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May 9, 2002
Alex Lynch
American
Mainstream Media:
Insitutionalized Subjectivity
Alexander Cockburn
The Armey Plan:
Palestine to Ft. Worth?
May 8, 2002
James
Masterson
Hysteria
and Panic
About France
Robert Fisk
The Solution to this Filthy War: Foreign
Occupation
Edward
Hammond
and Jan van Aken
Pentagon
Pushed for Offensive BioWeapons Development
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
May 6, 2002
Fran Schor
Invasion
of Iraq:
Coming Soon
Dave Marsh
Love Hurts
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
May 3, 2002
Arundhati Roy
Democracy and
Religious Fascism
Wayne
Madsen
Dispatch
from Paris:
Le Pen's Strange Coalition
Yigal Bronner
A Journey to Beit Jalla
CounterPunch
Wire
Otto
Reich Named to Board of School of the Americas
John Troyer
Hatemongers Try to Cleanse History:
Gays and 9/11
John Stauber
Big
Food/Tobacco/Booze
Attacks "Mad Cow" Authors
Kathleen Christison
Before There Was Terrorism
May 2, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Rep.
Dick Armey Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians
Rami Kaplan
Israeli Soldiers Resisting
the Occupation:
Why We Refuse to Fight
Carol
Norris
Subterranean
Mini-Nuke Blues
Bernard Weiner
A Peek Inside Colin Powell's Personal
Diary
May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
Resources:
100s of Links
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The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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May
10, 2002
CounterPunch Special
Report
A Congressional
Staffer Details Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill:
"We are
All Members of Likud Now."
Our Vichy Congress
by George Sunderland
*
Should John Walker Lindh be found guilty of taking
up arms against the United States, pursuant to a fair trial before
a court of competent jurisdiction, this writer would have no
objection in principle to seeing him executed, or put away for
a long period. The law is the law; one may say this without engaging
in bloodthirsty rancor or the cheap, pseudo-patriotic histrionics
that are the custom on talk radio or the cable "news"
channels.
That having been stipulated, the American
Taliban case raises fundamental questions of group loyalty, and
what it means to cross the line between Constitutionally-protected
activities and openly treasonable behavior. Moreover, if Walker
Lindh's youth and alleged naiveté turn out to be mitigating
circumstances, how are we to judge disloyalty committed by older,
presumably responsible citizens who swear an oath to protect
the Constitution when they assume elective office?
What happens, indeed, when inverted and
transferred loyalty becomes so general as hardly to be noticeable?
Probably the emblematic example of this
kind of generalized disloyalty to the country of one's birth
is the Vichy government of France. Histories of the fall of France,
such as William Shirer's Collapse
of the Third Republic, or Alistair Horne's To
Lose a Battle, take pains to emphasize that France's
military collapse and generally subservient loyalty to German
occupation had their source not in military weakness per se,
but in the profound cynicism, corruption, and attenuated loyalty
of interwar France's professional class of politicians.
One of the archetypes that reverberates
in our extended historical memory is the thoroughly distasteful
picture of the dozing, senile Petain, the feral, rat-like Leval,
and a supporting cast of seedy hack politicians clenching acrid
Gauloise cigarettes between tobacco-stained fingers. When Petain
spoke of the "duty of loyalty" of France's citizens
to a collaborationist regime, the modern reader has no difficulty
in calculating that black is white and up is down. Loyalty to
France was not the loyalty preached and practiced by the politicians
in Vichy. At the end of World War II, many of these politicians
found themselves at the end of a rope.
What, then, is one to make of our representatives
and senators in Congress assembled?
For expressions of sheer grovelling subservience
to a foreign power, the pronouncements of Laval and Petain pale
in comparison to the rhetorical devotion with which certain Congressmen
have bathed the Israel of Ariel Sharon.
In March, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma
took the Senate floor and said the September 11 attacks were
punishment by God in response to U.S. policy toward Israel. Asserting
that Israel is "entitled" to the West Bank, he also
criticized his fellow citizens who counselled the Israelis to
use restraint, in effect blaming them for the terrorist attacks
of September 11: "One of the reasons I believe the spiritual
door was opened for an attack against the United States of America
is that the policy of our government has been to ask the Israelis,
and demand it with pressure, not to retaliate in a significant
way against the terrorist strikes that have been launched against
them."
According to this Tornado-Belt St. Augustine,
God in effect allowed airliners to be flown into the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon because U.S. actions towards Israel offended
the Almighty. In other words, the United States was punished
because the Bush administration had been insufficiently worshipful
towards Israel (the $3 billion annually that Congress squeezes
out of the taxpayer as tribute to the Jewish State is apparently
not sufficient in the opinion of this self-styled "fiscal
conservative"--and in the opinion of the Almighty Himself,
Whose inscrutable will Inhofe claims to be able to interpret).
Like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson,
Inhofe believes America suffered divinely-ordained punishment;
but the Senator adds a new twist: those 3,000 innocent Americans
died, he believes, because their government demonstrated insufficient
obeisance to a foreign country. For sheer treacherous Quislingism,
Inhofe's statement is hard to top.
