With U.S.-led forces mired in an Iraqi insurgency, political analysts have speculated that Bush may redirect his attentions toward solving an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is a major grievance in the Arab and Muslim world.

That could prompt Olmert to reconsider his unilateral policies towards a Palestinian leadership that he has argued is incapable or unwilling to make peace with Israel.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate who has been struggling to revive rapprochement efforts despite opposition from the Hamas Islamists with which he shares power, has said that Israel should seek peace as a key to wider regional calm.

Under Saddam, Iraq backed Palestinian militants and posed a menacing presence to Israel's east. During the 1991 Gulf war, Iraq rained missiles on Israel but Israel held its fire at the behest of Washington, which was wary of alienating Arab allies.

But Olmert's views on today's Iraq have not been shared by all Israeli experts.

Yuval Diskin, chief of the Shin Bet intelligence service, said in a leaked briefing earlier this year that Israel could come to rue Saddam's ouster if it deepens regional instability.

"When you take apart a system in which a dictator has been controlling his people by force, you have chaos," Diskin said in a recording broadcast by Israeli television. "I'm not sure we won't end up missing Saddam."

Bush Nuts Are George W. Bush lovers certifiable?

November 23, 2006
By Andy Bromage

A collective “I told you so” will ripple through the world of Bush-bashers once news of Christopher Lohse’s study gets out.

Lohse, a social work master’s student at Southern Connecticut State University, says he has proven what many progressives have probably suspected for years: a direct link between mental illness and support for President Bush.

Lohse says his study is no joke. The thesis draws on a survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. Lohse’s study, backed by SCSU Psychology professor Jaak Rakfeldt and statistician Misty Ginacola, found a correlation between the severity of a person’s psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.

But before you go thinking all your conservative friends are psychotic, listen to Lohse’s explanation.

“Our study shows that psychotic patients prefer an authoritative leader,” Lohse says. “If your world is very mixed up, there’s something very comforting about someone telling you, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’”

The study was an advocacy project of sorts, designed to register mentally ill voters and encourage them to go to the polls, Lohse explains. The Bush trend was revealed later on.

The study used Modified General Assessment Functioning, or MGAF, a 100-point scale that measures the functioning of disabled patients. A second scale, developed by Rakfeldt, was also used. Knowledge of current issues, government and politics were assessed on a 12-item scale devised by the study authors.

“Bush supporters had significantly less knowledge about current issues, government and politics than those who supported Kerry,” the study says.

Lohse says the trend isn’t unique to Bush: A 1977 study by Frumkin & Ibrahim found psychiatric patients preferred Nixon over McGovern in the 1972 election.

Rakfeldt says the study was legitimate, though not intended to show what it did.

“Yes it was a legitimate study but these data were mined after the fact,” Rakfeldt says. “You can ask new questions of the data. I haven’t looked at” Lohse’s conclusions regarding Bush, Rakfeldt says.

“That doesn’t make it illegitimate, it just wasn’t part of the original project.”

For his part, Lohse is a self-described “Reagan revolution fanatic” but said that W. is just “beyond the pale.” ●

Bush can’t designate groups as terrorists

Bush can’t designate groups as terrorists
Executive order establishing power was unconstitutional, ruling says
The Associated Press
Updated: 7:42 p.m. CT Nov 28, 2006

LOS ANGELES - A federal judge struck down President Bush's authority to designate groups as terrorists, saying his post-Sept. 11 executive order was unconstitutional and vague, according to a ruling released Tuesday.

The Humanitarian Law Project had challenged Bush's order, which blocked all the assets of groups or individuals he named as "specially designated global terrorists" after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

"This law gave the president unfettered authority to create blacklists," said David Cole, a lawyer for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Constitutional Rights that represented the group. "It was reminiscent of the McCarthy era."

The case centered on two groups, the Liberation Tigers, which seeks a separate homeland for the Tamil people in Sri Lanka, and Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan, a political organization representing the interests of Kurds in Turkey.

U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins enjoined the government from blocking the assets of the two groups.

Both groups consider the Nov. 21 ruling a victory; both had been designated by the United States as foreign terrorist organizations.

Cole said the judge's ruling does not invalidate the hundreds of other designated terrorist groups on the list but "calls them into question."

Justice Department reviewing options
Charles Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, said, "We are currently reviewing the decision and we have made no determination what the government's next step will be."

A White House spokeswoman declined to immediately comment.

The judge's 45-page ruling was a reversal of her own tentative findings last July in which she indicated she would uphold wide powers asserted by Bush under an anti-terror financing law. She delayed her ruling then to allow more legal briefs to be filed.

She also struck down the provision in which Bush had authorized the secretary of the treasury to designate anyone who "assists, sponsors or provides services to" or is "otherwise associated with" a designated group.

‘Services’ section of order still stands
However, she let stand sections of the order that penalize those who provide "services" to designated terrorist groups. She said such services would include the humanitarian aid and rights training proposed by the plaintiffs.

