Israel Palestine REMINDER OF REALITY

To keep you mental house in order, it is often helpful to read a short summary of the real -world. Here is one about ....

Understanding the Israeli and Palestinian conflict

by Marlene Sabeh

The historical facts of Israel's violence in Palestine
are so disquieting, and the ways in which they were
carried out, they simply cannot be ignored.

The violence culminated in Israel's ruthless 1947-49
"War of Independence," in which at least 750,000
Palestinian men, women, and children were expelled from
their homes - half before any Arab armies joined the
war. .. The resulting humanitarian disaster is known among
Palestinians and others as 'The Catastrophe,' or al
Nakba in Arabic. Zionist forces committed at least 33
massacres and destroyed 531 Palestinian villages and
towns. Author Norman Finkelstein states: "According to
the former director of the Israeli army archives, 'in
almost every village occupied by us during the War of
Independence, acts were committed which are defined as
war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes'...Uri
Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian
of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that
'every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs.'"

It is important to note that in 1947, Jewish land
ownership was under 7%, yet the UN General Assembly
proposed partition and granted the "Jewish state" ABOUT
60% of the total area of Palestine.

Would Americans cede sovereignty and over 60% of its
land to a foreign minority, say Canadians, who actually
owned under 7% of the land? If such a plan is
unthinkable for an American, then how can one ask
Palestinians to make a similar sacrifice? Perhaps that's
why the partition agreement was not so "agreeable" to
Palestinians.

The Israeli government at the time pursued a policy of
non- compromise, in order to prevent the return of the
refugees "at any price" (as Ben Gurion himself put it),
despite the fact that the UN General Assembly had been
calling for this since 11 December 1948. Palestinian
villages were either destroyed or occupied by Jewish
immigrants, and their lands were shared among the
surrounding kibbutzim. The law on "abandoned properties"
- which was designed to make possible the seizure of any
land belonging to persons who were "absent" -
legitimized this project of general confiscation as of
December 1948. Almost 400 Arab villages were thus either
wiped off the map or "Judaized", as were most of the
Arab quarters in mixed towns. According to a report
drawn up in 1952, Israel succeeded in expropriating
73,000 rooms in abandoned houses, 7,800 shops, workshops
and warehouses, 5 million Palestinian pounds in bank
accounts, and - most important of all - 300,000 hectares
of land, ("The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,
1947-1949", by Benny Morris)

In 1967 Israel launched its third war and seized even
more Palestinian (and other Arab) land: Sinai and Gaza
Strip were captured from Egypt, East Jerusalem and the
West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

Menahem Begin noted: 'In June 1967, we again had a
choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai
approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to
attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided
to attack him.' ("Noam Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle.")

Yitzhak Rabin: "I do not think Nasser wanted war. The
two divisions he sent to The Sinai would not have been
sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we
knew it." (Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's Chief of Staff in
1967, in Le Monde, 2/28/68)

In November 1967, the UN Security Council adopted
Resolution 242 which laid down a formula for
Arab-Israeli peace whereby Israel would "withdraw from
territories occupied in the war in exchange for peace
with its neighbors." This was never honored by Israel.

Instead, Israel militarily occupied the West Bank and
Gaza Strip - the remaining 22% of mandatory Palestine -
and began building settlements (only for Jewish
Israelis) on land confiscated from Palestinian Muslims
and Christians. It has demolished more than 18,000
Palestinian homes since 1967. In 2005 Israel returned
Gazan land to its owners, but continues to control its
borders, ports, and air space, turning Gaza into a
virtual concentration camp where 1.5 million people are
held under what a UN Human Rights Commissioner described
as "catastrophic" conditions.

We should applaud the courage of a new breed of Israeli
historians for daring to revisit historical realities of
Israel's founding. One of these historians is professor
of History at Ben Gurion University in Israel, Benny
Morris. What Morris has opened to public scrutiny are
the "original sins" of the state of Israel. Sixty years
after the event, the time is long overdue to bring an
end to a logic that has generated so much war, and to
find a way for the two peoples to coexist. This can only
be done by pulling away the veil over the historical
origins of the tragedy.

American taxpayers give Israel approximately $7 million
per day - far more than we give to all of sub-Saharan
Africa. In its 60 years of existence, Israel, a nation
the size of New Jersey, has received more of our tax
money than any other country on earth. While most
Americans are unaware of these facts (studies have shown
that media report on Israeli deaths at rates up to 13
times greater than they report on Palestinian deaths)
our governmental actions make us responsible for a
continuing catastrophe of historic proportions - and
which is, in addition, creating extremely damaging
enmity toward the US itself.

As more and more U.S. citizens across a spectrum of
politics and ethnicities become informed on this issue,
they are demanding that their elected representatives
change current U.S. policies.

In the world's recent history, the Berlin Wall has
fallen, Northern Ireland has achieved peace, and South
African Apartheid has ended.

Change is possible and justice attainable - but only
when people are informed.

Alexander Haig's Dark Side - Roman Catholic War Criminal

       
Tom Shachtman Author, 'The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama'  Posted: February 21, 2010 02:22 PM

Alexander Haig's Dark Side

Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig is now posthumously being recast as the quintessential soldier-patriot. The truth is, he had a dark side: wiretapping for Richard Nixon, facilitating the operations of a military spy ring that stole classified documents from the White House, sabotaging peace negotiations over Vietnam and détente with the USSR, and unduly hastening Nixon's exit from office. Haig is most lauded as the man who, according to conventional wisdom, held the presidency together during the depths of Watergate. But that evaluation obscures Haig's true role in the Nixon White House.

He began to come to prominence in 1968 when Fritz Kraemer, who had helped Haig rise within the Pentagon, recommended him to another protégé, Henry Kissinger, as Kissinger's military advisor on the Nixon National Security Council. Haig shared Kraemer's militarist, simplistic, anti-Communist, anti-diplomacy view of the world and of America's place in it.

At the NSC, even before Haig finished elbowing rivals out of the way to become Kissinger's deputy, he was up to his eyeballs in questionable activities, submitting the names of targets for the wiretapping of newsmen and NSC and Pentagon staffers, and reading the resulting wiretap logs, though he later denied involvement or said he had done everything at Nixon's request. Nixon had no reason to think of tapping Secretary of Defense aide Robert Pursley, but Haig had been butting heads with Pursley.

Haig quickly learned how to curry favor with Nixon: by feeding the president's need to be bellicose. The White House tapes reveal Haig as the ultimate sycophant, urging Nixon to smite the enemy in Vietnam, unleash the bombs, stand tough against the Soviets, and, not incidentally, to keep Kissinger in his place -- all in the violent, pusillanimous language that philosopher Lionel Rubinoff so aptly labeled "the pornography of power." Nixon rewarded Haig with one star, two stars, four stars.

What has not been generally understood until the recent publication of The Forty Years War, by Len Colodny and me, is that despite Nixon's attention and assistance, Haig consistently undermined the president, primarily because of his antagonism toward what he saw as Nixon's radical foreign policies. Haig channeled Kraemer's views that diplomacy was useless and détente a farce, that the Russians could never be trusted, that the Chinese were playing us, and that the war in Vietnam could be won on the battlefield if only Nixon would stop withdrawing 10,000 troops a month.

Furthering the militarist agenda, Haig facilitated the operations of a military spy ring that stole classified national security documents from Kissinger and from the National Security Council, and therefore from the president, and conveyed them to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the purpose of slowing the détente express. The JCS leaked some classified information to the press, embarrassing Nixon and coming close to capsizing U.S. policy toward the India and Pakistan, then at war with each other. On December 21, 1971, when the stunned Nixon learned of the existence of the spy ring, he labeled it "a federal offense of the highest order." For political reasons, he decided not to prosecute anyone for it; and, oblivious to Haig's involvement because of a bureaucratic slip-up, gave him more and more responsibilities.

Haig, for his part, fought successfully through the remaining years of the Nixon Administration to keep secret his involvement in that espionage.

Dispatched to Phnom Penh, Haig exceeded Nixon's instructions and told Lon Nol that the U.S. would continue to fight in Cambodia even after Congress had expressly forbidden further American incursions there and Nixon had agreed to that restriction. Visiting Vietnam to bring back honest reports of the war's progress, Haig returned with rosy ones that belied what soldiers in the field said to him. Jumped over hundreds of generals so that Nixon could appoint him Vice-Chief of Staff of the Army, Haig was in that job only a few months before being brought back to the White House in May 1973 as chief of staff. Thus began what Colodny and I call "The Haig Administration."

As we document in our book, Haig returned to the White House with a secret to protect and an agenda to pursue. "Al controlled everything, everybody and everything," former White House aide Larry Higby told us about this era. That control was far from benevolent. For instance, during this period he worked closely with another Kraemer friend, Democratic Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson, to allow Jackson to effectively block progress on détente. Haig and his long-term friend J. Fred Buzhardt had been brought into the White House primarily to protect the president from the mounting mess of Watergate. But at every turn they worked to hasten Nixon's exit from office.

We reveal for the first time, based on a close reading of White House documents and tapes, that within days of taking the reins at the White House, Haig maneuvered Nixon into not claiming executive privilege to prevent Lt.-General Vernon Walters -- an old friend of the president's -- from testifying to Congress and turning over a crucial "memcon." The memcon contained Walters' account of the June 23, 1972 meeting at the White House of himself, CIA Director Richard Helms, and Nixon aides John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, in which the Nixon aides conveyed the need to have the CIA block the FBI's investigation into Watergate. That memcon, and Walters' testimony, would lead investigators directly to the "smoking gun" tape that eventually sealed Nixon's fate.

A month after the Walters memcon affair, Haig assured that Alexander Butterfield would reveal the White House taping system in testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee by concealing from Nixon the fact that Butterfield was about to testify, thus preventing the president from forbidding that testimony on the grounds of executive privilege, which Nixon later wrote that he would have done.

In October 1973, according to then-attorney general Elliot Richardson, Haig's duplicity exacerbated a bad situation with Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox until it mushroomed into the Saturday Night Massacre -- the resignations of Richardson and his deputy, and the firing of Cox -- which spurred the first calls for Nixon's impeachment.

During this period, Haig frequently usurped the president's power, telling a delegation from a high-level security panel who insisted on seeing Nixon, "I am the president" and sending them away.

Some have said that Haig acted imperially and hastened Nixon's exit to protect the country. But as the evidence we have found makes clear, Haig's aims in the Nixon White House in 1973-74 were always to protect himself and aggrandize his own power.

