The economic road map
By Hannah Kim, Haaretz, April 30, 2003
Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the end of last week that if the economic plan is not approved, Israel will not receive loan guarantees from the American administration. Shlomo Shani, head of the Histadrut's trade unions division, dismissed this as another empty threat on Netanyahu's part, and the two men's words were tossed into the trash can in which a host of threats from both the treasury and the Histadrut have collected in recent weeks. But what if there is truth to Netanyahu's statement? Indeed, as the economic reforms in 1985 approached, Israel was visited by Stanley Fischer, then the adviser to the U.S. State Department on the Israeli economy and later the deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who was involved in the decisions that were taken at that time. These decisions included the legislating of the Economic Arrangements Law, which signaled the beginning of the undermining of the welfare state and the independence of the Knesset as a legislative body. The American involvement in the Israeli economy is not something new. What's more, the neo-conservative administration currently controlling the White House is led by a comprehensive world view, according to which the world must be designed to "look like America." Even so, the theory according to which the United States openly intervenes in forcing a neo-liberal order in Israel is new. Whereas in the past the granting of guarantees was conditional on the freezing of the settlements, progress in the peace negotiations or the convening of an international conference, as happened during Yitzhak Shamir's government, from now on, according to Netanyahu, domestic socio-economic arrangements will be the issue.

Promoting Diversity and Cultural Interaction
By James Zogby, Arab News, April 30, 2003
In the most difficult of times, Arab-Americans convened their annual Khalil Gibran Spirit of Humanity awards dinner in Washington, DC. Named after the famous Arab-American poet of Lebanese descent, the event recognized individuals and institutions whose “work commitment and support make a difference in promoting co-existence and inclusion in all walks of life.” The award also aims to promote “the positive forces of diversity and cultural interaction, and to showcase programs that foster democratic and humanitarian values across racial, ethnic and religious lines.” With civil liberties under assault in the United States, Iraq facing a humanitarian crisis and social upheaval, and Palestine devastated by a continuing brutal Israeli assault, some might have found it hard to find the “Spirit of Humanity” at work in our world. But for the 700 who gathered for the 5th annual Arab-American Institute Foundation event, that spirit was everywhere in evidence. This year’s honorees were an extraordinary group. Amnesty International USA (AI), the largest grass-roots human rights organization in the world, was recognized for its post 9/11 defense of those who were victims of hate crimes and those whose rights were violated by government actions. Mercy Corps International, a global humanitarian organization, was recognized for its worldwide relief program efforts with special attention being given to its work in Lebanon, Palestine, the Balkans and Iraq. Mercy Corps was also involved in addressing post-9/11 trauma among US children with programs focusing on creating cross cultural understanding and respect.

Did Our Leaders Lie to Us? Do We Even Care? 
By Robert Steinback, CommonDreams/Miami Herald, April 29, 2003
Now that wasn't so bad, was it?'' One of my pro-war acquaintances said this in a reassuring, not gloating, manner. His tone was a congenial gesture in the wake of our heated arguments over the Iraq War in recent weeks; we had remained tensely civil. I shrugged. Indeed, the shooting war in Iraq had -- from an American vantage point -- gone well. Relatively few casualties on our side; surviving Iraqis clearly pleased to be rid of Saddam Hussein, if wary of our presence. This summation, of course, ignores many unanswered questions. So I asked him one. ''Would it bother you if we were to discover that George Bush lied about the case for going to war?'' I asked. He knew what I was referring to. His blunt answer left my jaw hanging. ``Everyone knows he lied about weapons of mass destruction being the point of the war.'' Just a few weeks ago, any statement from me that Bush's case for war was riddled with inconsistencies and illogic would have brought swift and fierce condemnation from this fellow. Now, basking in the glow of military conquest -- and confronted by a thus-far futile search for chemical and biological weapons -- this hawk  breezily conceded the point while also waving it away as inconsequential. Have we become a country that wears its hypocrisy openly and proudly? We Americans have always had a penchant for creative self-delusion. We chafe, for example, at corruption in government, yet routinely reelect the scoundrels who perpetrate it. We demand both services and cuts in the taxes that pay for them. But it seems the agony of Sept. 11 has pushed us into an altogether new realm, where we don't even care if our rhetoric makes sense, as long as we're led to a feel-good conclusion. The joy of kicking butt obliterates the need to make an honest case for war.

