The neocons' next war
By Sidney Blumenthal | August 6, 2006
The National Security Agency is providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran are supplying new armaments to Hezbollah as it fires hundreds of missiles into northern Israel, according to a national security official with direct knowledge of the operation. President Bush has approved the secret program.
Inside the administration, neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney's national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries, the source privy to conversations about the program says. (Intelligence, including that gathered by the NSA, has been provided to Israel in the past for various purposes.) The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is said to have been "briefed" and to be "on board," but she is not a central actor in pushing the covert neoconservative scenario. Her "briefing" appears to be an aspect of an internal struggle to intimidate and marginalize her. Recently she has come under fire from prominent neoconservatives who oppose her support for diplomatic negotiations with Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weaponry.
Rice's diplomacy in the Middle East has erratically veered from initially calling on Israel for "restraint," to categorically opposing a cease-fire, to proposing terms for a cease-fire guaranteed to conflict with the European proposal, and thus to thwarting diplomacy, prolonging the time available for the Israeli offensive to achieve its stated aim of driving Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon. But the neocon scenario extends far beyond that objective to pushing Israel into a "cleansing war" with Syria and Iran, says the national security official, which somehow will redeem Bush's beleaguered policy in the entire region.
In order to try to understand the neoconservative road map, senior national security professionals have begun circulating among themselves a 1996 neocon manifesto against the Middle East peace process. Titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," its half-dozen authors included neoconservatives highly influential with the Bush administration -- Richard Perle, first-term chairman of the Defense Policy Board; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense; and David Wurmser, Cheney's chief Middle East aide.
"A Clean Break" was written at the request of incoming Likud Party Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and intended to provide "a new set of ideas" for jettisoning the policies of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Instead of trading "land for peace," the neocons advocated tossing aside the Oslo agreements that established negotiations and demanding unconditional Palestinian acceptance of Likud's terms, "peace for peace." Rather than negotiations with Syria, they proposed "weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria." They also advanced a wild scenario to "redefine Iraq." Then King Hussein of Jordan would somehow become its ruler; and somehow this Sunni monarch would gain "control" of the Iraqi Shiites, and through them "wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria."
Netanyahu, at first, attempted to follow the "clean break" strategy, but under persistent pressure from the Clinton administration he felt compelled to enter into U.S.-led negotiations with the Palestinians. In the 1998 Wye River accords, concluded through the personal involvement of President Clinton and a dying King Hussein, the Palestinians agreed to acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel and Netanyahu agreed to withdraw from a portion of the occupied West Bank. Further negotiations, conducted by his successor Ehud Barak, that nearly settled the conflict ended in dramatic failure, but potentially set the stage for new ones.
At his first National Security Council meeting, President George W. Bush stunned his first secretary of state, Colin Powell, by rejecting any effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. When Powell warned that "the consequences of that could be dire, especially for the Palestinians," Bush snapped, "Sometimes a show for force by one side can really clarify things." He was making a "clean break" not only with his immediate predecessor but also with the policies of his father.
In the current Middle East crisis, once again, the elder Bush's wise men have stepped forward to offer unsolicited and unheeded advice. (In private they are scathing.) Edward Djerejian, a former ambassador to Israel and Syria and now the director of the James Baker Institute at Rice University, urged on July 23, on CNN, negotiations with Syria and Iran. "I come from the school of diplomacy that you negotiate conflict resolution and peace with your enemies and adversaries, not with your friends," he said. "We've done it in the past, we can do it again."
Charles Freeman, the elder Bush's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, remarked, "The irony now is that the most likely candidate to back Hezbollah in the long term is no longer Iran but the Arab Shiite tyranny of the majority we have installed in Baghdad." Indeed, when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki came to Washington in the last week of July he preceded his visit with harsh statements against Israel. And in a closed meeting with U.S. senators, when asked to offer criticism of Hezbollah, he steadfastly refused.
Richard Haass, the Middle East advisor on the elder Bush's National Security Council and President Bush's first-term State Department policy planning director, and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, openly scoffed at Bush's Middle East policy in an interview on July 30 in the Washington Post: "The arrows are all pointing in the wrong direction. The biggest danger in the short run is it just increases frustration and alienation from the United States in the Arab world. Not just the Arab world, but in Europe and around the world. People will get a daily drumbeat of suffering in Lebanon and this will just drive up anti-Americanism to new heights." When asked about the president's optimism, he replied, "An opportunity? Lord, spare me. I don't laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?"
The same day that Haass' comments appeared Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush's national security advisor and still his close friend, published an Op-Ed in the Washington Post written more or less as an open letter to his erstwhile and errant protégé Condoleezza Rice. Undoubtedly, Scowcroft reflects the views of the former President Bush. Adopting the tone of an instructor to a stubborn pupil, Scowcroft detailed a plan for an immediate end to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and for restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, "the source of the problem." His program is a last attempt to turn the president back to the ways of his father. If the elder Bush and his team were in power and following the Scowcroft plan, a cease-fire would have been declared. But Scowcroft's plan resembles that of the Europeans, already rejected by the Bush administration, and Rice is the one offering a counterproposal that has put diplomacy into a stall.
Despite Rice's shunning of the advice of the Bush I sages, the neoconservatives have made her a convenient target in their effort to undermine all diplomatic initiatives. "Dump Condi," read the headline in the right-wing Insight Magazine on July 25. "Conservative national security allies of President Bush are in revolt against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that she is incompetent and has reversed the administration's national security and foreign policy agenda," the article reported. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a member of the Defense Policy Board, was quoted: "We are sending signals today that no matter how much you provoke us, no matter how viciously you describe things in public, no matter how many things you're doing with missiles and nuclear weapons, the most you'll get out of us is talk."
