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Nice reading of Israel’s strategy called Peripheral Alliance and intelligence swaps with CIA through James Angleton.
The History of Mossad’s framework for creating clandestine relations with countries and national movements under the principle that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”
Recounting the history of the secret triangular relationships between Iran, the United States and Israel in the period prior to the rise to power of Ayatollah Khomeini. Nevertheless, one cannot grasp the magnitude of the blow that the revolution dealt to the defense establishments of America and Israel and their intelligence agencies, as well as the hostility that the new regime felt towards those countries.
● Israel, KBR, Caspian Oil and war in Georgia
When the journalists from the same western countries asked the Shah, why he needed such formidable armaments like a fleet of F-18s, that were not introduced even in the US, the Shah said it is like asking the US and UK why they have such big armies and defence forces. One can easily make out how shallow, Shah’s reasoning was for squandering his oil wealth on military hardware, while his people in village across the country did not have the most basic necessities of life.
India with all his back to back high GDP percentages, has yet to get nearly 600 million India out of their abject poverty, where even survival is a life long struggle. All these Tatas, Mittals, Ambanis and Bajajs will not save India, if and when these poor and hungry people cling to any convenient trigger and call it a day.
That trigger too could borrow from the history of Iran. The way Shah was forcing ‘modernization’ on his old country steeped in an age-old culture tied up to an overpowering religion, India’s new wave of modernization is seriously challenging the old morals and cultural conservativeness. Unless the administration is able to moderate the whole face-off between the old and the new, we may be faced with some trigger that will bring fascists to rule the land. India must shun both the US and Israel, get rid with all intelligence and security entanglements with both these ruthless conspirators and depend on its own homegrown intellect to devise ways and means to tackle India’s most intractable problem of poverty.
A relic of the Cold War with communism and the Soviet Union …
Israel was desperate to play a crucial part in such an alliance. In 1951, the year that Mossadeq nationalised oil in Iran, the influential Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz spelled out Israel’s watchdog role in defence of US and British interests:
- The feudal regimes in the Middle East have had to make such concessions to the nationalist movements … that they become more and more reluctant to supply Britain and the United States with their natural resources and military bases … Strengthening Israel helps the Western powers maintain equilibrium … in the Middle East.
Israel is to become the watchdog. There is no fear that Israel will undertake any aggressive policy towards the Arab states when this would explicitly contradict the wishes of the US and Britain. But if for any reasons the western powers should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied upon to punish one or several neighbouring states whose discourtesy to the west went beyond the bounds of the permissible.
Here was the direct offer to smash down precisely that brand of Arab nationalism which might seize power in any of the Arab countries, nationalising US or British oil interests on the one hand and stirring up Arab hostility to the West on the other.
The exact military links between the US and Israel at this time have remained a closely guarded secret. But a US National Security Council memorandum of 1958 noted that a “logical corollary” of opposition to radical Arab nationalism “would be to support Israel as the only strong pro-west power left in the near East”. Meanwhile in the mid-1950s Israel concluded a pact with the region’s most viciously right-wing dictators, Ethiopia, Turkey and the Shah in Iran. The biographer of Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, recalled that this “periphery pact” was encouraged by John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State.
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Livni served in Mossad from 1980 till 1983, between the ages of 22 and 26. She had been recruited after her National Service, which she left with the rank of lieutenant, by a childhood friend, Mira Gal, who served herself for two decades in the agency and became later her ministry bureau chief. In Paris, Livni covertly ran a “safe house” that was used by hit squads at a time when the Israeli agency ran a series of assassinations in European capitals. After the Six-Day War (1967), Paris had become an important intelligence base for Mossad. There were two stations of the agency in the French capital, and Israeli agents operating out of Paris carried out assassinations.
Tzipi Livni was on active service when Mamoun Meraish, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was shot dead by a Mossad hit squad in the streets of Athens on 21 August 1983 . According the Times of London ( 1 June 2008 ), she was implicated in this assassination. She was part of the unit that fatally poisoned the Iraqi nuclear scientist Abdul Rasul at a lunch in Paris in 1983. She was also involved in the murder, in June 1980, of an Egyptian-born scientist working on the Iraqi atomic programme, who was found murdered in his hotel room in Paris.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."In Paris, Livni covertly ran a “safe house” that was used by hit squads at a time when the Israeli agency ran a series of assassinations in European capitals
I think of Mumbai when I read this.
http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/12/chabad-lubavitch-dangerous-game.html
Oui, sounds like she might be one of our little drummer girls…huh…;o) hugs
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(TimesOnline) – The former British prime minister Tony Blair arrived in the Gaza Strip on his first visit to the battered Hamas-run enclave since being appointed Middle East peace envoy.
“I wanted to come to hear for myself first-hand from people in Gaza, whose lives have been so badly impacted by the recent conflict,” Mr Blair said at a UN-run school in the northern town of Beit Hanoun.
“These are the people who need to be the focus of all our efforts for peace and progress from now on,” he said.
He added that he would “relay their account of events, their assessment of what is needed for reconstruction, their goals for rebuilding a vibrant sector” to an international conference on Gaza reconstruction tomorrow.