The Humanitarian Law Project planned to appeal that part of the ruling, Cole said.

"We are pleased the court rejected many of the constitutional arguments raised by the plaintiffs, including their challenge to the government's ban on providing services to terrorist organizations," Miller said Tuesday. "However, we believe the court erred in finding that certain other aspects of the executive order were unconstitutional."

The ruling was still considered a victory, Cole said.

"Even in fighting terrorism the president cannot be given a blank check to blacklist anyone he considers a bad guy or a bad group and you can't imply guilt by association," Cole said.

UK Police Adorn Nazi Chic

Uniforms begin to befit fascist policies abolishing freedom of speech

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, November 28, 2006

British police have been photographed wearing bizarre Nazi-like insignia on their uniforms as the attire of Tony Blair's enforcers begins to compliment the totalitarian society the Prime Minister is creating by openly abolishing freedom of speech and freedom of assembly under draconian crime and terror laws.

The image was sent to us by a protester who joined around 200 others to march against the presence of the British National Party in Blackpool England on Saturday. Many consider the BNP to be a neo-Nazi front organization but some demonstrators probably left the event more worried about the similar direction in which UK police are heading, as exemplified by their changing uniforms.

The police officer photographed is wearing black attire that clearly bears the logo of a yellow lightening strike on a red background. It looks somewhat like a single 'S' as oppose to the double 'SS' worn by Hitler's feared Schutzstaffel, otherwise known as the Waffen SS, the Fuhrer's bodyguards who later grew to become the elite corps of the third reich's army.

The "sieg heil" hand salute is purely coincidental but it marries the context.

Should Brits be a little concerned that a branch of their police is wearing insignia that wouldn't look out of place in 1930's Nazi Germany? Allied to the fascist policies that have all but ended every fundamental freedom in the country under the stewardship of Tony Blair, it seems this is just the natural progression for the proto-dictatorship, where you are completely free so long as you don't exercise any of your freedoms.

Blair has created over 3,000 new criminal offences during his time in office - one for every day of his tenure and six times the amount created by Tory predecessors John Major and Margaret Thatcher. Allied with a raft of authoritarian anti-terror legislation, social behavior mandates and hate speech restrictions - ridiculous measures such as criminalizing the nomination of a neighbor to turn off your house alarm have also been introduced.

The so-called 'liberal' Blair has instituted a police state that obliterates anything the traditionally imperious Tories could ever get through.

In addition to the frenzied lawmaking, Blair has overseen the abolition of jury rights, handing cases likely to last over 3 months to the dictate of a single judge, criminalized any protest not authorized by the government under the Serious Organised Crime Act, mandated the entry of any protester into a terror database upon police questioning, created glorification of terror laws that are so sweeping they could apply to any form of free speech, eradicated habeas corpus by introducing house arrests and ever-increasing time lengths of detention without charge, attacked the notion of guilty until proven innocent by imposing curfews for under 16's, supported the use of intelligence knowingly obtained from torture in Uzbekistan and allowed the use of British airports for the 'extraordinary rendition' of terror suspects, created framework for the introduction of mandatory ID cards and implemented a national DNA database that stores records for eternity even if the suspect is acquitted of their crime.

Using the fear of terror, Blair has presided over the destruction of liberty in Britain.

We should remember that the bobby on the beat does not craft the policies and does not design the uniform, this is merely an outward expression of the deliberate fostering of authoritarianism that the world has been forced to labor under since 9/11.

This is why Iraqi's hate us

Video link

This Is Why The Iraqis Hate Us
Another beating snuff video shames coalition of the killing, You Tube censors it

Prison Planet | November 17, 2006
Paul Joseph Watson

British troops punch, beat and kick pleading Iraqi children as a sadistic comrade films the brutal scenes of torture, laughing, screaming, growling and frothing like a serial killer filming a snuff movie. This is why the Iraqis hate us.

Iraqi children throw rocks as they flee from running British troops, are grabbed, brought inside a gate and beaten half to death. Watch the video below. The censorship spies at You Tube rejected it 2 minutes after upload so I re-named it "Fluffy Happy Poodles In Heaven," to try and bypass their keyword filters and it was still rejected. I even renamed the actual 'wmv' filename but it was still blocked for "terms of use violation." I finally managed to get it posted on Google Video. If it disappears again, here's the Windows Media link on our server.

"Oh yes! Oh Yes! You're gonna get it!" snarls the cameraman.

"Yes! Naughty little boys."

He laughs as they boys begin to scream out in pain, "Yes!"

He then takes on the tone of a demented serial killer, grunting and growling, "Yeeeeeesss, yeeeeeessss," as troops punch and kick the children.

He mocks the cries of the boys, "No please don't hurt me," laughs again and then proceeds to begin frothing in some kind of insane carnal bloodlust, "Motherfuckers, you little fuckers - die!"

Adult Iraqis are brought in and similarly assaulted - the video ends.

A probe of this video led to the arrest of the cameraman, Cpl Martin Webster, but after that the investgation seemingly went nowhere and was swept under the rug.