In 1981, when President Reagan was shot, Haig told the Cabinet and the press, "As of now, I am in control here in the White House," and by this obvious mis-stating of the correct chain of succession forever disqualified himself from further high office. In retrospect he claimed his outburst had been no more than a "poor choice of words;" rather, the statement was symptomatic of Haig's lifelong attitude toward democratically elected public officials and presidential power.


Alexander Meigs Haig, Jr. (December 2, 1924 – February 20, 2010) was a United States Army general who served as the United States Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan and White House Chief of Staff under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.[1] He also served as Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, the number-two ranking officer in the Army,[2] and as Supreme Allied Commander Europe commanding all U.S. and NATO forces in Europe.

A veteran of the Korean War and Vietnam War, Haig was a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star with oak leaf cluster, and the Purple Heart.[3]

On February 20, 2010, Haig died from complications from a staphylococcal infection after being hospitalized at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore on January 28, 2010.

Haig was born in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia. He was the middle of three children of Alexander Meigs Haig, Sr., a Republican lawyer, and his wife Regina Anne Murphy.[5] When Haig was 10, his father died of cancer, and his Irish American mother raised her children in the Catholic church.[6] He attended Saint Joseph's Preparatory School in Philadelphia and graduated from Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. He then studied at the University of Notre Dame for two years, before transferring to the United States Military Academy, where he graduated in 1947. Haig earned a master's degree in business administration from Columbia Business School in 1955, and a master's degree in international relations from Georgetown University in 1961. His thesis was on the role of military officers in making national policy.



59th United States Secretary of State In office January 22, 1981 – July 5, 1982 President     Ronald Reagan Deputy     William P. Clark Walter John Stoessel, Jr. Preceded by     Edmund Muskie Succeeded by     George Shultz 5th White House Chief of Staff In office 1973–1974 President     Richard Nixon Gerald Ford Preceded by     H. R. Haldeman Succeeded by     Donald Rumsfeld Supreme Allied Commander Europe In office December 16, 1974 – July 1, 1979 Preceded by     Gen. Andrew Goodpaster Succeeded by     Gen. Bernard W. Rogers Deputy National Security Advisor In office 1970–1973 President     Richard Nixon Preceded by     Robert Komer Succeeded by     Brent Scowcroft Born     December 2, 1924 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Died     February 20, 2010 (aged 85) Baltimore, Maryland Political party     Republican Spouse(s)  WIFE   Patricia (nee Fox, 1950–+2010) Alma mater     United States Military Academy Columbia Business School Georgetown University Profession     Soldier, Civil servant Religion     Roman Catholic Signature      Military service Service/branch     United States Army Years of service     1947–1979 Rank     US-O10 insignia.svg General Battles/wars     Korean War Vietnam War Awards     Distinguished Service Cross Defense Distinguished Service Medal Silver Star Bronze Star Combat Infantryman Badge Purple Heart Presidential Service Badge

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Korea

As a young officer, Haig served on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur in Japan. In the early days of the Korean War, Haig was responsible for maintaining General MacArthur's situation map and briefing MacArthur each evening on the day's battlefield events.[7] Haig later served (1950-51) with the X Corps, as aide to MacArthur's Chief of Staff, the controversial General Edward Almond,[3] who awarded Haig two Silver Stars and a Bronze Star with Valor device.[8] Haig participated in four Korean War campaigns, including the Battle of Inchon, the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, and the evacuation of Hu(ngnam[7] as Almond's aide.
Pentagon assignments

Haig served as a staff officer in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations (DCSOPS) at the Pentagon (1962-64), and then was appointed Military Assistant to Secretary of the Army Stephen Ailes in 1964. He then was appointed Military Assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, continuing in that service until the end of 1965.


Vietnam

In 1966 Haig took command of a battalion of the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam. On May 22, 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Haig was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the US Army's second highest medal for valor, by General William Westmoreland as a result of his actions during the battle of Ap Gu in March 1967.[9] During the battle, Haig's troops (of the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division (United States) became pinned down by a Viet Cong force that outnumbered U.S. forces by three to one. In an attempt to survey the battlefield, Haig boarded a helicopter and flew to the point of contact. His helicopter was subsequently shot down. Two days of bloody hand-to-hand combat ensued. An excerpt from Haig's official Army citation follows:

    When two of his companies were engaged by a large hostile force, Colonel Haig landed amid a hail of fire, personally took charge of the units, called for artillery and air fire support and succeeded in soundly defeating the insurgent force ... the next day a barrage of 400 rounds was fired by the Viet Cong, but it was ineffective because of the warning and preparations by Colonel Haig. As the barrage subsided, a force three times larger than his began a series of human wave assaults on the camp. Heedless of the danger himself, Colonel Haig repeatedly braved intense hostile fire to survey the battlefield. His personal courage and determination, and his skillful employment of every defense and support tactic possible, inspired his men to fight with previously unimagined power. Although his force was outnumbered three to one, Colonel Haig succeeded in inflicting 592 casualties on the Viet Cong ... (HQ US Army, Vietnam, General Orders No. 2318 (May 22, 1967)[10]

Haig was also awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Purple Heart during his tour in Vietnam,[9] and was eventually promoted to Colonel, becoming a brigade commander of the 1st Infantry Division (United States) in Vietnam.


West Point

At the end of his one-year tour, Alexander Haig returned to the continental United States to become Regimental Commander of the Third Regiment of the Corps of Cadets at West Point, under the also newly arrived Commandant, Brigadier General Bernard W. Rogers. (Both had served together in the 1st Infantry Division, Rogers as Assistant Division Commander and Haig as Brigade Commander.)


Security adviser (1969-1972)

In 1969, he was appointed Military Assistant to the Presidential Assistant for National Security Affairs, Henry Kissinger, a position he retained until 1970 when President Richard Nixon promoted Haig to Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In this position, Haig helped South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu negotiate the final cease-fire talks in 1972. Haig continued in this position until 1973, when he was appointed to be Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, a post he held until the last few months of President Nixon's tenure, during which he served as White House Chief of Staff.

White House Chief of Staff (1973-74)

Photo: Chief of Staff Haig (far right), Sec. of State Kissinger, Rep. Ford and President Richard Nixon meet on October 13, 1973, regarding Ford's upcoming appointment to Vice-President.

Haig served as White House Chief of Staff during the height of the Watergate affair from May 1973 until September 1974, taking over the position from H.R. Haldeman, who resigned on April 30, 1973, while under pressure from Watergate prosecutors.

Haig has been largely credited with keeping the government running while President Nixon was preoccupied with Watergate,[1] and was seen as the "acting president" in Nixon's last months.[4] Haig also played an instrumental role in finally persuading Nixon to resign. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Nixon had been assured of a pardon by then-Vice President Gerald Ford if he would resign. In this regard, in his 2001 book "Shadow," author Bob Woodward describes Haig's role as the point man between Nixon and Ford during the final days of Watergate. According to Woodward, Haig played a major behind-the-scenes role in the delicate negotiations of the transfer of power from President Nixon to President Ford.

Haig remained White House Chief of Staff during the early days of the Ford Administration until Donald Rumsfeld replaced him in September 1974. By that time, Ford, in a highly controversial move, had pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed as president. Author Roger Morris, a former colleague of Haig's on the National Security Council early in Nixon's first term, wrote that when Ford pardoned Nixon, he in effect pardoned Haig as well.[11]

NATO Supreme Commander (1974-79)

From 1974 to 1979, Haig served as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), the Commander of NATO forces in Europe, and Commander-in-Chief of United States European Command (CinCUSEUR). A creature of habit, Haig took the same route to SHAPE every day - a pattern of behavior that did not go unnoticed by terrorist groups. On June 25, 1979, Haig was the victim of an assassination attempt in Mons, Belgium. A land mine blew up under the bridge on which Haig's car was traveling, narrowly missing Haig's car, but wounding three of his bodyguards in a following car.[12] Authorities later attributed responsibility for the attack to the Red Army Faction (RAF). In 1993 a German Court sentenced Rolf Clemens Wagner, a former RAF member, to life imprisonment for the assassination attempt.[12]  (look up GLADIO in wikipedia!  He was responsible for false flag terror. )

Civilian positions

Alexander Haig retired as a four-star general from the Army in 1979, and moved on to civilian employment. In 1979, he worked at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute briefly, and would later serve on that organization's board.[13] Later that year, he was named President, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), and Director of United Technologies Corporation (UTC), a job he retained until 1981.

Secretary of State (1981-1982)

In January 1981, Haig was tapped by President Ronald Reagan to be Secretary of State. Confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee focused on Haig's role during Watergate. Haig was confirmed by a Senate vote of 93-6.[14] His speeches in this role in particular led to the coining of the neologism "Haigspeak", described in a dictionary of neologisms as "Language characterized by pompous obscurity resulting from redundancy, the semantically strained use of words, and verbosity",[15] leading ambassador Nicko Henderson to offer a prize for the best rendering of the Gettysburg address in Haigspeak.[16]

Reagan assassination attempt

In 1981, following the March 30 assassination attempt on Reagan, Haig asserted before reporters "I am in control here" as a result of Reagan's hospitalization.

    Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the President, the Vice President and the Secretary of State in that order, and should the President decide he wants to transfer the helm to the Vice President, he will do so. He has not done that. As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the Vice President and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course.
    —Alexander Haig , Alexander Haig, autobiographical profile in TIME Magazine, April 2, 1984[17]

Haig was incorrect in his interpretation of the U.S. Constitution concerning both the presidential line of succession and the 25th Amendment, which dictates what happens when a president is incapacitated. The holders of the two offices between the Vice President and the Secretary of State, the Speaker of the House (at the time, Tip O'Neill) and the President pro tempore of the Senate (at the time, Strom Thurmond), would be required under U.S. law (3 U.S.C. § 19) to resign their positions in order for either of them to become acting President. This was an unlikely event, considering that Vice-President Bush was merely not immediately available. Haig's statement reflected political reality, if not necessarily legal reality. Haig later said,

    I wasn't talking about transition. I was talking about the executive branch, who is running the government. That was the question asked. It was not, "Who is in line should the President die?"
    —Alexander Haig, Alexander Haig interview with 60 Minutes II April 23, 2001


Falklands War

In April 1982 Haig conducted shuttle diplomacy between the governments of Argentina in Buenos Aires and the United Kingdom in London after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Negotiations broke down and Haig returned to Washington on April 19. The British fleet then entered the war zone.
1982 Lebanon War

Haig's report to Reagan on January 30, 1982, shows that Haig feared that the Israelis might start a war against Lebanon.[18] Critics have accused Haig of "greenlighting" the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. Haig denies this and says he urged restraint.[19]

A military hawk, Haig caused some alarm with his suggestion that a "nuclear warning shot" in Europe might be effective in deterring the Soviet Union.[20] His tenure as Secretary of State was often characterized by his clashes with the more moderate Defense Secretary, Caspar Weinberger.

