Mossad Chief Confirms Netanyahu’s Warning of London Bombing

The controversy continues over an Associated Press story detailing the remarks of a “senior Israeli official” who claimed that Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in London for an economic conference, was warned by Scotland Yard “minutes” in advance of the terrorist bombings. According to the original story, Netanyahu’s prior knowledge was the cause of his not showing up at the conference, which took place at a hotel near the Liverpool Underground station. A subsequent AP report contained the Israeli’s government’s denial of a prior warning, and claimed that Netanyahu received a warning after the blasts.

Although the first AP story was never retracted, that didn’t prevent Israel’s American amen corner from claiming that it had been withdrawn, nor did it stop Stratfor.com from coming out with an analysis claiming that Israel knew “days” in advance, and that it wasn’t Scotland Yard that informed Netanyahu. Former intelligence analyst Tommy Preston, of Preston Global, concurred.

My own column drawing on these sources drew fire, not only from the usual suspects, but also from dailykos.com, the Democratic party website spawned by the Dean campaign. “Antiwar.com is not a legitimate source,” declared one poster.

This from a website that headlined “Did BushCo Tip Off London Bombers?”!

An author who goes by the name “DHinMI” manufactured a quote, purportedly from me, that was nothing more than a crude fabrication: it had quote marks around it, as if I had written it, when in reality I had written no such thing. DhinMI’s point: that to even suggest that Netanyahu had advance notice of the London bombings is so obviously an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory” that no discussion is required, regardless of what the Associated Press reports.

The Kossacks, as they call themselves, are trying to clean their act up so that they can be more closely associated with the Democratic party apparatus. However, why limit themselves to condemning my column: why not condemn AP as an “illegitimate source” for publishing the news of Netanyahu’s foreknowledge to begin with? And while they’re at it, they need to add a few more media source to the list, including some of the Israeli media. Israel Insider cites Mossad chief Meir Dagan, in an interview with the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag:

“The Mossad office in London received advance notice about the attacks, but only six minutes before the first blast, the paper reports, confirming an earlier AP report. As a result, it was impossible to take any action to prevent the blasts.”

Here is the Bild am Sonntag story in German, and a Google translation.

Is this just empty boasting on the part of the Mossad chief, or is there some truth to the initial AP report? Is Meir Dagan spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories?

We report. You decide.

I might add that some of the DailyKos folks are shocked – shocked! – that Antiwar.com opposed the Kosovo war. We, in turn, are shocked at the hypocrisy of those who support a war of aggression against a country, Yugoslavia, that had never attacked us, and that was never sanctioned by the United Nations. They only oppose wars started by Republicans: we at Antiwar.com, on the other hand, oppose all wars of aggression, regardless of the partisan affiliation of those in power at the time.

If You’re in the Bay Area This Weekend

Speaking of WMDs that do exist…

For some reason or other, a few dozen Nobel prize-winning scientists and other smarty-pantses are concerned that America and Russia still have enough nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert to destroy civilization (“Nobel Laureates say ‘Take Nuclear Warheads off Hair-Trigger Alert’“). One of these Big-Brains Who HATE AMERICA!!! (irony alert), Nobel Peace Showoff scientist Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat (aka “the man who walked away from the Manhattan Project”) came up with the idea of raising money from the private sector to dismantle nuclear weapons. To this end, a long fundraising walk has been organized by the Global Nuclear Disarmament Fund. The opening event — which includes a Japanese senator, Nobel prize winners, actor Steven Seagal, etc. — begins Saturday morning in San Francisco: click here for program. The walk starts at noon, heads down the peninsula, and over the next month hits NV, AZ, & NM, ending at the Trinity nuke test site: click here for walk schedule.

All apologies….

3 months ago (“No Peaking“) I said that I’d answer some of my Peak Oil mail “in the next day or two.” I made a file of many of these e-mails and my replies, and then decided to write an article instead — which I still haven’t done. It’s a shame, ’cause I rec’d a number of good e-mails, both pro and con. When I finish the article I’m working on I’ll post a link to it here. Sorry about that.

London Bombing: Still No Iraqi Terrorists

Zahid Hussain, the London Times‘ correspondent in Pakistan explains “how Pakistan became a hotbed for terrorists“:

For quite some time, there has been a network of contacts between British extremists and the Jihadi organisations based in Pakistan. Once contact has been made with … young people, they become influenced by them and are encouraged to visit the training camps.