A month earlier, Perle, in a June 25 Op-Ed in the Washington Post, revived an old trope from the height of the Cold War, accusing those who propose diplomacy of being like Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who tried to appease Hitler. "Condoleezza Rice," wrote Perle, "has moved from the White House to Foggy Bottom, a mere mile or so away. What matters is not that she is further removed from the Oval Office; Rice's influence on the president is undiminished. It is, rather, that she is now in the midst of and increasingly represents a diplomatic establishment that is driven to accommodate its allies even when (or, it seems, especially when) such allies counsel the appeasement of our adversaries."
Rice, agent of the nefarious State Department, is supposedly the enemy within. "We are in the early stages of World War III," Gingrich told Insight. "Our bureaucracies are not responding fast enough. We don't have the right attitude."
Confused, ineffectual and incapable of filling her office with power, Rice has become the voodoo doll that Powell was in the first term. Even her feeble and counterproductive gestures toward diplomacy leave her open to the harshest attacks from neoconservatives. Scowcroft and the Bush I team are simply ignored. The sustained assault on Rice is a means to an end -- restoring the ascendancy of neoconservatism.
Bush's rejection of and reluctance to embrace the peace process concluded with the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections. This failure was followed by a refusal to engage Hamas, potentially splitting its new governmental ministers from its more radical leadership in Damascus. Predictably, the most radical elements of Hamas found a way to lash out. And Hezbollah seized the moment by staging its own provocation.
Having failed in the Middle East, the administration is attempting to salvage its credibility by equating Israel's predicament with the U.S. quagmire in Iraq. Neoconservatives, for their part, see the latest risk to Israel's national security as a chance to scuttle U.S. negotiations with Iran, perhaps the last opportunity to realize the fantasies of "A Clean Break."
By using NSA intelligence to set an invisible tripwire, the Bush administration is laying the condition for regional conflagration with untold consequences -- from Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Israel. Secretly devising a scheme that might thrust Israel into a ring of fire cannot be construed as a blunder. It is a deliberate, calculated and methodical plot.
Sidney Blumenthal: The Neocons' Next War
Sunday, August 06, 2006
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by Winter Patriot
on Sunday, August 06, 2006
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A Clean Break : Blueprint for Israel's War Against the Peace Process
Sunday, August 06, 2006
A Clean Break:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
Following is a report prepared by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000." The main substantive ideas in this paper emerge from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser participated. The report, entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," is the framework for a series of follow-up reports on strategy.
Israel has a large problem. Labor Zionism, which for 70 years has dominated the Zionist movement, has generated a stalled and shackled economy. Efforts to salvage Israel’s socialist institutions—which include pursuing supranational over national sovereignty and pursuing a peace process that embraces the slogan, "New Middle East"—undermine the legitimacy of the nation and lead Israel into strategic paralysis and the previous government’s "peace process." That peace process obscured the evidence of eroding national critical mass— including a palpable sense of national exhaustion—and forfeited strategic initiative. The loss of national critical mass was illustrated best by Israel’s efforts to draw in the United States to sell unpopular policies domestically, to agree to negotiate sovereignty over its capital, and to respond with resignation to a spate of terror so intense and tragic that it deterred Israelis from engaging in normal daily functions, such as commuting to work in buses.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government comes in with a new set of ideas. While there are those who will counsel continuity, Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break; it can forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism, the starting point of which must be economic reform. To secure the nation’s streets and borders in the immediate future, Israel can:
+ Work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll-back some of its most dangerous threats. This implies clean break from the slogan, "comprehensive peace" to a traditional concept of strategy based on balance of power.
+ Change the nature of its relations with the Palestinians, including upholding the right of hot pursuit for self defense into all Palestinian areas and nurturing alternatives to Arafat’s exclusive grip on Palestinian society.
+ Forge a new basis for relations with the United States—stressing self-reliance, maturity, strategic cooperation on areas of mutual concern, and furthering values inherent to the West. This can only be done if Israel takes serious steps to terminate aid, which prevents economic reform.
This report is written with key passages of a possible speech marked TEXT, that highlight the clean break which the new government has an opportunity to make. The body of the report is the commentary explaining the purpose and laying out the strategic context of the passages.
A New Approach to Peace
Early adoption of a bold, new perspective on peace and security is imperative for the new prime minister. While the previous government, and many abroad, may emphasize "land for peace"— which placed Israel in the position of cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, and military retreat — the new government can promote Western values and traditions. Such an approach, which will be well received in the United States, includes "peace for peace," "peace through strength" and self reliance: the balance of power.
A new strategy to seize the initiative can be introduced:
Israel’s quest for peace emerges from, and does not replace, the pursuit of its ideals. The Jewish people’s hunger for human rights — burned into their identity by a 2000-year old dream to live free in their own land — informs the concept of peace and reflects continuity of values with Western and Jewish tradition. Israel can now embrace negotiations, but as means, not ends, to pursue those ideals and demonstrate national steadfastness. It can challenge police states; enforce compliance of agreements; and insist on minimal standards of accountability.
Securing the Northern Border
Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon, including by:
+ striking Syria’s drug-money and counterfeiting infrastructure in Lebanon, all of which focuses on Razi Qanan.
+ paralleling Syria’s behavior by establishing the precedent that Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by Israeli proxy forces.
+ striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper.