President Reagan accepted Haig's resignation from State on July 5, 1982.[21] Haig was succeeded by George P. Schultz, who was confirmed on July 16, 1982.[22]


1988 Republican presidential nomination

Haig ran unsuccessfully for the Republican Party nomination for President in 1988. Although he enjoyed relatively high name familiarity, Haig never broke out of single digits in national public opinion polls. He was a fierce critic of then Vice President George H. W. Bush, often doubting Bush's leadership abilities, questioning his role in the Iran Contra Scandal, and using the word wimp in relation to Bush in an October 1987 debate in Texas. Despite extensive personal campaigning and paid advertising in New Hampshire, Haig remained stuck in last place in the polls. Four days before the February 1988 NH primary election, Haig withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Senator Bob Dole, who made an appearance at the press conference, heavily covered by political reporters partly because a snow storm had limited travel by candidates and reporters. Dole, steadily gaining on Bush after beating him handily a week earlier in the Iowa caucus, ended up losing to Bush in NH by ten percentage points. With his momentum regained, Bush easily won the nomination.


Later life and death

Haig was the host for several years of the television program World Business Review. At the time of his death, he was the host of 21st Century Business, with each program a weekly business education forum that included business solutions, expert interview, commentary and field reports.[23] Haig served as a founding member of the advisory board of Newsmax Media, which publishes the conservative web site, Newsmax.com.[24] Haig was co-chairman of the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus, along with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Stephen J. Solarz. A member of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) Board of Advisors, Haig was also a founding Board Member of America Online.[25]

On January 5, 2006, Haig participated in a meeting at the White House of former Secretaries of Defense and State to discuss United States foreign policy with Bush administration officials.[26] On May 12, 2006, Haig participated in a second White House meeting with 10 former Secretaries of State and Defense. The meeting including briefings by Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, and was followed by a discussion with President George W. Bush.[27] Haig's memoirs - Inner Circles: How America Changed The World - were published in 1992.

On February 19, 2010, a hospital spokesman revealed that the 85-year-old Haig had been hospitalized at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore since January 28 and remained in critical condition.[28] On February 20, Haig died at the age of 85 from complications from a staphylococcal infection that he had prior to admission.[4]

According to The New York Times, his brother, Father Haig said the Army was coordinating a Mass at Fort Myers in Washington and an interment at Arlington National Cemetery, but both would be delayed by about two weeks due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.[4]

Family

Alexander Haig was married to Patricia (née Fox) from 1950 until his death. She is the mother of his three children, all of whom survive him: Alexander Patrick Haig Sr., Managing Director of Worldwide Associates, Inc., and Barbara Haig, "Deputy to President for Policy & Strategy" at the National Endowment for Democracy both of Washington, DC, and Brian Haig, author and military analyst of Hopewell, N.J. Haig's younger brother, Rev. Frank Haig, is a Jesuit priest and professor emeritus of physics at Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland. He also served as the seventh president of Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, Haig's older sister Regina Haig Meredith was a practicing attorney licensed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and was a co-founding partner of the firm Meredith, Meredith, Chase and Taggart, located in Princeton and Trenton, New Jersey; she died in 2008.

 Military awards  Qualification Badges      * Combat Infantry Badge.svg  Combat Infantryman Badge     * US - Presidential Service Badge.png  Presidential Service Badge  Decorations      * US-DSC-RIBBON.png  Distinguished Service Cross     * Defense Distinguished Service ribbon.svg  Defense Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster     * Distinguished Service Medal ribbon.svg  Army Distinguished Service Medal     * SilverStar.gif  Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster     * Legion of Merit ribbon.svg  Legion of Merit with two Oak Leaf Clusters     * Distinguished Flying Cross ribbon.svg  Distinguished Flying Cross with two Oak Leaf Clusters     * Bronze Star ribbon.svg  Bronze Star with "Valor device" and two Oak Leaf Clusters     * Purple Heart BAR.svg  Purple Heart     * Air Medal ribbon.svg  Air Medal with Bronze Numeral 24     * Army Commendation Medal ribbon.svg  Army Commendation Medal  Service Medals      * National Defense Service Medal ribbon.svg  National Defense Service Medal with Bronze Service Star     * American Campaign Medal ribbon.svg  American Campaign Medal     * World War II Victory Medal ribbon.svg  World War II Victory Medal     * Army of Occupation ribbon.svg  Army of Occupation Medal     * KSMRib.svg  Korean Service Medal with four Bronze Stars     * Vietnam Service Ribbon.svg  Vietnam Service Medal with two Bronze Stars  Foreign Awards      * BaoQuocHuanChuongR.gif  National Order of Vietnam     * Vietnam gallantry cross-w-palm-3d.svg  Vietnam Gallantry Cross with Palm     * United Nations Service Medal for Korea ribbon.png  United Nations Service Medal     * Vietnam Campaign Medal Ribbon.png  Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal  Further reading      * Dress Grey, by Lucian K. Truscott IV, 1978, ISBN 0385134754. Truscott, scion of a longtime military family (his grandfather Lucian Truscott Jr. was an important World War II general), was a cadet at West Point during Haig's late 1960s stint there; this book is a novel, in which a thinly disguised Haig is portrayed as a central character in a murder and cover-up mystery at West Point. Truscott had earlier (1974) spoken out in The Village Voice, about problems at West Point.     * Haig: The General's Progress, by Roger Morris, Playboy Press, 1982, ISBN 0872237532. Morris, a respected author, was a colleague of Haig's on the National Security Council, early in President Richard Nixon's first term. Morris presents important material on Haig's early life and Army career, as well as deeper and darker material than the official line, on the often seamy dealings of the Nixon White House, including Watergate.     * The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, by Seymour Hersh, Summit Books, New York, 1983, ISBN 0671506889. The book focuses on U.S. foreign policy, directed mainly from the White House by Nixon and Henry Kissinger during Nixon's first term; since Haig eventually became Kissinger's deputy during that era, there is also plenty of material on Haig here, often at variance with the official, sanitized versions.     * Caveat: Realism, Reagan and Foreign Affairs, by Alexander Haig, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1984. The book is Haig's account of what happened while he was Secretary of State.  References     1. ^ a b "Alexander Haig, MSN Encarta". Alexander Haig, MSN Encarta. http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle.aspx?refid=761585441.     2. ^ "ALEXANDER M. HAIG, Assistant to the President: Files, 1973-74". WEBLINKwwwford.utexas.edu/library/guides/Finding%20Aids/Haig,%20Alexander%20-%20Files.htm.     3. ^ a b "Premier Speakers Bureau". http://premierespeakers.com/alexander_haig. [dead link]    4. ^ a b c d Weiner, Tim (February 20, 2010). "Alexander M. Haig Jr., 85, Forceful Aide to 2 Presidents, Dies". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 21, 2010. WEBLINKwwwwebcitation.org/5nhqLAZBM. Retrieved February 20, 2010.     5. ^ Hohmann, James (February 21, 2010). "Alexander Haig, 85; soldier-statesman managed Nixon resignation". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on February 21, 2010. WEBLINKwwwwebcitation.org/5nhqZ4BwM. Retrieved February 21, 2010.     6. ^ "Haig's Future Uncertain After a Shaky Start". Anchorage Daily News. 1981-04-11. WEBLINKgoogle.com/newspapers?id=6Yg1AAAAIBAJ&sjid=pJ4FAAAAIBAJ&pg=1406,2881203&dq=haig's-future-uncertain-after-a-shaky-start-as-secretary-of&hl=en. Retrieved 2009-12-22.     7. ^ a b Alexander M. Haig, Jr.. "Lessons of the forgotten war". WEBLINKwwwhistorycentral.com/Documents/HaigKorea.html.     8. ^ "UT Biography". https://my.tennessee.edu/portal/page?_pageid=91,55081&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL. [dead link]    9. ^ a b "West Point Citation". WEBLINKwwwaogusma.org/aog/awards/DGA/96-Haigl.htm. [verification needed]   10. ^ "Full Text Citations For Award of The Distinguished Service Cross, U.S. Army Recipients - Vietnam". WEBLINKwwwhomeofheroes.com/valor/1_Citations/07_RVN-dsc/dsc_07RVN-armyH.html. [dead link]   11. ^ Haig: The General's Progress, by Roger Morris (American writer), Playboy Press, 1982, pp. 320-325.   12. ^ a b "German Guilty in '79 Attack At NATO on Alexander Haig". The New York Times. November 25, 1993. WEBLINKwwwnytimes.com/1993/11/25/world/german-guilty-in-79-attack-at-nato-on-alexander-haig.html.    13. ^ Maykuth, Andrew (Feb. 21, 2010). "Philadelphia dominated Haig's formative years". Philadelphia Inquirer. WEBLINKwwwphilly.com/inquirer/world_us/20100221_Philadelphia_dominated_Haig_s_formative_years.html.    14. ^ "AP: Rice Confirmed Despite Dems' Criticisms". WEBLINKwwwcommondreams.org/headlines05/0126-10.htm.    15. ^ Fifty years among the new words: a dictionary of neologisms, 1941-1991, John Algeo, p.231   16. ^ Financial Times, London, March 21 2009   17. ^ "Alexander Haig". Time: p. 22 of 24 page article. April 2, 1984. WEBLINKwwwtime.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,954230,00.html. Retrieved 2008-05-21.    18. ^ Ronald Reagan edited by Douglas Brinkley (2007) The Reagan Diaries Harper Collins ISBN 978-0-06-0876005 p 66 Saturday, January 30   19. ^ "Alexander Haig". Time. April 9, 1984. WEBLINKwwwtime.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,952421,00.html.    20. ^ Waller, Douglas C. Congress and the Nuclear Freeze: An Inside Look at the Politics of a Mass Movement, 1987. Page 19.   21. ^ Ajemian, Robert; George J. Church; Douglas Brew (1982-07-05). "The Shakeup at State". Time. WEBLINKwwwtime.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,925497,00.html. Retrieved 2010-02-21.    22. ^ Short History of the Department of State, United States Department of State, Office of the Historian. Retrieved 2010-02-20.   23. ^ "World Business Review with Alexander Haig". WEBLINKwww21cbtv.com/. Retrieved 2008-12-17.    24. ^ General Alexander M. Haig, Jr. joins Newsmax.com advisory board, "PR Newswire", June 21, 2001.   25. ^ "Business Wire AOL-TIme Warner announces its board of directors". WEBLINKfindarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2001_Jan_12/ai_69075111. Retrieved 2008-12-17.    26. ^ "President George W. Bush poses for a photo Thursday, January 5, 2006, in the Oval Office with former Secretaries of State and Secretaries of Defense from both Republican and Democratic administrations, following a meeting on the strategy for victory in Iraq.". The White House. January 5, 2006. WEBLINKgeorgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/01/images/20060105_d-0300-1-515h.html. Retrieved 2008-12-17.    27. ^ "Bush discusses Iraq with former officials". WEBLINKwwwupi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20060512-111719-8658r.    28. ^ "Haig, top adviser to 3 presidents, hospitalized". Associated Press. February 19, 2010. Archived from the original on February 20, 2010. WEBLINKwwwwebcitation.org/5ngfu7qgH. Retrieved February 20, 2010.