But top it we can.
A perusal of the May 6, 2002 Jerusalem
Post reveals the following headline: "Visiting Congressmen
Advise Israel to Resist US Administration Pressure." The
Israeli newspaper chronicles the pilgrimage of a group of Congressional
wardheelers to the Promised Land, carrying with them a copy of
the resolution of support for the Israeli government which passed
Congress by a vote of 352-21 with 29 abstentions. The delegation's
leader, Rep. James Saxton of New Jersey, displayed a copy of
the resolution to reporters, which he said they wanted to "hand
deliver" to the Israeli people. Saxton's enthusiasm for
Israel is a matter of long standing, and extends to providing
Congressional employment to Israeli citizen--and rumored Mossad
asset--Yosef Bodansky.
An ironic aspect to this Congressional
junket is that these are precisely the public officials who routinely
suggest that dissent against the Bush administration's conduct
of the war in Afghanistan is tantamount to treason.
Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's
tepid criticism of Bush's policies in March elicited a firestorm
of self-righteous indignation from Republicans, and Daschle,
duly chastised, slunk offstage.
No criticism of President Bush is warranted,
apparently, except where Israel is involved. In that case, one
is seemingly permitted to travel to foreign countries at taxpayer
expense for the purpose of publicly undercutting one's own government's
foreign policy. What gives this circumstance added savor is the
recollection that Jesse Jackson's erstwhile forays into hostage
negotiation in Lebanon and the Balkans met with grumbling from
Republicans that Jackson ought to be prosecuted for violating
the Logan Act. Again, apparently the Israel exception applies.
A further example of Vichyite subservience
is provided by John McCain, adored pet of newspaper editorial
boards and in relentless competition with Joseph Lieberman as
Conscience of the Senate pro tempore. Addressing the closing
plenary session of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
at the Jefferson Memorial on April 23, McCain plighted his troth
with Sharon's Israel in a manner that would have been denounced
as fellow-travelership or useful idiocy had it been Henry Wallace
praising the Soviet Union.
Invoking Senator Henry "Scoop"
Jackson (the founder, as it were, of Congressional Vichyism:
a truly odious pork-barreling errand boy of the military industrial
complex whose chief contribution to American statecraft was launching
the careers of the smoothly sinister Richard Perle and howling
militarist Frank Gaffney) McCain described the indissoluble moral
bond between the American Republic and the Middle Eastern apartheid
state run by an ex-general currently under indictment by a Belgian
court for war crimes. Indeed, "To be proudly pro-American
and pro-Israeli is not to hold conflicting loyalties. As Scoop
understood, it is about defending the principles that both countries
hold dear. And I stand before you today, proudly pro-American
and pro-Israel." It is notable that McCain produced this
effusion at an American national memorial, surrounded by Israeli
flags. The Senator apparently thinks that this scene would be
so impressive to his Arizona constituents that he put a picture
of it on his web site.
Command performances before AIPAC have
become standard features in the life of a Washington elected
official, like filing FEC reports and hitting on interns. The
stylized panegyrics delivered at the annual AIPAC meeting have
all the probative value of the Dniepropetrovsk Soviet's birthday
greeting to Stalin, because the actual content is unimportant;
what is crucial is that the politician in question be seen to
be genuflecting before the AIPAC board. In fact, to make things
easier, the speeches are sometimes written by an AIPAC employee,
with cosmetic changes inserted by a member of the Senator's or
Congressman's own staff.
Of course, there are innumerable lobbies
in Washington, from environmental to telecommunications to chiropractic;
why is AIPAC different? For one thing, it is a political action
committee that lobbies expressly on behalf of a foreign power;
the fact that it is exempt from the Foreign Agents' Registration
Act is yet another mysterious "Israel exception." For
another, it is not just the amount of money it gives, it is the
political punishment it can exact: just ask Chuck Percy or Pete
McClosky. Since the mid-1980s, no Member of Congress has even
tried to take on the lobby directly. As a Senate staffer told
this writer, it is the "cold fear" of AIPAC's disfavor
that keeps the politicians in line.
This scam has been going on for decades.
The main purpose, other than to maintain
the flow of weapons and loot to Israel, is to keep Congress's
investigatory apparatus turned off. AIPAC appears to be batting
a thousand.
Lyndon Johnson's decision to cover up
the deliberate and protracted Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty
in June 1967 (and which resulted in 34 deaths: almost double
the deaths suffered by the crew of the U.S.S. Cole) was pointedly
not investigated by Congress. Instead, the surviving crew were
shamefully bullied into silence by the gargoyle Johnson and his
functionaries; those who did break their silence later were reviled
by the lobby as delusional anti-Semites.