Israel also can take this opportunity to remind the world of the nature of the Syrian regime. Syria repeatedly breaks its word. It violated numerous agreements with the Turks, and has betrayed the United States by continuing to occupy Lebanon in violation of the Taef agreement in 1989. Instead, Syria staged a sham election, installed a quisling regime, and forced Lebanon to sign a "Brotherhood Agreement" in 1991, that terminated Lebanese sovereignty. And Syria has begun colonizing Lebanon with hundreds of thousands of Syrians, while killing tens of thousands of its own citizens at a time, as it did in only three days in 1983 in Hama.
Under Syrian tutelage, the Lebanese drug trade, for which local Syrian military officers receive protection payments, flourishes. Syria’s regime supports the terrorist groups operationally and financially in Lebanon and on its soil. Indeed, the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in Lebanon has become for terror what the Silicon Valley has become for computers. The Bekaa Valley has become one of the main distribution sources, if not production points, of the "supernote" — counterfeit US currency so well done that it is impossible to detect.
Given the nature of the regime in Damascus, it is both natural and moral that Israel abandon the slogan "comprehensive peace" and move to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction program, and rejecting "land for peace" deals on the Golan Heights.
Moving to a Traditional Balance of Power Strategy
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria's regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq. This has triggered a Jordanian-Syrian rivalry to which Asad has responded by stepping up efforts to destabilize the Hashemite Kingdom, including using infiltrations. Syria recently signaled that it and Iran might prefer a weak, but barely surviving Saddam, if only to undermine and humiliate Jordan in its efforts to remove Saddam.
But Syria enters this conflict with potential weaknesses: Damascus is too preoccupied with dealing with the threatened new regional equation to permit distractions of the Lebanese flank. And Damascus fears that the 'natural axis' with Israel on one side, central Iraq and Turkey on the other, and Jordan, in the center would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula. For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity.
Since Iraq's future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly, it would be understandable that Israel has an interest in supporting the Hashemites in their efforts to redefine Iraq, including such measures as: visiting Jordan as the first official state visit, even before a visit to the United States, of the new Netanyahu government; supporting King Hussein by providing him with some tangible security measures to protect his regime against Syrian subversion; encouraging — through influence in the U.S. business community — investment in Jordan to structurally shift Jordan’s economy away from dependence on Iraq; and diverting Syria’s attention by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize Syrian control of Lebanon.
Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite.
King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf, Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet’s family, the direct descendants of which — and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows — is King Hussein.
Changing the Nature of Relations with the Palestinians
Israel has a chance to forge a new relationship between itself and the Palestinians. First and foremost, Israel’s efforts to secure its streets may require hot pursuit into Palestinian-controlled areas, a justifiable practice with which Americans can sympathize.
A key element of peace is compliance with agreements already signed. Therefore, Israel has the right to insist on compliance, including closing Orient House and disbanding Jibril Rujoub’s operatives in Jerusalem. Moreover, Israel and the United States can establish a Joint Compliance Monitoring Committee to study periodically whether the PLO meets minimum standards of compliance, authority and responsibility, human rights, and judicial and fiduciary accountability.
Israel has no obligations under the Oslo agreements if the PLO does not fulfill its obligations. If the PLO cannot comply with these minimal standards, then it can be neither a hope for the future nor a proper interlocutor for present. To prepare for this, Israel may want to cultivate alternatives to Arafat’s base of power. Jordan has ideas on this.
To emphasize the point that Israel regards the actions of the PLO problematic, but not the Arab people, Israel might want to consider making a special effort to reward friends and advance human rights among Arabs. Many Arabs are willing to work with Israel; identifying and helping them are important. Israel may also find that many of her neighbors, such as Jordan, have problems with Arafat and may want to cooperate. Israel may also want to better integrate its own Arabs.
Forging A New U.S.-Israeli Relationship
In recent years, Israel invited active U.S. intervention in Israel’s domestic and foreign policy for two reasons: to overcome domestic opposition to "land for peace" concessions the Israeli public could not digest, and to lure Arabs — through money, forgiveness of past sins, and access to U.S. weapons — to negotiate. This strategy, which required funneling American money to repressive and aggressive regimes, was risky, expensive, and very costly for both the U.S. and Israel, and placed the United States in roles is should neither have nor want.
Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality — not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel’s new strategy — based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength — reflects continuity with Western values by stressing that Israel is self-reliant, does not need U.S. troops in any capacity to defend it, including on the Golan Heights, and can manage its own affairs. Such self-reliance will grant Israel greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure used against it in the past.
To reinforce this point, the Prime Minister can use his forthcoming visit to announce that Israel is now mature enough to cut itself free immediately from at least U.S. economic aid and loan guarantees at least, which prevent economic reform. [Military aid is separated for the moment until adequate arrangements can be made to ensure that Israel will not encounter supply problems in the means to defend itself]. As outlined in another Institute report, Israel can become self-reliant only by, in a bold stroke rather than in increments, liberalizing its economy, cutting taxes, relegislating a free-processing zone, and selling-off public lands and enterprises — moves which will electrify and find support from a broad bipartisan spectrum of key pro-Israeli Congressional leaders, including Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.
Israel can under these conditions better cooperate with the U.S. to counter real threats to the region and the West’s security. Mr. Netanyahu can highlight his desire to cooperate more closely with the United States on anti-missile defense in order to remove the threat of blackmail which even a weak and distant army can pose to either state. Not only would such cooperation on missile defense counter a tangible physical threat to Israel’s survival, but it would broaden Israel’s base of support among many in the United States Congress who may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile defense. Such broad support could be helpful in the effort to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
To anticipate U.S. reactions and plan ways to manage and constrain those reactions, Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel. If Israel wants to test certain propositions that require a benign American reaction, then the best time to do so is before November, 1996.