ISRAEL's war on peace groups

In preparation of the attack on Iran ....

Israel Threatens "Sabotage" and "Attack" on Global Peace/Justice Groups

February 20, 2010 by Michael Leon ·

Update: Read MuzzleWatch’s Think tank tells Israeli government to declare war on peace groups.--"They’re baaaaack -- Israel’s ‘most influential’ think tank tells Israeli government to ‘attack’ and ’sabotage’ global peace and human rights groups (as opposed to domestic Israeli groups which are already under attack.)"

Hey, it bears repeating endlessly: If you are against war generally, you are per force not anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist, pro-Taliban, pro- blah blah blah. Those making threats against this site for featuring reports on Israeli militarism are doing nothing new. Ask Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Jeff Gates, MuzzleWatch, Jewish Voice for Peace; hell ask Andrew Sullivan. Ask J-Street.

>From Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 16 February 2010

Israel’s new strategy: "sabotage" and "attack" the global justice movement

An extraordinary series of articles, reports and presentations by Israel’s influential Reut Institute has identified the global movement for justice, equality and peace as an "existential threat" to Israel and called on the Israeli government to direct substantial resources to "attack" and possibly engage in criminal "sabotage" of this movement in what Reut believes are its various international "hubs" in London, Madrid, Toronto, the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.

A Reut Institute presentation calls on Israel to "attack catalysts" -- global peace and justice activists.


The Reut Institute’s analyses hold that Israel’s traditional strategic doctrine -- which views threats to the state’s existence in primarily military terms, to be met with a military response -- is badly out of date. Rather, what Israel faces today is a combined threat from a "Resistance Network" and a "Delegitimization Network."

The Resistance Network is comprised of political and armed groups such as Hamas and Hizballah who "rel[y] on military means to sabotage every move directed at affectingseparation between Israel and the Palestinians or securing a two-state solution" ("The Delegitimization Challenge: Creating a Political Firewall, Reut Institute, 14 February 2010).

Furthermore, the "Resistance Network" allegedly aims to cause Israel’s political "implosion" -- a la South Africa, East Germany or the Soviet Union -- rather than bring about military defeat through direct confrontation on the battlefield.

The "Delegitimization Network" -- which Reut Institute president and former Israeli government advisor Gidi Grinstein provocatively claims is in an "unholy alliance" with the Resistance Network -- is made up of the broad, decentralized and informal movement of peace and justice, human rights, and BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) activists all over the world. Its manifestations include protests against Israeli officials visiting universities, Israeli Apartheid Week, faith-based and trade union-based activism, and "lawfare" -- the use of universal jurisdiction to bring legal accountability for alleged Israeli war criminals. The Reut Institute even cited my speech to the student conference on BDS held at Hampshire College last November as a guide to how the "delegitimization" strategy supposedly works ("Eroding Israel’s Legitimacy in the International Arena," Reut Institute, 28 January 2010).

The combined "attack" from "resisters" and "delegitimizers," Reutsays, "possesses strategic significance, and may develop into a comprehensive existential threat within a few years." It further warns that a "harbinger of such a threat would be the collapse of the two-state solution as an agreed framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the coalescence behind a ‘one-state solution’ as a new alternative framework."

At a basic level, Reut’s analysis represents an advance over the most primitive and hitherto dominant layers of Israeli strategic thinking; it reflects an understanding, as I put it in my speech at Hampshire, that "Zionism simply cannot bomb, kidnap, assassinate, expel, demolish, settle and lie its way to legitimacy and acceptance."

But underlying the Reut Institute’s analysis is a complete inability to disentangle cause and effect. It seems to assume that the dramatic erosion in Israel’s international standing since its wars on Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2009 is a result of the prowess of the "delegitimization network" to which it imputes wholly nefarious, devious and unwholesome goals -- effectively the "destruction of Israel."

It blames "delegitimizers" and "resisters" for frustrating the two-state solution but ignores Israel’s relentless and ongoing settlement-building drive -- supported by virtually every state organ -- calculated and intended to make Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank impossible.

It never considers for a moment that the mounting criticism of Israel’s actions might be justified, or that the growingranks of people ready to commit their time and efforts to opposing Israel’s actions are motivated by genuine outrage and a desire to see justice, equality and an end to bloodshed. In other words, Israel is delegitimizing itself.

Reut does not recommend to the Israeli cabinet -- which recently held a special session to hear a presentation of the think tank’s findings -- that Israel should actually change its behavior toward Palestinians and Lebanese. It misses the point that apartheid South Africa also once faced a global "delegitimizationnetwork" but that this has now completely disappeared. South Africa, however, still exists. Once the cause motivating the movement disappeared -- the rank injustice of formal apartheid -- people packed up their signs and their BDS campaigns and went home.

Instead, Reut recommends to the Israeli government an aggressive and possibly criminal counter-offensive. A powerpoint presentation Grinstein made to the recent Herzliya Conference on Israeli national security actually calls on Israel’s "intelligence agencies to focus" on the named and unnamed "hubs" of the "delegitimization network" and to engage in "attacking catalysts" of this network. In its "The Delegitimization Challenge: Creating a Political Firewall" document, Reut recommends that "Israel should sabotage network catalysts."

The use of the word "sabotage" is particularly striking and should draw the attention of governments, law enforcement agencies and university officials concerned about the safety and welfare of their students and citizens. The only definition of "sabotage" in United States law deems it to be an act of war on a par with treason, when carried out against the United States. In addition, in common usage, the American Heritage Dictionary defines sabotage as "Treacherous action to defeat or hinder a cause or an endeavor; deliberate subversion." It is difficult to think of a legitimate use of this term in a political or advocacy context.

At the very least, Reut seems to be calling for Israel’s spy agencies to engage in covert activity to interfere with the exercise of legal free speech, association and advocacy rights in the United States, Canada and European Union countries, and possibly to cause harm to individuals and organizations. These warnings of Israel’s possible intent -- especially in light of its long history of criminal activity on foreign soil -- should not be taken lightly.

The Reut Institute, based in Tel Aviv, raises a significant amount of tax-exempt funds in the United States through a nonprofit arm called American Friends of the Reut Institute (AFRI). According to its public filings, AFRI sent almost $2 million to the Reut Institute in 2006 and 2007.

In addition to a state-sponsored international "sabotage" campaign, Reut also recommends a "soft" policy. This specifically involves better hasbaraor state propaganda to greenwash Israel as a high-tech haven for environmental technologies and high culture -- what it terms "Brand Israel."

Other elements include "maintain[ing] thousands of personal relationships with political, cultural, media and security-related elites and influentials" around the world, and "harnessing Jewish and Israeli diaspora communities" even more tightly to its cause. It even emphasizes that Israel should use "international aid" to boost its image (its perfunctory foray into earthquake-devastated Haiti was an example of this tactic).

What ties together all these strategies is that they are aimed at frustrating, delaying and distracting attention from the fundamental issue: that Israel -- despite its claims to be a liberal and democratic state -- is an ultranationalist ethnocracy that relies on the violent suppression of the most fundamental rights of millions of Palestinians, soon to be a demographic majority, to maintain the status quo. There is no "game changer" in Reut’s new strategy.

Reut is apparently unaware even of the irony of trying to reform "Brand Israel" as something cuddly, while at the same time publicly recommending that Israel’s notorious spies "sabotage" peace groups on foreign soil.

But there are two lessons we must heed: Reut’s analysis vindicates the effectiveness of the BDS strategy, and as Israeli elites increasingly fear for the long-term prospects of the Zionist project they are likely to be more ruthless, unscrupulous and desperate than ever.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.

HAARETZ - Israel USA WAR PARTY news

Here an interesting WHITE MANS BURDEN article
Imagine you are Iran and you are surrounded by the most deadly military machines.
How does this article sound?  YES it sounds like Hitler being against the arms race!
(laughable?  There is a photo of it)

here the article:

Avoiding the last resort

By Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff - HAARETZ
/hasen/spages/1150889.html

If anyone still had doubts, they disappeared this week,
with the visit by the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff and the latest threats by the Iranian president
and Hezbollah's secretary general:

Oh No! The highest military arseholes of the world, the oligarchs with the mightiest weapons of mass destruction have not threatened Iran at all.. The THREAT comes from the UNTERMENSCHEN. We, the well-intentioned WEST, we are oh-so-surprised and cannot understand why someone would consider violence to other countries.

Ill winds are blowing
in the Middle East. If the international community finds

Ah!  Its the international community!  The coalition of the willing, the civilized West WHO ALL AGREE!  USA and Israel are alone in UN resolutions and all other 180-odd nations vote differently, but NO MATTER, we (Israel and USA)  -- by definition -- are the international community!!

itself on a collision course with Iran,

Oh, it is a passive ship.. its just a course... we are going our peaceful ways, and HEY! SUDDENLY there is this highway-robber. No Matter that we are killing thousands in his neck of the woods and we are carrying WMDs.  No!  Its just a collision course! How unfortunate!

and levies tough
sanctions, the spring and summer months could be
particularly difficult. This tension could escalate into
an all-out war.

But we are not threatening! Noooooo.

Maybe only a few people want this to
happen,

MAYBE??  How honest!  Maybe the sentence would have sounded way too devious like this:  Nobody wants this to happen.  Yes this would have sounded like Al Capone or Adolf Hitler.

 but meanwhile Tehran and Jerusalem are
exchanging threatening messages, and with Beirut, Gaza
and Damascus in the middle, the situation could spin out
of control.