Originally leaked in February this year, this is just the latest in a long line of "trophy videos" that expose the true face of what the troops have been trained and ordered to do in Iraq, dominate, brutalize and enslave the population - and it's why nearly 3,000 have come home in flag-draped coffins.

This is why the Iraqis hate us.

- A CNN clip from the early days of the "liberation" shows U.S. troops finishing off an injured Iraqi. The tape cuts to an interview with one of the soldiers who states, "Like, man, you guys are dead now, you know. But it was a good feeling. I mean, afterwards you're like, hell, yeah, that was awesome. Let's do it again."

- In another clip the soldier exclaims, "Hell yeah bitches," as he audibly orgasms as the scene of carnage before him - a missile slamming into a nearby building. "I got all that shit on camera."

- U.S. troops in a convoy drive vehicles down an Iraqi highway and bemoan the fact that they are not allowed to gun down children who throw rocks at them.

- Bloodthirsty security guards and contractors hang out the back of trucks and randomly execute Iraqis driving in vehicles behind them.

- An Iraqi taxi driver who stole some firewood gets his vehicle crushed by an Abrams tank as U.S. troops cheer and holler.

These are just some of the videos that have been leaked onto the Internet. Now we know that the policy to abuse and torture innocent Iraqis just to show them who the bosses were was implicit, how many more of these kind of incidents have happened over the past three and a half years but not been videotaped by salivating zombies?

This is why the Iraqis hate us.

No one is suggesting that U.S. troops should roll over like a poodle if someone is shooting at them - they have every right to shoot back no matter what your view on the war is. The rubicon is crossed when petty thieves, children who throw rocks or completely innocent people are brutalized without recourse and the one thing that betrays the true nature of it all is the sadistic reaction of the protagonists who enjoy the torture, the beatings and the death.

Most of these individuals were brought up on a steady diet of first person shoot-em-ups, and they have overlaid the mental perception that the video games taught them on how to treat death. Distanced and emotionless, the troops see random slaughter and torture as a stress reliever, a means of letting off some steam - and it's all sanctioned from the very top.

This is why the Iraqis hate us.

The assumption that Iraq is now liberated and that its people have suffered for the glorious opportunity of seeing democracy and freedom flourish throughout their country is the last thread the Neo-Cons are hanging onto as claims of weapons of mass destruction and Al-Qaeda ties evaporated long ago. Yet to claim Iraq is liberated is the most absurd of any of the justifications for going to war or "staying the course."

Every cornerstone of what one would consider to be basic rights in a free society, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, right to fair judicial process, right to be secure from unlawful searches and seizures in one's home, have been abolished in Iraq. The occupation makes the regime of Saddam Hussein look like post-revolution America.

This is why the Iraqis hate us.

I guess the Iraqi children should feel lucky in that they got their retaliation in first by throwing rocks, many are simply arrested, hooded and taken to the torture camp for refusing to show ID at checkpoints . It's good to see that the authorities are not hypocrites and that the same kind of law enforcement techniques are practiced here at home, as Mostafa Tabatabainejad can attest to, the student was tortured for refusing to show his ID to UCLA police in a campus library.

The fun will continue when the same kind of barbarous fiends who get orgasmic pleasure from watching children being tortured come back home and become our police.

10 Year Old Disciplined For Visiting 9/11 Websites - Alex Jones Infowars

Armed Men Terrorize School

Michigan raid part of unfolding agenda to mould schools into prisons and students into obedient slaves

By Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, November 1, 2006

A recent incident in which armed riot police raided a Michigan junior and high school as part of a drill that the children were not aware was about to take place raises the bar in the pursuit of an agenda to fully transform public schools into prison training camps set up to breed continuous generations of obedient slaves.

The Associated Press reports,

"A school safety drill that included police officers in riot gear with weapons has caused concern among some parents who say it was too realistic and frightened some students."

"Students, who were unaware police were conducting a drill, were taken from the classroom into the halls, patted down by officers and asked what they had in their pockets, the newspaper said."

"Some of these kids were so scared, they just about wet their pants," said Marge Bradshaw, a parent with four children in Godfrey-Lee Schools. "I think it's pure wrong that the students and parents were not informed of this."

The students were not told that the drill was about to take place and the teachers were given just a moments notice.

This follows an incident in early October where another Michigan school was locked down for hours after a teenager was seen in the woods wearing a Halloween mask.

The raid is similar to past examples such as Goose Creek South Carolina (video below), where armed police raided a high school with weapons drawn supposedly in search of drugs. Shouting officers aimed guns at students heads as they were ordered face-up against the wall, then into Guantanamo style squats as they were handcuffed and K9 dogs sniffed their backpacks.

No drugs were found and the Goose Creek Police Department, the city, as well as the Berkeley County School District had to pay $1.6 million for violating the rights of nearly 150 students caught in the raid. The three had to sign a consent decree barring similar activities in future but it included a waver where probable cause or voluntary consent could be cited to conduct further raids.
Full story with video