Conclusions: Transcending the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Notable Arab intellectuals have written extensively on their perception of Israel’s floundering and loss of national identity. This perception has invited attack, blocked Israel from achieving true peace, and offered hope for those who would destroy Israel. The previous strategy, therefore, was leading the Middle East toward another Arab-Israeli war. Israel’s new agenda can signal a clean break by abandoning a policy which assumed exhaustion and allowed strategic retreat by reestablishing the principle of preemption, rather than retaliation alone and by ceasing to absorb blows to the nation without response.
Israel’s new strategic agenda can shape the regional environment in ways that grant Israel the room to refocus its energies back to where they are most needed: to rejuvenate its national idea, which can only come through replacing Israel’s socialist foundations with a more sound footing; and to overcome its "exhaustion," which threatens the survival of the nation.
Ultimately, Israel can do more than simply manage the Arab-Israeli conflict though war. No amount of weapons or victories will grant Israel the peace its seeks. When Israel is on a sound economic footing, and is free, powerful, and healthy internally, it will no longer simply manage the Arab-Israeli conflict; it will transcend it. As a senior Iraqi opposition leader said recently: "Israel must rejuvenate and revitalize its moral and intellectual leadership. It is an important — if not the most important--element in the history of the Middle East." Israel — proud, wealthy, solid, and strong — would be the basis of a truly new and peaceful Middle East.
Participants in the Study Group on "A New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000:"
Richard Perle, American Enterprise Institute, Study Group Leader
James Colbert, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Johns Hopkins University/SAIS
Douglas Feith, Feith and Zell Associates
Robert Loewenberg, President, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
Jonathan Torop, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
David Wurmser, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
Meyrav Wurmser, Johns Hopkins University
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
Following is a report prepared by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000." The main substantive ideas in this paper emerge from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser participated. The report, entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," is the framework for a series of follow-up reports on strategy.
Israel has a large problem. Labor Zionism, which for 70 years has dominated the Zionist movement, has generated a stalled and shackled economy. Efforts to salvage Israel’s socialist institutions—which include pursuing supranational over national sovereignty and pursuing a peace process that embraces the slogan, "New Middle East"—undermine the legitimacy of the nation and lead Israel into strategic paralysis and the previous government’s "peace process." That peace process obscured the evidence of eroding national critical mass— including a palpable sense of national exhaustion—and forfeited strategic initiative. The loss of national critical mass was illustrated best by Israel’s efforts to draw in the United States to sell unpopular policies domestically, to agree to negotiate sovereignty over its capital, and to respond with resignation to a spate of terror so intense and tragic that it deterred Israelis from engaging in normal daily functions, such as commuting to work in buses.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government comes in with a new set of ideas. While there are those who will counsel continuity, Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break; it can forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism, the starting point of which must be economic reform. To secure the nation’s streets and borders in the immediate future, Israel can:
+ Work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll-back some of its most dangerous threats. This implies clean break from the slogan, "comprehensive peace" to a traditional concept of strategy based on balance of power.
+ Change the nature of its relations with the Palestinians, including upholding the right of hot pursuit for self defense into all Palestinian areas and nurturing alternatives to Arafat’s exclusive grip on Palestinian society.
+ Forge a new basis for relations with the United States—stressing self-reliance, maturity, strategic cooperation on areas of mutual concern, and furthering values inherent to the West. This can only be done if Israel takes serious steps to terminate aid, which prevents economic reform.
This report is written with key passages of a possible speech marked TEXT, that highlight the clean break which the new government has an opportunity to make. The body of the report is the commentary explaining the purpose and laying out the strategic context of the passages.
A New Approach to Peace
Early adoption of a bold, new perspective on peace and security is imperative for the new prime minister. While the previous government, and many abroad, may emphasize "land for peace"— which placed Israel in the position of cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, and military retreat — the new government can promote Western values and traditions. Such an approach, which will be well received in the United States, includes "peace for peace," "peace through strength" and self reliance: the balance of power.
A new strategy to seize the initiative can be introduced:
TEXT:
We have for four years pursued peace based on a New Middle East. We in Israel cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent. Peace depends on the character and behavior of our foes. We live in a dangerous neighborhood, with fragile states and bitter rivalries. Displaying moral ambivalence between the effort to build a Jewish state and the desire to annihilate it by trading "land for peace" will not secure "peace now." Our claim to the land —to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years--is legitimate and noble. It is not within our own power, no matter how much we concede, to make peace unilaterally. Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, "peace for peace," is a solid basis for the future.
Israel’s quest for peace emerges from, and does not replace, the pursuit of its ideals. The Jewish people’s hunger for human rights — burned into their identity by a 2000-year old dream to live free in their own land — informs the concept of peace and reflects continuity of values with Western and Jewish tradition. Israel can now embrace negotiations, but as means, not ends, to pursue those ideals and demonstrate national steadfastness. It can challenge police states; enforce compliance of agreements; and insist on minimal standards of accountability.
Securing the Northern Border
Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon, including by:
+ striking Syria’s drug-money and counterfeiting infrastructure in Lebanon, all of which focuses on Razi Qanan.
+ paralleling Syria’s behavior by establishing the precedent that Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by Israeli proxy forces.
+ striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper.