Likewise, the Congressional investigation
into the Beirut barracks bombing stuck to the narrow issue of
the incompetent U.S. military chain of command, and avoided the
wider issue of the Marines' presence as sitting ducks in the
middle of Sharon's first war of conquest. A retired officer has
asserted that the Mossad had intelligence from informers that
the frame of a truck was being reinforced to carry a heavy load
of explosives, but chose to keep the intelligence secret. Despite
the lobby's claim that the U.S.-Israel relationship is one of
mutual intelligence sharing, the real relationship is a starker
one: according to old intelligence hands, Israel takes all and
gives nothing, even if U.S. lives are at stake.
The way for then-National Security Advisor
Bud McFarlane's "opening to Iran" was paved by the
fact that Israel was already providing F-4 Phantom spare parts
(manufactured in the United States and transported to Israel
at American taxpayer expense) to Iran on the sly as a way of
counterbalancing Iraq's military power.
The extent to which President Reagan's
privatized foreign policy used these pre-existing links to pursue
the Iranian opening is uncertain. What is certain is that the
joint House-Senate investigating committee, chaired by long-time
AIPAC favorite Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, took some pains
to steer the investigation away from Israel, so that those links
would not be made public in a way that would embarrass our Major
non-NATO Ally.
Finally, for a country that loves a good
spy mystery--whether it is Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, or Robert
Hansen, each one eliciting from Capitol Hill cries for an investigation,
more polygraphs, increased use of the death penalty, etc., etc.--Congress's
deafening silence over the Israeli "art students" saga,
particularly after 9/11, is astonishing for those unfamiliar
with Congress's reticence about embarrassing Israel.
All the more amazing that only two years
before, the Hill was in an uproar over the Chinese spy hysteria
(the fact that Wen Ho Lee, the apparently falsely accused Los
Alamos employee, had been fingered in the columns of manic Zionist
and Sharon confidant William Safire supplies an almost O. Henry
quality of irony to the tale). The full story of how hundreds
of Mossad agents-in-training were literally inundating Federal
facilities in the year and a half prior to 9/11 may never be
known, thanks to a total smothering by the Justice Department,
Congress, and the major media, but
a good summary may be read in the following here.
As year chases year, the lobby's power
to influence Congress on any issue of importance to Israel grows
inexorably stronger. In 1995, coincidentally the year her then-husband
became Speaker of the House, Marianne Gingrich was hired by the
Israel Export Development Co., Ltd (IEDC) as its vice president
for business development. Mrs. Gingrich's interest in Israel
began during an eight-day trip to Israel she and her husband
made in August 1994 at AIPAC's expense.
Was it a political payoff from a foreign
power?
"If I were going to get a political
payoff, it would not be for the amount of money I am making,"
said Mrs. Gingrich, who had no experience in the field. Her salary
was $2,500 per month, "plus commissions," the size
of which neither she nor anyone connected with the business would
reveal.
By an even odder coincidence, the newly-minted
Speaker Gingrich's foreign policy prescriptions became stridently
pro-Israel and bellicosely opposed to the countries that Israel
designates as enemies. One of Gingrich's notable forays into
diplomacy at the time was his public call for the CIA to overthrow
the government of Iran. Someone apparently failed to remind the
Speaker that the agency had already engineered an Iranian coup
in 1953--and look how well that little enterprise turned out.
Israel's strategy of using its influence
on the American political system to turn the U.S. national security
apparatus into its own personal attack dog--or Golem--has alienated
the United States from much of the Third World, has worsened
U.S. ties to Europe amid rancorous insinuations of anti-Semitism,
and makes the United States a hated bully. And by cutting off
all diplomatic lines of retreat--as Sharon did when he publicly
made President Bush, the leader of the Free World, look like
an impotent fool--Israel paradoxically forces the United States
to draw closer to Israel because there is no thinkable alternative
for American politicians than continuing to invest political
capital in Israel.
We have now reached the point where there
may be no turning back as nuclear Armageddon beckons from the
Middle East. Writing recently in The Washington Post, Chris Patten,
the European commissioner for external relations, says "a
senior Democratic senator [alas, Patten does not name him] told
a visiting European the other day: 'All of us here are members
of Likud now.'"
So it has come to this: members of the
world's greatest deliberative body, the heirs of Clay, La Follette,
and Taft, now identify themselves with a radical political movement
that grew out of the terrorism of Judeo-Fascist and Mussolini
admirer Vladimir Jabotinsky; Menachim Begin, co-conspirator in
the bombing of the King David Hotel; and Ariel Sharon, the butcher
of Sabra and Shatila.
Whether they identify with Sharon's Israel
because of crass political advantage, or because, like those
of Senator Inhofe's, their views are indistinguishable from the
delusions of a certifiable lunatic, our Vichy Congress is driving
us down the path of a final, fatal clash of civilizations. All
Americans, be they old-line conservatives who hate seeing their
country hopelessly embroiled in the Old World's perpetual quarrels,
or liberals in the honorable anti-imperilialist and antimilitarist
tradition of William Jennings Bryan, or the apolitical who resent
the prospect of becoming an irradiated corpse, must put aside
their differences and start loudly and persistently identifying
these Congressional Likudniki for what they are: Quislings.
George Sunderland is the pen name of a Congressional staff member.
Comments to Sunderland can be sent to counterpunch@counterpunch.org
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