While Iran is deliberately heating up the atmosphere,
the United States is seeking to cool it down a little.
Strangely enough, at this stage both sides have
interpreted Israel's role in a similar manner; both
apparently believe it could lose its patience.

Patience?  Israel has been the ATTACKER! It's like a Mafia-Boss Loosing his patience!

This is
the backdrop for the announcement by Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Israel is planning a war in the
coming months (which was immediately met by a sweeping
denial by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), and for
the threats by Hezbollah secretary general Hassan
Nasrallah about attacking Israel's strategic
infrastructure.

This threatening atmosphere is apparently also the main
reason for the "airlift" of senior U.S. officials to
Israel, including CIA Director Leon Panetta (who was
here earlier this month, according to foreign reports),
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen,
and Vice President Joe Biden, due here next month.

Mullen landed at the beginning of this week on the
hottest day of the winter, bearing an unequivocal
warning. First, in a departure from the norm, his visit
began with a brief press conference at the U.S. Embassy
in Tel Aviv, which lasted 25 minutes. Some of the
Israeli correspondents, who were informed only an hour
in advance, arrived in T-shirts. It was evident that His
Honor the Admiral was somewhat surprised by the casual
atmosphere - and by the biting tone of the questions.

But Mullen had a message to convey, by order of the
president, and he stuck to it. True, "from a policy
standpoint, Iran cannot have nuclear weapons," but, said
the guest, he was worried about the "unintended
consequences" of an attack by Israel. He made these
comments publicly even before his first meeting with his
hosts, and of course they immediately dictated the tone
of that evening's news and the next morning's papers.

Mullen - whose excellent relationship with Israeli Chief
of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi is described in Israel as a
security asset - had carried out a similar mission once
already, in June 2008. He was sent then by the previous
U.S. president, George W. Bush, to warn Israel not to
attack Iran. He did so after two meetings between Bush
and then-prime minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister
Ehud Barak, during which the president got the
impression, based on rather exceptional Israeli
requests, that Jerusalem was planning to bomb Iran.

Early in 2003 an Israeli delegation visited Washington
for strategic discussions, on the eve of the U.S.
invasion of Iraq. The Americans wanted only one thing
from Israel: a promise that it wouldn't attack Iraq on
its own, even if Iraqi president Saddam Hussein launched
chemical weapons at it (the same weapons of mass
destruction that it later turned out the Iraqis no
longer had). The Israelis, on orders of then-prime
minister Ariel Sharon, refused to commit. More than a
year later, when Sharon himself visited the White House,
Bush asked him to promise that Israel would not try to
assassinate or otherwise harm Palestinian Authority
chairman Yasser Arafat. Sharon replied that he was well
aware of the American demands. When the president
repeated his request, the prime minister again avoided
an official promise.

History History... all those memories!!  Except it is a very one-sided version. Imagine! In all those peaceful years Israel was soo passive, it never attacked Lebanon (oops, it did) or Gaza (oops) and the USA -- mafia bully No One -- has conquered the oil-regions and killed untold numbers of brown untermenschen..

Now, particularly after announcing that they are
starting to enrich uranium to 20 percent, the Iranians
are no longer making much of an effort to pretend their
nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, which was
their explanation until now. Tehran's true intentions
are now clear to everyone, from Washington to London to
Beijing.

Lets just assume that is true. Lets assume that Iran is building a nuclear arsenal. How many nuclear bombs?  Two?  Ten? And how about Nuclear Proliferation?  Did Israel join the regime?  Have inspections? Pakistan? India? USA? France? UK? Germany? South Africa? North Korea? France? China? Russia?  Were they bombed when they made their nuclear arsenals? The whole thing is so sad. The USA now has incredible secret WMDs, weapons that could split the earth in two. And Iran?  Have you seen the air-pollution in Teheran? SHOCKING!  They need electricity!  They need a big stick to stay independent. They have NEVER in 2000 years attacked ANY country. They were attacked by the CIA NUMEROUS TIMES.  Knowing that, and knowing that we DO NOT WANT NUCLEAR ANYTHING -- how should we treat our neighbor on this blue planet?

The problem is that the Chinese are far more
concerned about the danger to their oil supply than the
nuclear threat, and consider refusing to approve
sanctions against Iran to be an effective tactic in the
power struggle with the United States.

Ah, ok. so It is all the Chinese people's fault. How novel!  England and USA can't sell them Opium any more, bad untermensch.

Had Mohammed ElBaradei, who flagrantly collaborated with
the Iranians,

Wow.  A newspaper writing government propaganda, wow!

 not ended his term as director of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, we could have
wondered whether even he was still capable of denying
the clearly emerging picture. In his absence, it looks
as though the IAEA will also align itself with future
U.S. analyses and harden its tone toward Iran.

Israel will choose to attack only as a last resort. If
Iran continues to enrich uranium and Washington does not
succeed in imposing genuine sanctions, or if such
sanctions do not move Iran, this question becomes more
relevant. In such a case, Israel would have more
legitimacy for acting in self-defense, and could not be
blamed when diplomatic efforts fail.

Hitler claimed self defence!  Bombing the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan - Pure Self-Defence!!

For the time being, the Netanyahu government will try to
"translate" the fear of its future actions into hard
currency.

Oh, he is so good. What a wonderful manager!!  Hard Currency.. we like it!

 The United States has already deployed a radar
system in Israel, which has improved the country's
deterrent capability against missile strikes. Israel
recently received a commitment regarding U.S. Army
emergency storehouses here.

Of course this is not preparing for war, and it is not a threat to iran. As long as they do what we tell them to do, there will be no violence, maybe. Al Capone.

If we accept the version of
the Prime Minister's Office, there may also have been
success on the Russian front, in the form of another
delay in the deal to sell SA-300 anti-aircraft missiles
to Tehran.

Mullen's host, Ashkenazi, calmed down another front this
week: Barak's front against Ashkenazi. Barak even
praised the latter in public - a sign that both sides
are trying to chill the atmosphere after the blowout
between their advisers a week ago. A certain amount of
bad blood will apparently remain between the two
bureaus, however. And that is what awaits the chief of
staff as he enters the fourth year of his term, which is
likely to be extended to a fifth year.

7 Bases for coming US-War on Liberal Sth America

DIVIDE AND CONQUER
(mix some synthetic terror with a dose of disinformation and resource confilcts, and voila! The USA has new tin-pot dictator allies that will do any crime under the protection of the protectors of big business.

Seven Bases

Written by Diane Lefer and Hector Aristizábal   

U.S. and Colombian officials signed an agreement
granting the U.S. military access to seven Colombian
bases for ten years.

The United States thereby increased its ties to the
military known for the worst human rights abuses in the
Western Hemisphere and is a troubling indication of what
can be expected of the Obama Administration and its
promise of change. Does this agreement (signed in the
fall of 2009) really change anything? We take a look at
the history of each of these bases as well as conditions
in the surrounding communities and the nation as a
whole.

#1: Tolemaida

This base, located in Melgar, Cundinamarca, has been
sending students to the School of the Americas for Army
Ranger training for more than 50 years. The US military
and its contractors already have a long association with
the base where they have enjoyed immunity from
prosecution for such crimes as the rape and sexual abuse
of Colombian girls as young as twelve (documented by
video), and the trafficking for profit of arms to
illegal paramilitary groups. The new agreement will
allow unparalleled access by the US armed forces and
will apparently continue diplomatic immunity for US
personnel, both military and civilian.

In Bogotá, just 43 miles to the northeast, more than
1,000 people arrive each day as they flee violence aimed
at stealing their small rural landholdings usually for
the benefit of paramilitary bosses, narcotraffickers,
transnational corporations and their government allies.
The US-supported Colombian military has done nothing to
protect approximately 4 million internally displaced
people, 75 percent of whom are women and children, left
homeless and impoverished.  

While US policy is to fund the war on drugs and the war
on the FARC, the cocaine trade provides employment and
income to more than one million Colombians and the armed
conflict is one of the nation's largest sources of work.
In Colombia, a minority of the population has steady
employment. Most of the potential workforce consists of
the unemployed, those who've given up looking for work
or who participate in the informal economy of day
laborers, street vendors, armed insurgents, and
criminals. Workers lucky enough to have steady
employment for a 48-hour week at the minimum wage do not
earn enough to purchase a basic market basket of goods
for a family of four.

The Colombian Ministry of Defense has estimated that
more than 4,600 FARC members and more than 1,300 ELN
members are minors and that most guerrilla fighters had
joined the guerrilla ranks as children. Witness for
Peace learned of a school in Bogotá where 80 children
dropped out in a single semester to join the FARC,
motivated not by ideology but because their families
couldn't afford to feed them.

Education and employment opportunities will have more
impact on the civil conflict and the cocaine trade than
more weapons, more military training, and more war.


#2. Bahía Málaga

This naval base in Valle de Cauca department is located
outside Buenaventura which, as the nation's largest
Pacific port, is also notorious for its role in
exporting cocaine--a clear rationale for the base. The
city itself is dangerous and impoverished though it
serves as a gateway to some of Colombia's premier
tourist beach resorts and lies near an essential ocean
ecosystem.

Over the past several years, the workforce of mostly
Afro-Colombian and indigenous sugar-cane cutters and
sugar refinery workers have labored in slavery-like
conditions in Valle de Cauca and neighboring Cauca
department. The 18,000 workers who went on strike in
2008 were, predictably, called FARC terrorists by
Colombia's President Uribe.

The department capital of Cali was the destination that
same year of tens of thousands of indigenous protestors
and their Afro-Colombian and campesino allies who
undertook an eight-day march to focus the nation's
attention on their call for a Life Plan that honors
human development and the environment instead of the
Development Plan promoted by transnationals and the
government that focuses on resource extraction with no
concern for consequences. The development plans that
equal Death Plans for millions are enforced and
implemented by the Colombian military.

The Colombian Constitution affirms specific
rights--including land rights--to Afro-Colombians as
well as to the indigenous populations but both minority
groups continue to suffer discrimination. The US State
Department reports that indigenous people are the
country's poorest population and have the highest
age-specific mortality rates and rates of intestinal
diseases, tuberculosis, hepatitis, and malaria.

Valle de Cauca borders the department of Chocó which a
former Colombian president referred to as the "country's
piggy bank" because of the richness of its vast mineral
deposits and other natural resources.Chocó, with the
highest percentage of Afro-Colombian residents in the
nation, also has the lowest per capita level of social
investment and ranked last in terms of education,
health, and infrastructure while suffering some of the
country's worst political violence.