Israel also can take this opportunity to remind the world of the nature of the Syrian regime. Syria repeatedly breaks its word. It violated numerous agreements with the Turks, and has betrayed the United States by continuing to occupy Lebanon in violation of the Taef agreement in 1989. Instead, Syria staged a sham election, installed a quisling regime, and forced Lebanon to sign a "Brotherhood Agreement" in 1991, that terminated Lebanese sovereignty. And Syria has begun colonizing Lebanon with hundreds of thousands of Syrians, while killing tens of thousands of its own citizens at a time, as it did in only three days in 1983 in Hama.
Under Syrian tutelage, the Lebanese drug trade, for which local Syrian military officers receive protection payments, flourishes. Syria’s regime supports the terrorist groups operationally and financially in Lebanon and on its soil. Indeed, the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in Lebanon has become for terror what the Silicon Valley has become for computers. The Bekaa Valley has become one of the main distribution sources, if not production points, of the "supernote" — counterfeit US currency so well done that it is impossible to detect.
TEXT:
Negotiations with repressive regimes like Syria’s require cautious realism. One cannot sensibly assume the other side’s good faith. It is dangerous for Israel to deal naively with a regime murderous of its own people, openly aggressive toward its neighbors, criminally involved with international drug traffickers and counterfeiters, and supportive of the most deadly terrorist organizations.
Given the nature of the regime in Damascus, it is both natural and moral that Israel abandon the slogan "comprehensive peace" and move to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction program, and rejecting "land for peace" deals on the Golan Heights.
Moving to a Traditional Balance of Power Strategy
TEXT:
We must distinguish soberly and clearly friend from foe. We must make sure that our friends across the Middle East never doubt the solidity or value of our friendship.
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria's regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq. This has triggered a Jordanian-Syrian rivalry to which Asad has responded by stepping up efforts to destabilize the Hashemite Kingdom, including using infiltrations. Syria recently signaled that it and Iran might prefer a weak, but barely surviving Saddam, if only to undermine and humiliate Jordan in its efforts to remove Saddam.
But Syria enters this conflict with potential weaknesses: Damascus is too preoccupied with dealing with the threatened new regional equation to permit distractions of the Lebanese flank. And Damascus fears that the 'natural axis' with Israel on one side, central Iraq and Turkey on the other, and Jordan, in the center would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula. For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity.
Since Iraq's future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly, it would be understandable that Israel has an interest in supporting the Hashemites in their efforts to redefine Iraq, including such measures as: visiting Jordan as the first official state visit, even before a visit to the United States, of the new Netanyahu government; supporting King Hussein by providing him with some tangible security measures to protect his regime against Syrian subversion; encouraging — through influence in the U.S. business community — investment in Jordan to structurally shift Jordan’s economy away from dependence on Iraq; and diverting Syria’s attention by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize Syrian control of Lebanon.
Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite.
King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf, Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet’s family, the direct descendants of which — and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows — is King Hussein.
Changing the Nature of Relations with the Palestinians
Israel has a chance to forge a new relationship between itself and the Palestinians. First and foremost, Israel’s efforts to secure its streets may require hot pursuit into Palestinian-controlled areas, a justifiable practice with which Americans can sympathize.
A key element of peace is compliance with agreements already signed. Therefore, Israel has the right to insist on compliance, including closing Orient House and disbanding Jibril Rujoub’s operatives in Jerusalem. Moreover, Israel and the United States can establish a Joint Compliance Monitoring Committee to study periodically whether the PLO meets minimum standards of compliance, authority and responsibility, human rights, and judicial and fiduciary accountability.
TEXT:
We believe that the Palestinian Authority must be held to the same minimal standards of accountability as other recipients of U.S. foreign aid. A firm peace cannot tolerate repression and injustice. A regime that cannot fulfill the most rudimentary obligations to its own people cannot be counted upon to fulfill its obligations to its neighbors.
Israel has no obligations under the Oslo agreements if the PLO does not fulfill its obligations. If the PLO cannot comply with these minimal standards, then it can be neither a hope for the future nor a proper interlocutor for present. To prepare for this, Israel may want to cultivate alternatives to Arafat’s base of power. Jordan has ideas on this.
To emphasize the point that Israel regards the actions of the PLO problematic, but not the Arab people, Israel might want to consider making a special effort to reward friends and advance human rights among Arabs. Many Arabs are willing to work with Israel; identifying and helping them are important. Israel may also find that many of her neighbors, such as Jordan, have problems with Arafat and may want to cooperate. Israel may also want to better integrate its own Arabs.
Forging A New U.S.-Israeli Relationship
In recent years, Israel invited active U.S. intervention in Israel’s domestic and foreign policy for two reasons: to overcome domestic opposition to "land for peace" concessions the Israeli public could not digest, and to lure Arabs — through money, forgiveness of past sins, and access to U.S. weapons — to negotiate. This strategy, which required funneling American money to repressive and aggressive regimes, was risky, expensive, and very costly for both the U.S. and Israel, and placed the United States in roles is should neither have nor want.
Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality — not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel’s new strategy — based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength — reflects continuity with Western values by stressing that Israel is self-reliant, does not need U.S. troops in any capacity to defend it, including on the Golan Heights, and can manage its own affairs. Such self-reliance will grant Israel greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure used against it in the past.
