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THE INSIDE HISTORY OF THE ISRAEL
LOBBY
Former top
CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison give CounterPunchers
the real scoop on the Israel lobby and precisely how powerful
it is. Read
how US presidents from Wilson, through FDR to Truman were manipulated
by the Zionist lobby; how Israel bent LBJ, Reagan and Clinton
to its purpose; how Bush's White House has been the West Wing
of the Israeli government; how Washington's revolving doors send
full-time Israel lobbyists from think-tanks to the National Security
Council and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. For all who want a
true measure of the Lobby's power, the Christisons' 8-page dossier,
exclusive to CounterPunch newsletter subscribers, is a MUST read. CounterPunch
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Turning Quibbles
Over Footnotes into Academic Felonies
My
Trial By Media
By WARD CHURCHILL
Bolder, Colorado.
On February 2, 2005, Colorado Governor
Bill Owens called for me to be fired because of statements I
made about U.S. foreign policy that were clearly protected by
the First Amendment. It would have been illegal to do so then,
and it is just as illegal today.
More than 16 months ago Governor
Owens informed then-CU President Betsy Hoffman that his office
would "work closely with her and the Board of Regents to
terminate" me. A few weeks later President Hoffman expressed
her fears of a "new McCarthyism" to the Boulder faculty,
and a few days later she resigned. Apparently this message was
not lost on the remaining CU administrators.
The fact that CU has spent
over a year and a great deal of money conducting a sham investigation
of "research misconduct" does not convert an otherwise
illegal action into a legitimate one. In its determination to
fire me, the University has continuously violated its own rules,
the Regents' laws on academic freedom, and the U.S. Constitution's
guarantees of due process and equal protection. As today's press
release illustrates, CU administrators
have conducted a "trial by media," not a confidential
personnel investigation. Today's report is but the latest step
in this process.
After encouraging malicious
and frivolous allegations to be made, Interim Chancellor DiStefano,
as complainant, submitted the resulting media stories as if they
were his own allegations of research misconduct. These were
then investigated by a committee which, over my objections, was
dominated by CU insiders. That committee's report has now been
rubber stamped by the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct
(SCRM), and SCRM's approval will proceed back up the internal
hierarchy to Interim Chancellor DiStefano for his approval.
Anyone who bothers to read
the investigative committee's unnecessarily long and obfuscatory
report will see that the committee both deviated from and far
exceeded its mandate to served as an unbiased, non-adversarial,
fact-finding body. Instead, it functioned as prosecutor, jury
and judge. Despite the availability of outside experts in my
field, no one on the committee had expertise in American Indian
Studies and the committee included no American Indians.
The investigative committee
artificially constricted the time and manner of my responses
and then disregarded the evidence I was able to present. It
did not measure my work against the accepted practices of my
discipline; instead it invented and applied a secret set of standards.
Even so, it was unable to provide the required evidence that
I violated relevant norms and, in the end, resorted to recommending
harsh sanctions because I did not have the "right attitude."
This process has not demonstrated
that I engaged in any serious research misconduct but that, after
more than a year of painstaking review, those charged with firing
me could find nothing more than a few footnotes and questions
of attribution to quibble over.
University of Colorado administrators
have simply confirmed that they will shamelessly cater to political
pressure, discarding the most basic principles of academic freedom
in their attempt to silence me and discredit my work.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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