Patriot Raid
By Jason Halperin, AlterNet, April 29, 2003
Two weeks ago I experienced a very small taste of what hundreds of South Asian immigrants and U.S. citizens of South Asian descent have gone through since 9/11, and what thousands of others have come to fear. I was held, against my will and without warrant or cause, under the USA PATRIOT Act. While I understand the need for some measure of security and precaution in times such as these, the manner in which this detention and interrogation took place raises serious questions about police tactics and the safeguarding of civil liberties in times of war. That night, March 20th, my roommate Asher and I were on our way to see the Broadway show "Rent." We had an hour to spare before curtain time so we stopped into an Indian restaurant just off of Times Square in the heart of midtown. I have omitted the name of the restaurant so as not to subject the owners to any further harassment or humiliation. We helped ourselves to the buffet and then sat down to begin eating our dinner. I was just about to tell Asher how I'd eaten there before and how delicious the vegetable curry was, but I never got a chance. All of a sudden, there was a terrible commotion and five NYPD in bulletproof vests stormed down the stairs. They had their guns drawn and were pointing them indiscriminately at the restaurant staff and at us. "Go to the back, go to the back of the restaurant," they yelled. I hesitated, lost in my own panic. "Did you not hear me, go to the back and sit down," they demanded. I complied and looked around at the other patrons. There were eight men including the waiter, all of South Asian descent and ranging in age from late-teens to senior citizen. One of the policemen pointed his gun point-blank in the face of the waiter and shouted: "Is there anyone else in the restaurant?" The waiter, terrified, gestured to the kitchen. The police placed their fingers on the triggers of their guns and kicked open the kitchen doors. Shouts emanated from the kitchen and a few seconds later five Hispanic men were made to crawl out on their hands and knees, guns pointed at them.

First, They Came for the Immigrants...
By Richard L. Clinton, AlterNet, April 29, 2003
Two old friends of mine – a Jewish couple in their 80s, both retired university professors who fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and eventually became U.S. citizens – made a stunning remark to me a few months ago: "You know, all our lives we have blamed our parents and our parents' generation for allowing Hitler to gain control. Now we're beginning to see how powerless they must have felt to stop what was happening all around them." My friends' melancholy comment came back to me and a palpable chill ran down my spine when I read about the Gestapo-style arrest of U.S. citizen Maher "Mike" Hawash. Two weeks ago, police took the 38-year-old Intel software contractor from his Hillsboro home and put him in solitary confinement (according to his wife) in a federal prison. No charges have been filed against him, and his attorneys reportedly are forbidden to discuss the case. What is happening to our country? I already had heard on National Public Radio a New Jersey attorney's account of having been appointed as counsel for Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen arrested in Chicago nearly a year ago for supposedly planning to concoct a "dirty bomb" – radioactive materials packed around a conventional explosive. After only one or two brief meetings, she was abruptly denied access to her client, who was transferred to a brig somewhere in South Carolina, where he remains in solitary confinement to this day, unindicted for any crime and unable to see or speak with his lawyer. Can this really be happening in the United States?

Did the US Murder Journalists?
By Robert Fisk, CounterPunch, April 29, 2003
What is a journalist's life worth? I ask this question for a number of reasons, some of them--frankly--quite revolting. Two days ago, I went to visit one of my colleagues wounded in the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Samia Nakhoul is a Reuters correspondent, a young woman reporter who is married to another colleague, the Financial Times correspondent in Beirut. Part of an American tank shell was embedded in her brain--a millimetre difference in entry point and she would have been half paralysed--after an M1A1 Abrams tank fired a round at the Reuters office in Baghdad, in the Palestine Hotel, last week. Samia, a brave and honourable lady who has reported the cruelty of the Lebanese civil war at first hand for many years, was almost destroyed as a human being by that tank crew. At the time, General Buford Blount of the 3rd Infantry Division, told a lie: he said that sniper fire had been directed at the tank--on the Joumhouriyah Bridge over the Tigris river--and that the fire had ended "after the tank had fired" at the Palestine Hotel. I was between the tank and the hotel when the shell was fired. There was no sniper fire--nor any rocket-propelled grenade fire, as the American officer claimed--at the time. French television footage of the tank, running for minutes before the attack, shows the same thing. The soundtrack--until the blinding, repulsive golden flash from the tank barrel--is silent. Samia Nakhoul wasn't the only one to be hit. Her Ukrainian cameraman, father of a small child, was killed. So was a Spanish cameraman on the floor above. And then yesterday I had to read, in the New York Times, that Colin Powell had justified the murder--yes, murder--of these two journalists. This former four-star general--I'm talking about Mr Powell, not the liar who runs the 3rd Infantry Division--actually said, and I quote: "According to a US military review of the incident, our forces responded to hostile fire appearing to come from a location later identified as the Palestine Hotel... Our review of the April 8th incident indicates that the use of force was justified."