To reinforce this point, the Prime Minister can use his forthcoming visit to announce that Israel is now mature enough to cut itself free immediately from at least U.S. economic aid and loan guarantees at least, which prevent economic reform. [Military aid is separated for the moment until adequate arrangements can be made to ensure that Israel will not encounter supply problems in the means to defend itself]. As outlined in another Institute report, Israel can become self-reliant only by, in a bold stroke rather than in increments, liberalizing its economy, cutting taxes, relegislating a free-processing zone, and selling-off public lands and enterprises — moves which will electrify and find support from a broad bipartisan spectrum of key pro-Israeli Congressional leaders, including Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.
Israel can under these conditions better cooperate with the U.S. to counter real threats to the region and the West’s security. Mr. Netanyahu can highlight his desire to cooperate more closely with the United States on anti-missile defense in order to remove the threat of blackmail which even a weak and distant army can pose to either state. Not only would such cooperation on missile defense counter a tangible physical threat to Israel’s survival, but it would broaden Israel’s base of support among many in the United States Congress who may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile defense. Such broad support could be helpful in the effort to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
To anticipate U.S. reactions and plan ways to manage and constrain those reactions, Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel. If Israel wants to test certain propositions that require a benign American reaction, then the best time to do so is before November, 1996.
Conclusions: Transcending the Arab-Israeli Conflict
TEXT:
Israel will not only contain its foes; it will transcend them.
Notable Arab intellectuals have written extensively on their perception of Israel’s floundering and loss of national identity. This perception has invited attack, blocked Israel from achieving true peace, and offered hope for those who would destroy Israel. The previous strategy, therefore, was leading the Middle East toward another Arab-Israeli war. Israel’s new agenda can signal a clean break by abandoning a policy which assumed exhaustion and allowed strategic retreat by reestablishing the principle of preemption, rather than retaliation alone and by ceasing to absorb blows to the nation without response.
Israel’s new strategic agenda can shape the regional environment in ways that grant Israel the room to refocus its energies back to where they are most needed: to rejuvenate its national idea, which can only come through replacing Israel’s socialist foundations with a more sound footing; and to overcome its "exhaustion," which threatens the survival of the nation.
Ultimately, Israel can do more than simply manage the Arab-Israeli conflict though war. No amount of weapons or victories will grant Israel the peace its seeks. When Israel is on a sound economic footing, and is free, powerful, and healthy internally, it will no longer simply manage the Arab-Israeli conflict; it will transcend it. As a senior Iraqi opposition leader said recently: "Israel must rejuvenate and revitalize its moral and intellectual leadership. It is an important — if not the most important--element in the history of the Middle East." Israel — proud, wealthy, solid, and strong — would be the basis of a truly new and peaceful Middle East.
Participants in the Study Group on "A New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000:"
Richard Perle, American Enterprise Institute, Study Group Leader
James Colbert, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Johns Hopkins University/SAIS
Douglas Feith, Feith and Zell Associates
Robert Loewenberg, President, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
Jonathan Torop, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
David Wurmser, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
Meyrav Wurmser, Johns Hopkins University
NYT: Mexican Tribunal Rejects Orbrador's Demand for Total Vote Recount
Sunday, August 06, 2006
NYT: Mexican Tribunal Rejects Leftist’s Demand for Total Vote Recount
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. | Published: August 6, 2006
MEXICO CITY, Aug. 5 — A seven-member electoral tribunal on Saturday unanimously rejected a demand from the leftist candidate for president for a complete recount of votes, setting the stage for more protests by thousands of his supporters who have camped out in the capital, claiming the election last month was fraudulent.
Later in the day, the candidate, Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor who champions the cause of the poor, refused to accept the ruling. At a raucous rally in the Zócalo, the city’s historic central square, he called on his followers to continue a campaign of civil disobedience in support of a full recount. He gave no hint of what the next move in that campaign would be.
“We demand that the magistrates rectify their decision because they have the ability and the moral responsibility to do it,” he said, as a crowd of several thousand chanted “fraud, fraud.”
During a two-hour morning session, the judges ordered that the votes in the July 2 election be recounted in only 11,839 of the 130,000 polling places. They rejected Mr. López Obrador’s argument that there was enough human error and, in some instances, enough evidence of fraud to warrant recounting all 41 million votes.
They also noted that his Party of the Democratic Revolution had failed to challenge the results in 70 electoral districts, and that under the law, those results must stand.
Leonel Castillo, the chief judge of the electoral tribunal, defended the integrity of Mexico’s electoral system in general, saying fraud was nearly impossible because citizens chosen at random and trained to be poll workers were responsible for counting the vote on election night.
“Citizens provide the certainty of the computation process,” he said. “This is the method and the way that the law makes the elections certain.”
Other judges echoed his view, rejecting Mr. Lopéz Obrador’s contention that there was a plot among poll workers in some states to pad his opponent’s totals.
“The election method is ingenious,” Magistrate Mauro Miguel Reyes Zapata said. “It’s ingenious, and we can assume it is secure, because it is the citizens who carry it out and organize it.”
But there was apparently still a chance that a further recount could be ordered. Lorenzo Cordova, a law professor who specializes in election law, said the court could order a recount of more polling places later on if the recount reveals signs of fraud.
“This recount, although it’s partial, will permit one to find evidence of whether there was fraud or not,” he said. “It opens the door to the possibility of knowing if Mr. Lopéz Obrador’s accusations have merit or not.”
Last month, an official tally handed a narrow victory to Felipe Calderón, the conservative candidate from Mr. Fox’s governing National Action Party. The count showed Mr. Calderón won by only 243,000 votes. Mr. López Obrador has argued that there were arithmetical errors in at least 72,000 polling places and evidence of fraud in about 600.
Over the last month, Mr. López Obrador has said repeatedly that he will accept nothing less than a recount of all the votes cast.