The human rights group said that weapons experts in Gaza found white phosphorus artillery shells marked M825 A1 – a US-made munition – throughout the coastal strip. The Times published photographic evidence that Israel was using the M825 A1 shells on January 8. At that time, Israeli military spokesmen denied that the weapon was being used, saying: “This is what we call a quiet shell – it has no explosives and no white phosphorus”.
After the Gaza conflict, Israel acknowledged using white phosphorus in a manner “according to international law”. Israeli media reported that the military was investigating the incident on January 15, when several white phosphorus artillery shells hit a UN headquarters in Gaza City, destroying tens of tons of humanitarian aid. Amnesty said that they had found shells with the marking PB-91K018-035, a lot number which indicates that they were assembled by Pine Bluff Arsenal (PB) in October 1991.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Blair has been and will always be MIA in the Middle East. That’s where he retired a few years ago.
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(Times Online) – Two former British military officers are expected to give crucial evidence against Georgia when an international inquiry is convened to establish who started the country’s bloody five-day war with Russia in August 2008.
Ryan Grist, a former British Army captain, and Stephen Young, a former RAF wing commander, are said to have concluded that, before the Russian bombardment began, Georgian rockets and artillery were hitting civilian areas in the breakaway region of South Ossetia every 15 or 20 seconds.
Their accounts seem likely to undermine the American-backed claims of President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia that his little country was the innocent victim of Russian aggression and acted solely in self-defence.
OSCE stalemated on future of Georgian mission
I blogged a number of diaries about the war in South Ossetia –
● HRW: Georgia admits to dropping cluster bombs
● Russia to Cut Military Ties with NATO
● Israel’s Mercenaries in Georgia
● Medvedev Declares End of Hostilities
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
A former member of an Israeli assassination squad has broken his silence for the first time.
The Israeli military’s policy of targeted killings has been described from the inside for the first time. In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, and in his testimony to an ex-soldiers’ organisation, Breaking the Silence, a former member of an assassination squad has told of his role in a botched ambush that killed two Palestinian bystanders, as well as the two militants targeted.
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But then, he says, the orders suddenly changed. “They said he had one minute to arrive, and then we got an order that it was going to be an assassination after all.” He thinks it came from a war room set up for the operation and his impression was that “all the big chiefs were there”, including a brigadier general.
The two militants would still have suspected nothing as they approached the junction, even when a big Israel Defence Forces (IDF) supply truck lumbered out of a side turning to cut them off. They would have had no way of knowing the truck was full of armed soldiers, waiting for this moment. A 4×4 was deployed by the road, only in case “something really wrong” happened.
But something did go wrong: the truck moved out too soon, and blocked not only the militants in their black Hyundai, but the white Mercedes taxi in front of them. It was carrying Sami Abu Laban, 29, a baker, and Na’el Al Leddawi, 22, a student. They were on their way from Rafah to Khan Younis to try to buy some scarce diesel to fire the bread ovens.
As the critical moment approached, the sharpshooter said he began to shake from the waist down. “What happens now is I’m waiting for the car to come and I am losing control of my legs. I have an M16 with digicom [special sniper sights with lifetime warrenty! – Oui]. It was one of the strangest things that ever happened to me. I felt completely concentrated. So the seconds are counted down, then we started seeing the cars, and we see that two cars are coming, not one. There was a first car very close to the following one and when the truck came in, it came in a bit early, and both cars were stopped.Everything stopped. They gave us two seconds and they said, ‘Shoot. Fire.'” Who gave the order, and to whom? “The unit commander … to everybody. Everybody heard ‘Fire’.”
The target, Razeq, was in the passenger seat, closest to the APC. “I have no doubt I see him in the scope. I start shooting. Everyone starts shooting, and I lose control. I shoot for one or two seconds. I counted afterwards – shot 11 bullets in his head. I could have shot one shot and that’s it. It was five seconds of firing.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
Similarily, when Jamal Abdel-Razek was assassinated in Gaza on 22 November 2000, the Israeli media reported that “four Tanzim militiamen” had been killed, although it later turned out that two of the victims were riding in a taxi that got caught up in the shooting, and the third was a friend of Abdel-Razek who was driving him to university.
In addition, the Israeli army has set up a whole language to describe the al-Aqsa Intifada in a light more favorable to Israel, and the media obligingly uses this “newspeak.” Attacks become “responses,” settler rampage becomes settler “protests,” Gilo is not a settlement but a “suburb of Jerusalem,” bulldozing agricultural land and housing becomes a “security engineering work,” and assassinations become “selective strikes” or “interception operations.”
Palestine Chronology 2000
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
As Jews, we stand united with another Israel, the patriarch Jacob, who cursed his sons Simeon and Levi for massacring the people of Shechem in revenge for the rape of their sister Dinah. Like Jacob, “we shall not be a party to the counsel of zealots. We shall not be counted in their assembly. (See Genesis 34. 49: 5-7).
As Jews, we stand united with the Jewish sages who rejected the zealotry of the Jewish “terrorists” at Masada, those who masked ethnic tribalism in the cloak of “self-defense” and “national honor.”
As Jews, we listen not only when the sage Hillel says, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” but also when he says, “If I am only for myself, what am I?” Hillel’s closing words also ring true in this hour of decision when a full cessation of conflict is demanded of both sides: “If not now, when?”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."