Iraqi "intelligence documents" likely planted
By Wayne Madsen, Online Journal, April 30, 2003
April 29, 2003—After the United States and Britain were shown to be providing bogus and plagiarized "intelligence" documents to the UN Security Council that supposedly "proved" Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program, the world's media is now being fed a steady stream of captured Iraqi "intelligence" documents from the rubble of Iraq's Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters. The problem with these documents is that they are being provided by the U.S. military to a few reporters working for a very suspect newspaper, London's Daily Telegraph (affectionately known as the Daily Torygraph" by those who understand the paper's right-wing slant). The Telegraph's April 27 Sunday edition reported that its correspondent in Baghdad, Inigo Gilmore, had been invited into the intelligence headquarters by U.S. troops and miraculously "found" amid the rubble a document indicating that Iraq invited Osama bin Laden to visit Iraq in March 1998. Gilmore also reported that the CIA had been through the building several times before he found the document. Gilmore added that the CIA must have "missed" the document in their prior searches, an astounding claim since the CIA must have been intimately familiar with the building from their previous intelligence links with the Mukhabarat dating from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Moreover, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, including Britain's MI-6, have refuted claims of a link between bin Laden and Iraq. Gilmore also made it a point to declare he was not providing propaganda for the United States, a strange statement by someone who claims to be a seasoned Middle East correspondent. However, it is highly possible he was providing the propaganda for the benefit of a non-government actor, the neo-conservative movement, which uses the Pentagon as a base of operations, and employs deception and perception management tactics to push its sinister agenda.

An insult to British intelligence
By Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, April 30, 2003
Ministers doctored secret service briefings to get their way over Iraq -- Members of parliament returning to Westminster after their Easter break, and congressmen in America for that matter, may well be asking if they have been duped. Saddam Hussein, they were repeatedly told, posed a threat not just to his own people, but to the national security of the US and Britain. But where is the evidence that he possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological material, and the ability to use them as weapons? Ministers and intelligence agencies say they are confident that these will turn up and that they were dismantled and hidden well before Hans Blix and his team of UN inspectors started looking for them at the end of last year. It will take weeks, perhaps months, to track them down, we are warned. Yet isn't this precisely what Blix told the UN security council, only to be met with the response that London and Washington could not wait? What is now clear, and admitted by all sides, is that whatever weapons of mass destruction Iraq did possess, they were not a threat, not even to British and American forces, from the time the UN inspectors went in.

'I am shooting two journalists every day'
By Omran Risheq, Palestine Monitor, April 30, 2003
Eyewitness Reports: The following accounts are written by the Palestine Monitor staff, local and international journalists or others who are living in, working in or visiting the Occupied Palestinian Territories and who have witnessed first hand various situations facing Palestinians today. -- “I am shooting two journalists every day” an Israeli soldier said to me, after he saw my press card at the Hwara checkpoint, outside Nablus, one of the major cities in the West Bank. Other Palestinians also stuck at the checkpoint later described this soldier to me as one of the worst soldiers they had ever encountered. He was scary enough that his mere presence would force everyone to form a straight queue as soon as possible in order to be checked and then hopefully allowed permission to cross through. Being a journalist, I wanted to visit Salem, Dir Al Hatab and Azmout, all villages in Nablus that have been under strict Israeli imposed closure and blockage. I was hoping to write about their continuous suffering. After about thirty minutes of waiting under the sun, it was my turn to approach the soldiers who were standing under the shade checking people’s Ids. The soldier, who seemed to be in his twenties, prevented me from entering. “I can’t let you enter,” he said to me. “You should have a document stating that you take all responsibility for your safety while in Nablus”. This was the first time that I had heard about such a document. Therefore, in an attempt to negotiate I suggested that I write on a piece of paper that I take full responsibility for my safety and will sign it for him. However, my attempt failed and the soldier refused, insisting that this document with proper signatures was necessary. He would not specify who would be the issuer of such a document.