Throughout Colombia, Afro-Colombians are driven off the
land they own and their leaders are targeted for
assassination. Native leaders who resist the degrading
exploitation of their traditional lands and try to ban
military actors from their resguardos (reservations) are
labeled FARC sympathizers and have been assassinated at
a rate that would translate in the US to more than
21,500 elected officials and community leaders murdered
for political purposes each year for the last 10 years.
The Awa people are particularly at risk as their
homeland spans the Colombia-Ecuador border, considered a
strategic military area by the government. Massacres in
February and August of 2009 claimed the lives of 25
people including children.


#3: Palanquero

The base is situated in the heart of Colombia, near
Puerto Salgar on the Magdalena River, the country's
principal inland waterway, notorious for the mutilated
bodies floating downstream or, unseen, confined to its
depths. While the guerrilla movements continue to carry
out killings, kidnappings, sabotage, and other
atrocities--extensively covered by the mainstream media,
the vast majority of murders, disappearances, and other
human rights abuses have been rarely covered in the
press and clearly tied to the Colombian Army and its
paramilitary allies.

Direct military funding from the US for Palanquero was
supposed to stop when courts found it was from this base
that planes dropped a US-made rocket on the village of
Santo Domingo, killing18 civilians. Palanquero was later
"recertified" for assistance. The advanced radar
equipment installed here by a US team was indispensable
in the operation that killed FARC Commander Raúl Reyes.
The bombing of his camp across the border in Ecuador
caused an international incident and is one of the
reasons the US lease on the Forward Operations Base in
Manta, Ecuador was not renewed.

Palanquero has become the most infamous and talked about
of the seven bases because of a US Department of Defense
Air Force document that stated the site "provides a
unique opportunity for full spectrum operations in a
critical sub region of our hemisphere where security and
stability is under constant threat from narcotics funded
terrorist insurgencies, anti-US governments, endemic
poverty and recurring natural disasters."  [emphasis
added] Colombian government documents state the
agreement provides for cooperation against
narcotrafficking, terrorism, and "otras amenazas de
carácter trasnacional" (other threats transnational in
character). Documents were later revised to eliminate
language suggesting the US might mount operations
against any target in the South American continent and
the US administration has offered high-level assurances,
but we've seen revised documents before. Just one
familiar example: Descriptions of torture techniques
were blacked out in the SOA Manual while the practice
continued around the world including by US forces. In
Colombia, during the first six months of 2008,
government security forces were involved in 74 incidents
of torture, a 46 percent increase compared with the
first six months of 2007--and those are merely the
incidents that were noted by the US State Department.


#4: Cartagena

As the home of the country's largest naval base, and
with the omnipresent police and military on the streets,
Cartagena--even during the worst periods of violence in
Colombia--continued to attract tourists with its beaches
and cultural life. Its patrimony of Spanish Colonial
architecture won the city designation as a UNESCO World
Heritage site. The US has conducted joint training
exercises with Colombian sailors here.

Cartagena is also the site of a sprawling shantytown
with thousands of displaced and desperate young people,
prime recruit material for criminal organizations and
illegal armed actors. Rightwing death squads visit these
streets to strike and kill, and the government's
security forces--ever present in tourists areas--do
nothing to make life here secure.  

Instead of more military, Cartagena needs more programs
like El Colegio del Cuerpo, a local dance company that
trains young people from impoverished backgrounds.
Through the discipline and expressiveness of creating
beauty, youth at-risk learn not only about the art of
dance, but a new sense of ethics. As the founders
explain, in Colombia, the human body is too often a
disposable thing, made to be tortured, mutilated,
murdered. At El Colegio del Cuerpo, youth once inured to
violence learn to respect the human body--their own, and
the bodies of others.


#5: Apiay

This air base also hosts the Colombian Army and Navy as
well as hundreds of US military personnel and
contractors who have been there since 2004, supporting
the anti-FARC military campaign called Plan Patriota.
Given that oil and gas facilities are often a guerrilla
target, it's worth noting that Apiay is also home to an
oil refinery. A gas pipeline to Bogotá runs from the
nearby city of Villavicencio which has been overwhelmed,
like Bogotá, with internally displaced people who live
in new slums that lack access to clean water. There's no
sanitation in poor neighborhoods and the electrical grid
is insufficient to meet the needs of the city.

Water, sanitation, electricity, city services. Those are
the exact concerns being addressed in the city of
Medellín by the youth organization, Red Juvenil which
offers a positive model for the nation. These young
people--conscientious objectors from the poorest and
most violent neighborhoods--reject recruitment by all
the armed actors. The say no to the guerrilla, the
paramilitaries, the cartels, and the Colombian military
as well, and instead focus their efforts on civic
improvement.


#6: Larandia

This base in Caquetá department is home to Colombian
counter-insurgency brigade No. 89, trained at WHINSEC.
Most of the several hundred US military advisors,
Special Forces, and DynCorp contractors sent to the
country by Plan Colombia have been based here.

In the Spring of 2009, Human Rights First reports that
97 people in Caquetá including prominent and
well-respected activists and intellectuals suddenly
found their names, addresses, and photographs circulated
on a military intelligence list linking them--without
any corroboration--to the FARC just as they were about
to testify about abuses and "extrajudicial killings"--a
euphemism for State-sponsored murders and
lynchings--carried out by the Colombian military. Being
named as a FARC sympathizer is tantamount in Colombia to
having a target pinned to your back.

Throughout the country, such accusations are routinely
made against those who resist war. "Peace Communities"
such as San José de Apartadó, which deny access to all
armed groups, whether legal or illegal, are relentlessly
targeted by the Army, police, and paramilitary forces
and suffer threats, massacres and disappearances.

Larandia's role in Plan Colombia, since 2002, has been
as the takeoff and landing site for the aircraft that
have fumigated the neighboring Putumayo region with
toxic herbicides. Cocaine cultivation has not
diminished, the supply remains unchanged, but local
people have suffered extreme hunger as their food crops
were sprayed and destroyed, toxins impacted people's
health as well as the environment in the Amazon basin,
"the lungs of the world."

Rumors now circulate about a deal: Colombian President
Uribe approves US access to bases in exchange for Obama
supporting a Free Trade Agreement by which the US could
continue to subsidize domestic agribusiness, thereby
threatening the livelihoods of Colombia's small and
subsistence farmers. Their lands are already being
illegally grabbed and transformed to palm oil biofuel
plantations--food for machines rather than people. Under
the FTA, the US could regulate its own financial sector
but Colombia would not be allowed to do so. Colombia
could not give preference to local businesses in
awarding government procurement contracts or in any way
privilege Colombian businesses over transnationals.

Every successful world economy has gone through a period
of protecting and developing its own business and
industrial base. The FTA presents Colombia with almost
insurmountable obstacles to doing so. While the wealthy
would become wealthier through their participation in
multinational schemes, the majority of Colombians would
be trapped in a backwards economy exporting natural
resources, monoculture products such as biofuels, and
raw materials, all of which rely on an exploitable
underclass of workers.

While Colombia needs a Fair Trade program that
encourages the development of a competitive 21st-century
economy, Uribe's government remains tragically committed
to neoliberalism. A better model is being tried
elsewhere on the continent: ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana
para los Pueblos de Nuestra América) is based on the
idea of social, political, and economic integration
between the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean
and a vision of social welfare, barter and mutual
economic aid.


#7: Malambo

Air Force officers from Malambo, located on Caribbean
coast in Colombia's Atlantic department, have trained at
WHINSEC. In the 80's, in addition to its anti-narcotics
operations, the base was charged with defense against a
presumed Sandinista threat. No wonder South and Central
American countries are not reassured by US statements
that all operations will be confined to Colombian
territory.

At the end of 2009, at the Second International
Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases,
delegates from twelve Latin American countries pledged
to cooperate on a campaign that seeks to have other
nations follow the lead of Bolivia and Ecuador, two
countries that have a ban on foreign bases written into
their respective national Constitutions.

In recent years, US military joined with the Colombian
Air Force to bring disaster relief to the departments
flood zones. They have also garnered favorable press by
participating in joint medical missions.

Flooding is common along the coast and regularly creates
disaster and disease in Barranquilla, the largest city
of the department, which has no rainwater drainage
system or flood prevention plan. If infrastructure needs
were addressed, the military wouldn't have to respond to
frequent disasters. If the department had sufficient
clinics, hospitals, and health care personnel, the
population wouldn't have to wait for the infrequent
arrival of medical missions.

In 2009, the mayor of Barranquilla faced a disciplinary
investigation by an anti-corruption agency after his
sudden dismissal of 2,300 municipal workers who were
members of trade unions. Union leaders and journalists
who voiced opposition to the mass firings received death
threats. Threats and actual killings are nothing new for
union leaders at the local Coca-Cola plant.

Violence against trade unionists in Colombia increases
every year with multinationals linked again and again to
the hiring of assassins.  

In Argentina and Chile, people are now being held
accountable for crimes against humanity committed during
their Dirty Wars. In Colombia, when arrested
paramilitary leaders begin to testify about their
connections to high ranking government officials and US
and transnational corporations, they are quickly
extradited to the US to face drug charges, putting them
out of reach of Colombian prosecutors, human rights
organizations, victims and their families. Not only do
Colombian perpetrators continue to enjoy impunity for
their past crimes, the abuses are ongoing.


Conclusion:

When funding for the SOA was threatened, the Department
of Defense renamed it WHINSEC. The agreement on bases
represents one more example of sleight-of-hand: As
Congress loses faith in Plan Colombia after investing
more than six billion dollars, the DOD taps the military
budget to keep the failed policies going with even less
Congressional oversight.

The Obama Administration's decision to extend US
military muscle to an extent previously unknown
threatens to destabilize the entire region. Yes, South
American countries have had their border skirmishes and
brief armed conflicts, but American bases create a
scenario for what could potentially be a major war on
the continent. At the same time, the US presence will
lead Colombia's neighbors to respond to this anxiety by
buying more weapons and raising more national armies.
Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru will
spend on their militaries the money that could and
should go to improving the quality of life for all their
citizens.

The agreement represents more of the inevitable failure
that comes from policies that rely on the military
paradigm. In Colombia, as in Afghanistan, military might
has failed and is destined to fail. In neither country
can the military put a dent in drug trafficking. In both
countries, a weak central government has little or no
presence--except for military presence--in much of the
country and fails to provide even basic services.
Military action inspires insurgency and resistance,
while warlords and corrupt government officials continue
to profit from war.