Outside the courthouse, about 200 protesters burst into shouts as news of the ruling spread, hurling insults about the judges and blocking the doors so no one could leave. Some carried placards that said, “Sold-out judges,” “You are a shame to Mexico” and “How much did they pay you?”
In recent days, political operatives connected to Mr. López Obrador have told of a move afoot to bribe the panel, though they offered no proof.
Arturo Nuñez and Ricardo Monreal, two lawyers for Mr. López Obrador, stormed out of the courthouse before the vote as soon as it became apparent the judges would not grant their request.
A spokesman for Mr. López Obrador, César Yañez, said the candidate was closeted with his closest advisers, hammering out a plan of action. His supporters have already blockaded the main artery of the capital, Avenida Reforma, for miles, tying up traffic and hurting businesses.
In his speech, Mr. López Obrador said he would unveil the next stage of the protest on Sunday morning.
The judges ruled there were arithmetic errors and other irregularities that warranted a recount of votes in about 10 percent of the polling places. Those polling places are located in 145 of the 300 electoral districts and 26 of the 32 states.
Chief Magistrate Castillo said Mr. López Obrador’s lawyers had failed to provide enough evidence of irregularities to throw the entire count into doubt.
Instead, the panel voted to order electoral judges in those states to conduct the partial recount over five days starting Wednesday. After the recount, they will rule on whether to annul the results from those polling places and to accept the new totals. Next, the judges must certify that the election was fair and name the new president-elect by Sept. 6.
Mr. Calderón, 43, a former energy minister, remained silent on Saturday. Lawyers for his party said the ruling seemed fair and that they hoped it would clear up doubts about the outcome.
But Mr. López Obrador made it plain that nothing short of a complete recount would dispel those doubts.
“They have the money and the power, but we have our principles and the backing of the people,” he said to the crowd. “The people are our principal resource.”
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. | Published: August 6, 2006
MEXICO CITY, Aug. 5 — A seven-member electoral tribunal on Saturday unanimously rejected a demand from the leftist candidate for president for a complete recount of votes, setting the stage for more protests by thousands of his supporters who have camped out in the capital, claiming the election last month was fraudulent.
Later in the day, the candidate, Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor who champions the cause of the poor, refused to accept the ruling. At a raucous rally in the Zócalo, the city’s historic central square, he called on his followers to continue a campaign of civil disobedience in support of a full recount. He gave no hint of what the next move in that campaign would be.
“We demand that the magistrates rectify their decision because they have the ability and the moral responsibility to do it,” he said, as a crowd of several thousand chanted “fraud, fraud.”
During a two-hour morning session, the judges ordered that the votes in the July 2 election be recounted in only 11,839 of the 130,000 polling places. They rejected Mr. López Obrador’s argument that there was enough human error and, in some instances, enough evidence of fraud to warrant recounting all 41 million votes.
They also noted that his Party of the Democratic Revolution had failed to challenge the results in 70 electoral districts, and that under the law, those results must stand.
Leonel Castillo, the chief judge of the electoral tribunal, defended the integrity of Mexico’s electoral system in general, saying fraud was nearly impossible because citizens chosen at random and trained to be poll workers were responsible for counting the vote on election night.
“Citizens provide the certainty of the computation process,” he said. “This is the method and the way that the law makes the elections certain.”
Other judges echoed his view, rejecting Mr. Lopéz Obrador’s contention that there was a plot among poll workers in some states to pad his opponent’s totals.
“The election method is ingenious,” Magistrate Mauro Miguel Reyes Zapata said. “It’s ingenious, and we can assume it is secure, because it is the citizens who carry it out and organize it.”
But there was apparently still a chance that a further recount could be ordered. Lorenzo Cordova, a law professor who specializes in election law, said the court could order a recount of more polling places later on if the recount reveals signs of fraud.
“This recount, although it’s partial, will permit one to find evidence of whether there was fraud or not,” he said. “It opens the door to the possibility of knowing if Mr. Lopéz Obrador’s accusations have merit or not.”
Last month, an official tally handed a narrow victory to Felipe Calderón, the conservative candidate from Mr. Fox’s governing National Action Party. The count showed Mr. Calderón won by only 243,000 votes. Mr. López Obrador has argued that there were arithmetical errors in at least 72,000 polling places and evidence of fraud in about 600.
Over the last month, Mr. López Obrador has said repeatedly that he will accept nothing less than a recount of all the votes cast.
Outside the courthouse, about 200 protesters burst into shouts as news of the ruling spread, hurling insults about the judges and blocking the doors so no one could leave. Some carried placards that said, “Sold-out judges,” “You are a shame to Mexico” and “How much did they pay you?”
In recent days, political operatives connected to Mr. López Obrador have told of a move afoot to bribe the panel, though they offered no proof.
Arturo Nuñez and Ricardo Monreal, two lawyers for Mr. López Obrador, stormed out of the courthouse before the vote as soon as it became apparent the judges would not grant their request.
A spokesman for Mr. López Obrador, César Yañez, said the candidate was closeted with his closest advisers, hammering out a plan of action. His supporters have already blockaded the main artery of the capital, Avenida Reforma, for miles, tying up traffic and hurting businesses.
In his speech, Mr. López Obrador said he would unveil the next stage of the protest on Sunday morning.
The judges ruled there were arithmetic errors and other irregularities that warranted a recount of votes in about 10 percent of the polling places. Those polling places are located in 145 of the 300 electoral districts and 26 of the 32 states.