For the last two decades, sections of Pakistan have been under the influence of guerillas who were involved in the war against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan – with, it’s important to say, American support.

They had offices in all of the neighbourhoods and were recruiting people to fight in that war. A culture of jihad developed which has continued to this day. Many are still involved in the fighting in Kashmir and through this they have become battle-hardened fighters while others have gone over to Iraq.

Suffocation chambers

Three years ago, under the psuedonym “Jim Rissman,” I wrote a piece for Antiwar that was then used by Freedomfiles.org to anchor its “Atrocities against the Afghan People” section. The Northern Alliance, a U.S. client, took prisoners “in a U.S.-orchestrated military operation,” as the Washington Post put it. Another source, Julian Strauss, picks up the story:

The prisoners were crammed at gunpoint into large, oblong freight containers. When no more could be squeezed in, the metal doors were shut tight. Slowly they began to suffocate.

By the time the containers were opened two days later – at the end of the journey from Kunduz to Sheberghan – many were dead.

“There was no oxygen,” said Maqsood Khan, a 26-year-old Pakistani from Rawalpindi. “We drank the sweat off our own bodies and off the dead men. Some drank their urine. Of 400, half were dead by the time we arrived.”…

Sajjid Mehmood, an 18-year-old from Karachi, said: “There were about 250 men in the container I was in. We were praying, shouting and begging for mercy. It was very difficult to breathe.

“Zubair, a man who was crushed up against me, died after two or three hours. We were praying to God. When the soldiers heard our cries for help they opened the rear doors and began shooting.

“Many of us died, maybe 20 or 30. When the container arrived after 18 hours, 150 out of 250 people were dead.” Today Sheberghan prison, originally built for 500 to 1,000 inmates, houses more than 3,000. The commandant said 807 of them are Pakistanis. The rest are Afghans.

My piece closes with Strauss’ warning that “stories such as these have only served to harden the resolve of Islamic militants.” And sure enough, from the Wall Street Journal we learn that the four London bombers, “of Pakistani descent,” according to friends “had been
influenced by claims of atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq.” (“From Heart of U.K., Four Friends Emerge As Terror Suspects,” 7/14/05)

Unbelievably, in Iraq fours days after the London bombings, “Ten Sunni Muslim tribesmen died after American-trained Iraqi police commandos kept them in an airtight container for more than six hours in 115-degree heat.” Because they belonged to the same tribe as the leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars, “they were locked in what was described as a cargo-type container” and suffocated.

Strauss’ piece was titled Slow death on the jail convoy of misery. I called mine Slow death on the jail convoys of misery to emphasize that the sides in the Afghan civil war took turns suffocating each other. The Iraq occurrence is to say the least a horrific development, for Iraqis, for the Western orchestrators, for the world. One can only hope that freight containers don’t “line the roads” of Iraq as they do in Afghanistan.

Orange Revolution Comes Full Circle

As is common with such revolutions, the democratic free-market Orange revolution in Ukraine continues to show signs of having turned sour before it began. Anders Aslund writes, “Last year Ukraine enjoyed economic growth of 12 percent; in the first four months of this year, the growth rate plunged to 5 percent, while inflation has surged to 15 percent….”

Furthermore, “the property rights of thousands of enterprises are in limbo. In Kiev, rumors abound that oligarchs connected to the old regime are trying to sell their enterprises to Russian business executives and are preparing to escape the country. Naturally, executives are cutting off investment, and economic growth is screeching to a halt. To make matters worse, a new socialist minister of privatization has been appointed who opposes privatization in principle. She asked recently: ‘What is so bad about re-nationalization?’ Tymoshenko concurred in a recent newspaper interview: ‘The biggest enterprises, which can easily be efficiently managed, must not be privatized, and they can give the state as an owner wonderful profits.’ This sounds like state capitalism.”

State capitalism. Hmmm. Well what should we have expected? As Justin Raimondo said more than three months ago:

“The Ukrainians believe they can balance their budget by revisiting suspicious privatizations, seizing assets, and re-selling them to the highest bidder. Yushchenko was sold to Western journalists as well as his own electorate as a ‘free-market reformer,’ but this is hardly a ‘free market’ approach. Aside from destroying the sort of stability that business requires, it assumes the good will of government regulators – not a wise course, in any country – and encourages yet more corruption by making political pull, rather than entrepreneurial skill, the coin of the realm. Who will be ‘re-privatized,’ and who will be spared? It’s all up to the gang currently in power.” Continue reading “Orange Revolution Comes Full Circle”