Social justice is the road to peace.



Hector and Diane have co-authored The Blessing Next to
the Wound (to be published Spring 2010 by Lantern
Books), his story of surviving torture and civil war in
Colombia and how he now seeks a path to healing for
himself and others through engaging the imagination in
works of activism and art.

We are saved - Obama understands the needs!!!

WE ARE SAVED!!!  OBAMA UNDERSTANDS WHAT THE WE NEED

(see first COMMENT, further below)


Obama Visits Vegas for Alleged "Socialism Summit"               
by Tom McGregor        Thu, Feb 18, 2010, 11:31 AM

President Barack Obama has frequently denounced bankers and Wall Street bigwigs for visiting Las Vegas and blowing U.S. government bailout cash on gambling junkets. Nonetheless, his remarks won't prevent him from attending an alleged "socialism summit" with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nv.) in 'Sin City.'

According to the Washington Times, "Nevada Republican Senate candidate Danny Tarkanian in mocking President Obama's third visit to Las Vegas, calling the president's campaign stops for embattled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a socialism summit."

Mr. Reid, who led Mr. Obama's unpartisan and unpopular health care reform proposal through the Senate, is expressing "hope" that the once-popular president to pump up his flaging re-election prospects. Yet, unemployment has skyrocketed in Las Vegas, dangerously harmed in the economic downturn, and polls disclose many Nevadans blame the Democrat-controlled Congress and the president for their plight.

As reported by the Washington Times, "in Las Vegas, President Obama and Sen. Reid are convening a 'socialism summit' to argue for more government control of our economy. But after a full year of broken stimulus promises, Nevadans aren't buying what the president and Sen. Reid are selling, said Mr. Tarkanian, who is leading Mr. Reid in the latest polls."

Nowadays, Nevadans are highly-suspicious of Obama-Reid efforts to base our country's economy around government, claimed Mr. Tarkanian, the son of Jery Tarkanian, the legendary former UNLV basketball coach. From their perspective, Washington dictates your wages, your health care and benefits. This agenda has been so invasive that under their energy-tax proposal, you will be taxed for turning on the wrong light.

To read the entire article from the Washington Times, link here:

Tmcgregordallas@yahoo.com

====== COMMENT =========

written by furrpiece , February 18, 2010

I love "Socialism Summit"; not because it's just clever, but because it's actually true.

"Socialism" is a soft word to describe Obama's orientation from birth. "Marxism" and "Communism" are more accurate.

FACT: Obama's mother and father were Communists

FACT: Obama's grandmother and grandfather were Socialists/Communists who traveled in those circles.

FACT: Obama's "mentor" when he was young was a black Communist named Frank Marshall Davis.

FACT: When Obama first ran for office, he was a member of the "New Party", a radical fringe group formed by Democratic Socialists of America. (Radical activist Noam Chomsky was also a member of the New Party.)

FACT: Rating agencies rated Obama not only the most liberal Member of the Senate, but the most liberal member of the entire country.

Obama's core philosophy has not only been Progressive/Socialist, but many of his positions parallel Soviet Communism.

Try as he may, Harry Reid couldn't get to the left of Obama. So, it's totally safe to say that the summit is very much a socialistic event.

==========

see!  The world is saved!!!  Corrupt private owner/investors will be held responsible for what they do very soon now!!
USA will stop the intelligence-military-industrial complex!!
Bottoms up to the socialist US of A!!!

Ergenekon+Gladio - Turkish Press

This article from the biggest turkish daily:

The real crime is  mentioned by name, unlike in the corporate western media

http://www.google.com/search?q=giant+wurlitzer+wiki+cia

although front-page material, western doctrinal organs
cannot mention it because it illuminates 9/11, Bali, London 77,
Madrid Trains etc etc etc

The real crime is that our secret "services" are
planting the bombs and blaming them on muslims.
Only if they have carefully planned it, assured deniability,
cleaned up all traces left fool-proof false clues,
assured the corporate media cover-up ... they employ
muslim kids to walk into restaurants with rucksacks
In Bali there were two bombs, but nobody talks about it!
Having sent them to "training camps" and
methodically planted a "credible" terrorist
history on them, real or imagined, they reap the harvest
of increased "defence" spending and job security.

Welcome to GLADIO - or "DEEP STATE".
(google both, wikipedia has the facts)

Here now the AMAZINGLY FREE Turkish press.
(Google ERGENEKON+ GLADIO and be amazed, too!)

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=a-birds-eye-view-2010-02-12

A Bird's Eye View

Friday, February 12, 2010 by ADVENA AVIS

Operation Gladio

We birds have been following with shock and awe the
various revelations published in the press on various
operations, scenarios or exercises that were being
discussed by elements of the Armed Forces of this
country in 2002 that aimed to create chaos and
instability in Turkey. In this way, the Armed Forces
would be allowed to take over the country and save it.
Nobody knows from what Turkey would be saved as these
plans included assassination attempts against prominent
personalities.

But these plans are not something new, dear humans.
Please remember your history. Immediately after World
War II, the United Kingdom and the United States decided
to create "stay-behind" paramilitary organizations with
the official aim of countering a possible Soviet
invasion through sabotage and guerilla warfare behind
enemy lines. Arms caches were hidden, escape routes
prepared and many loyal members were recruited, mainly
hard-line anti-communists.

This plan was given the code-name Gladio. It was first
coordinated by the Clandestine Committee of the Western
Union in 1948 and was later on integrated into the
Clandestine Planning Committee of NATO in 1951 and
overseen by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers
Europe, or SHAPE. Most of the operations were said to be
financed by the CIA. Secret armies operated in all NATO
countries and in some non-NATO European countries. With
the passing of time some of these secret armies were
transformed into different organizations with their own
agenda and may have even started performing terrorist
activities in order to destabilize governments.

Gladio was assumed to be very active in Italy. In 1964
it forced Italian Socialist ministers to leave the
government, in 1969 it masterminded the Piazza Fontana
bombing and in 1972 the Peteano massacre, killing three
policemen and blaming the Red Brigades for it. Gladio
was also behind the military coup that overthrew
democracy in Greece on April 21, 1967.

Here in Turkey, Gladio appears to have been responsible
for the 1977 Taksim Square massacre. The secret
organizations here had the codenames of Ergenekon (the
civilian branch) and the “Counter-Guerilla”
(the military branch). And you must not forget that it
was the late Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit who revealed
the existence of the Counter-Guerilla in 1977. The three
military coups that took place in Turkey in the 1960s,
1970s and 1980s were also inspired, if not organized, by
Gladio. So we wonder whether operations "Sledgehammer"
and "Cage" could belong to the updated version of Gladio
where the word communism has simply been replaced with
the word Islam?

However, we birds still cannot understand why you humans
still need NATO, an organization that, through its
inability to control the secret armies it organized, has
created so much instability and loss of life within its
member-states? And yet NATO is involved in a war to
combat terrorism in Afghanistan!

What more can we say other than ponder our thoughts,
dear humans, for your benefit.

keywords: false flag synthetic terror intelligence joint chiefs of staff
operation northwoods riechstagsbrand corporate cia banking
armament industry military totalitarian nexus

Guns and Butter - Obama's Republican Class War Presidency

Guns and Butter - Obama's Republican Class War Presidency - February 3, 2010 at 1:00pm
157.22.130.4
http://aud1.kpfa.org/data/20100203-Wed1300.mp3
"Obama's Republican Class War Presidency" with financial economist, Michael Hudson, on Obama's State of the Union Speech and its economic consequences.  The reappointment Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke.
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/58336


 Guns and Butter - The International Impact of the Chinese Cultural Revolution - January 27, 2010 at 1:00pm
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/58146
http://157.22.130.4/data/20100127-Wed1300.mp3
http://aud1.kpfa.org/data/20100127-Wed1300.mp3
"The International Impact of the Chinese Cultural Revolution" with authors, Ann Tomkins and Robert Weil.  Ann Tomkins talks about her personal experience living and working in Beijing during the first five years of the Cultural Revolution, in which she was first an observer, and then a participant. Robert Weil discusses some of the reasoning that led to the Cultural Revolution, which was a revolution within a revolultion, and some of the enduring ideas about people and society that it spawned.

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/58530
Guns and Butter - The New Junk Economics: From Democracy to Neoliberal Oligarchy
"The New Junk Economics:  From Democracy to Neoliberal Oligarchy" with financial economist and historian, Dr. Michael Hudson.  We discuss the Federal Reserve; money as debt; Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's misconception of the causes of the great depression of the 1930's; classical political economy versus anti-classical, so-called "neoclassical", economics; the labor theory of value; the dollar carry trade; government deficit spending; Greece.
http://aud1.kpfa.org/data/20100210-Wed1300.mp3

more guns and butter archives: http://www.kpfa.org/archive/show/complete/34
"Guns & Butter" investigates the relationships among capitalism, militarism and politics. Maintaining a radical perspective in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, "Guns & Butter: The Economics of Politics" reports on who wins and who loses when the economic resources of civil society are diverted toward global corporatization, war, and the furtherance of a national security state.Produced and hosted by Bonnie Faulkner.E-mail Bonnie at blfaulkner[-at-]yahoo.com


KPFB live stream 16kbit
http://www.kpfa.org/streams/kpfb_16k.m3u
http://aud1.kpfa.org:8080/icy_0
http://157.22.130.4:8080/icy_0
THE ARE PLAYING ZAPPA-eske 1970s sound just now ;-)  "in the army now"   right way wrong way my way

The band's name is The Valadiers --  were motown's first white group

I don't know what a Valadier is,” Stuart Avig confesses "I think it had something to do with being a brave warrior, brave Roman, something like that. The group was already named that when I joined it."

Valadier's Piazza del Popolo, however, incorporated the verdure of trees as an
essential element; he conceived his space ...

Greetings
This is Uncle Sam
I want to take you
To a far off land

I need you
Oh, I need you
Yes, I need you
To lend a helping hand

Said goodbye
To all my buddies
Say hello
To your new friends
'Cause you're in the army now
And your new life has just begun

I need you
Oh, I need you
Yes, I need you
To lend a helping hand

I can just see me now
With a rifle in my hand
I'm gonna have to say
Goodbye to my girl
And I hope she doesn't
Find another man
And baby, baby
While I'm away
Please, please write everyday

Oh no, no
Please don't take me, Uncle Sam
You're in the army now

Goodbye, baby
So long, friends
Goodbye, baby
I hope to see you again

I need you
(Come on, boy)
Oh, I need you
(We're gonna make a man out of you)
Yes, I need you
To lend a helping hand
(This one training
You're not gonna miss)

Come on, boy
Whatta mean you've never heard of KP
I don't care if it's 4 in the morning
There is a right way
A wrong way
And there's my way
You'll do it my way

Come on, boy
On the double
Get in step, boy
Come on, now
March, march

Your mama's a long ways off, boy
So stop your crying
March
Get in step, boy
Left, right
Left, right
I said get in step, boy
Left


Group Members:

 
Stuart Avig, Jerry Light, Art Glasser, Martin Coleman




Formed: 1959, Detroit, MI
Disbanded: 1964
Genres: Rhythm & Blues

Biography The Valadiers formed in Detroit, MI, in 1959; Stuart Avig (lead), Martin Coleman (lead, bass, baritone), and Art Glasser (second tenor) went to Oak Park High, and Jerry Light (bass, baritone) attended Detroit Mumford. Early influences include Jerry Butler & the Impressions, the Dells, the Flamingoes, and Jackie Wilson. They auditioned at Hitsville USA one day after high school, secured a three-year contract, and became Motown's first white group.

Their initial recording session produced "Nothing Is Going to Change It," and "Somebody Help Me Find My Baby," which Motown shelved. Nothing happened until their next session that produced the self-written "Greetings, This Is Uncle Sam," and "Take a Chance," the B-side. According to Avig, "the sessions took one or two hours for both the vocals and the music." The Valadiers wrote "Greetings," but everyone wanted a piece of the songwriters' credits, the 45 listed only P. Bennent -- who nobody knew -- as the songwriter. When it appeared on a compilation album, the credits listed Robert Bateman, Brian Holland, and Ronnie Dunbar. B.M.I. lists Bateman, Holland, Dunbar, and the Valadiers as the writers. "Greetings" was popular in the East and the Midwest, but never sold enough copies to classify as a hit.

The Valadiers appeared in Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Flint, Baltimore, Washington, and other cities with the top names in R&B. On a memorable show at the Cleveland Arena with Marv Johnson, the Isley Brothers, and Wilbert Harrison, the blue-eyed soul singers received a louder ovation than the Isleys. They enjoyed playing hometown spots like the 20 Grand Lounge and the Graystone Ballroom. Lead, Stuart Avig, a 5'4" dynamo, had voice that was a cross between Jackie Wilson and Smokey Robinson; his showstopping voice and demeanor wowed audiences.

The Valadiers' next recordings appeared on the Gordy label. "When I'm Away" (released the summer of 1962) and "I Found a Girl" (January 1963) received little promotion and there were no other releases, and they disbanded by 1964. The Monitors redid "Greetings" on Soul Records and out-charted the original. The Isley Brothers also cut a version that remained in Motown's vaults until the mid-'80s. Stuart cut some solo tracks at Golden World Records as Stuart Ames. He tried to bring Marty Coleman along but the owner, Ed Wingate, only wanted Stuart and squashed the record in its promotional stage. He recorded some tracks, uncredited, with the Reflections ("Just Like Romeo and Juliet") on Golden World.

After that experience Stuart sang around town in various clubs solo, or as the Valadiers, when he could assemble a group. Coleman concentrated on songwriting; B.M.I. lists 38 songs by him, but he wrote more. His biggest was "If This Is Love (Than I'd Rather Be Lonely)" by the Precisions on Drew Records. He wrote and arranged for Detroit's Top Dog label, owned by Artie Fields, and remain with the company until it folded after 11 single releases.

One of Marty's Top Dog songs, "Together We Can Make Such Sweet Music," was redone by both the Spinners and the Supremes & the Four Tops on Motown; Joe Towns recorded the original on Top Dog. When Motown absorbed Top Dog, Coleman fell in as a staff writer, placing tunes with the Originals, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and others. Britisher Ian Levine recorded the Valadiers in the late '80s. Stuart Avig was the sole original member, the other spots were filled by stand-ins. The material ran the gamut and included remakes of the Spinners' "Love Don't Love Nobody," the Isley Brothers' "I Guess I'll Always Love You," and the Miracles' "Ooh, Baby, Baby" with Stuart sounding as good as ever.

Light lives in St. Augustine, FL, while Glasser, Avig, and Coleman all reside in the Detroit area. Avig, happily married for 30 years, has two sons and works in the precious metals business. Glasser also works in greater Detroit, but the once talented Coleman is dogged by substance abuse problems. Stuart has fond memories of Motown and calls it "a rewarding experience." ~ Andrew Hamilton, All Music Guide

Greeting ( This Is Uncle Sam)
Because I Love Her
Youll Be Sorry Someday
I Found A Girl
While I'm Away
Take A Chance

YouTube - The Valadiers-You'll Be Sorry Someday
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIdRFUwkYhQ

HISTORY

 The Valadiers
 The Valadiers formed in Detroit, MI, in 1959; Stuart Avig (lead), Martin Coleman (lead, bass, baritone), and Art Glasser (second tenor) went to Oak Park High, and Jerry Light (bass, baritone) attended Detroit Mumford. Early influences include Jerry Butler & the Impressions, the Dells, the Flamingoes, and Jackie Wilson. They auditioned at Hitsville USA one day after high school, secured a three-year contract, and became Motown's first white group.

Their initial recording session produced "Nothing Is Going to Change It," and "Somebody Help Me Find My Baby," which Motown shelved. Nothing happened until their next session that produced the self-written "Greetings, (This Is Uncle Sam)," and "Take a Chance." The Valadiers wrote "Greetings" and it became very popular on the East coast and the Midwest. It has been rated as the 100th best Motown track ever recorded!

 

The Valadiers appeared in Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Flint, Baltimore, Washington, and other cities with the top names in R&B. On a memorable show at the Cleveland Arena with Marv Johnson, the Isley Brothers, and Wilbert Harrison, the blue-eyed soul singers received a louder ovation than the Isleys. They enjoyed playing hometown spots like the 20 Grand Lounge and the Graystone Ballroom. Lead, Stuart Avig, a 5'4" dynamo, had a voice that was a cross between Jackie Wilson and Smokey Robinson; his show-stopping voice and demeanor wowed audiences.

The Valadiers' next recordings appeared on the Gordy label, "When I'm Away", "Because I Love Her" and "I Found a Girl". These songs were hits, but neither as successful as Greetings. By 1964 The Valadiers disbanded and lead singer Stuart Avig went on to pursue a solo career. Stuart cut 2 solo tracks at Golden World Records as Stuart Ames, "King For A Day" and "Oh Angelina". After that experience Stuart sang around town in various clubs solo, or as the Valadiers, when he could assemble a group. Coleman concentrated on songwriting; B.M.I. lists 38 songs by him, but he wrote more. His biggest was "If This Is Love (Than I'd Rather Be Lonely)" by the Precisions on Drew Records. He wrote and arranged for Detroit's Top Dog label, owned by Artie Fields, and remained with the company until it folded after 11 single releases. One of Marty's Top Dog songs, "Together We Can Make Such Sweet Music," was redone by both the Spinners and the Supremes & the Four Tops on Motown; Joe Towns recorded the original on Top Dog. When Motown absorbed Top Dog, Coleman fell in as a staff writer, placing tunes with the Originals, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and others. 1n 1989 British music producer Ian Levine came to Detroit to record all of the old Motown stars including The Valadiers. Stuart Avig was the sole original member along with his current group from The Latin Counts. The Valadiers recorded numerous tracks that included remakes of the Spinners' "Love Don't Love Nobody," The Isley Brothers "I Guess I'll Always Love You," as well as "Behind A Painted Smile", "No Competition", "What’s Wrong With Me Baby" and "Truth Hurts". Stuart sounded as good as ever! In 2002 Stuart Avig joined forces with The Shades of Blue who recorded the chartbuster "Oh How Happy". The Shades of Blue along with Stuart have performed all over the country for the past 9 years. In 2009 Motown Records celebrated its 50th Anniversary and after numerous requests from promoters, artists and fans The Valadiers got back together for one last run. Original lead singer Stuart Avig has joined forces with Andy Alonzo (who has been a Valadier since 1980), Donald Revels and Charlie Valverde. --Andrew Hamilton



 "Greetings (This is Uncle Sam), " The Valadiers (1961)



Early Motown evidently had a thing about the letter V.
In addition to the Vandellas (featuring current Detroit
city councilwoman Martha Reeves) and the Velvelettes,
there were the Valadiers. "I don't know what a Valadier
is," Stuart Avig confesses. "I think it had something to
do with being a brave warrior, brave Roman, something
like that. The group was already named that when I
joined it."

That was in the late '50s at Oak Park High School.
According to legend, an integrated version of the group
had previously approached Gordy. "Come back when you're
one color," he reportedly said. They did, and were
signed in late 1959. Avig was only 16. Although a
Pontiac-based instrumental group, Nick and the Jaguars,
had earlier cut a single with Motown, and a handful of
white vocal acts (most notably Rare Earth) would come
aboard in the '60s, "we can legitimately say we were the
first [white vocalists]," he says.

The quartet  --  Avig, Jerry Light, Art Glasser, and
Martin Coleman  --  blended doo-wop with early R&B.
Avig, a dynamic lead singer, was influenced by such
black acts as the Dells, the Flamingos, and the
electrifying Jackie Wilson (a native Detroiter for whom
Gordy had written several hits in pre-Motown days).
"Race relations were different then," Avig says.
"Detroit was a segregated city. We were copying the
black sound, which didn't go over well with everyone. At
Motown, people were professional, but not everybody was
overly cordial or friendly."

The Valadiers' first recordings didn't make it out of
the vault, but in 1961 a song about the draft,
"Greetings (This Is Uncle Sam)," was a minor regional
hit. Avig recalls one show-stopping performance at
Cleveland Arena. "The Isley Brothers were headlining.
They came on after us, and we got a bigger ovation than
they did." After a couple of lackluster follow-up
singles, the group left Motown. Avig received his own
draft notice in 1964, serving two years in the Army.
After his discharge, he gave music another whirl before
marrying and settling into a new career in the
precious-metals refining business.

Today, Avig performs as a member of a blue-eyed soul
group called The Shades of Blue. He remains mostly
upbeat about his Motown experience. "The Four Tops, the
Temptations, the Supremes  --  they were all pushed to
the hilt. As far as promoting us with as much intensity
as they did black acts   I have no complaints. I'll be
forever grateful to Berry Gordy for signing us. He
didn't have to do it.