Chief Magistrate Castillo said Mr. López Obrador’s lawyers had failed to provide enough evidence of irregularities to throw the entire count into doubt.
Instead, the panel voted to order electoral judges in those states to conduct the partial recount over five days starting Wednesday. After the recount, they will rule on whether to annul the results from those polling places and to accept the new totals. Next, the judges must certify that the election was fair and name the new president-elect by Sept. 6.
Mr. Calderón, 43, a former energy minister, remained silent on Saturday. Lawyers for his party said the ruling seemed fair and that they hoped it would clear up doubts about the outcome.
But Mr. López Obrador made it plain that nothing short of a complete recount would dispel those doubts.
“They have the money and the power, but we have our principles and the backing of the people,” he said to the crowd. “The people are our principal resource.”
Miami Herald : Terrorism suspect's commitment waned
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Terrorism suspect's commitment waned
LIBERTY CITY SEVEN CASE
The FBI's interview with one of the Liberty City terrorist suspects offers fresh behind-the-scenes details of the group's alleged plot to blow up federal buildings and the Sears Tower.
by JAY WEAVER | August 6, 2006
At first glance, Lyglenson Lemorin appears to be just another follower of Narseal Batiste, the ringleader of the so-called Liberty City Seven terror group.
But close scrutiny of Lemorin's interview with FBI agents following his June arrest casts some doubt about his commitment to the group's alleged terror plans.
The first sign distancing the 31-year-old Haitian immigrant from Batiste and the other accused co-conspirators: the FBI busted him in Atlanta, not Miami.
Lemorin had moved to Atlanta after ending his involvement with Batiste's group, which was suspected of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and federal buildings in five U.S. cities.
In his post-arrest interview, he told the FBI that Batiste ''tricked everyone'' into pledging allegiance to al Qaeda and knew ''nothing good would come from this,'' saying he did not join in shooting video of alleged terror targets in Miami.
At another point, Lemorin told agents he didn't want to be in the ''al Qaeda circle'' and didn't like the ``al Qaeda talk.''
Since his June 22 arrest in Atlanta, Lemorin has been transferred to Miami. He is in custody along with the other six defendants -- all indicted on charges of conspiring with the terrorist group al Qaeda to bomb FBI buildings and the Sears Tower. Their trial is set for next March.
Prosecutors argue the seven defendants -- including Lemorin -- took the oath to al Qaeda in March before playing some role to carry out the alleged plot to wage a terror war against the United States.
''Following his arrest, Lemorin gave a detailed statement to the FBI admitting his involvement in the plot to overthrow the United States and bomb buildings,'' prosecutors Jacqueline Arango and Richard Getchell contend in court papers.
Lemorin got to know Batiste in 2005 when he went to work for his stucco and masonry business in Miami. He became friendly with Batiste and some of the other men who worked for his company and became acquainted with Batiste's spiritual side.
Batiste, a Chicago transplant, talked about building up a righteous nation of the Moorish Science Temple, a sect that blends Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Batiste and his men regularly met in a squat, concrete warehouse in Liberty City that they dubbed ''the Temple.'' Batiste taught them martial arts and military movements.
Last October, Batiste began talking with a North Miami store owner of Arabic descent about his mission to create a Moorish government within the United States. He explained to the shopkeeper that extreme Islamic groups, such as al Qaeda, could help.
The shopkeeper, an FBI informant, told the agents handling the undercover case. They had him introduce another informant -- an Arabic friend who posed as an al Qaeda representative -- to Batiste.
Despite suspicions about that informant, known as Mohammad, Batiste came to trust him.
LOYALTY OATH
And on March 10, he led Batiste in al Qaeda's loyalty oath inside a GMC truck. Lemorin was present but was asked to leave during the ceremony. Six days later, Lemorin and five other Batiste followers also took the pledge, in another Miami warehouse that was under FBI video surveillance.
But, according to Lemorin's interview with the FBI, some immediately expressed regrets.
''[Lemorin] believes that he was one of the first to object to the oath,'' FBI agents wrote in their summary. ``He advised that one other brother questioned Batiste also.
'During this time, Batiste questioned them, asking if they were scared or coward. Lemorin feared Batiste. . . . Lemorin stated that the oath was `the last straw.' ''
After the ceremony, Batiste and Mohammad allegedly talked in depth about their plans with the others present, according to prosecutors. Batiste wanted to destroy the Sears Tower, they said. Mohammad wanted Batiste's group to help al Qaeda blow up five FBI buildings in Miami, Chicago, Washington, New York and Los Angeles.
But in his FBI interview, Lemorin said he ``attempted to stray from the group.''
Mohammad later gave Batiste a video camera and rental van to do surveillance of the FBI building in North Miami Beach and other local federal buildings.
''I was present when [Mohammad] gave Brother Naz [Batiste] a video camera to film target locations . . . to destroy,'' Lemorin said in a signed written statement for the FBI's Atlanta office.
But in his post-arrest interview, Lemorin told FBI agents that he did not participate with Batiste and some of the others in taking video footage of local federal buildings. He told them that Mohammad planned to send the footage to al Qaeda to see the targets. ''[Lemorin] believed it was for them to do something bad to us,'' FBI agents wrote.
In mid-April -- after the arrival of one of Batiste's spiritual advisors from Chicago -- the group started to unravel. The advisor, Sultan Khanbey, accused Batiste of allowing an FBI snitch to infiltrate the organization, accused him of treason against the Moorish nation and held a ''trial'' against him. Khanbey kicked out Batiste.
Soon after, Khanbey and some of Batiste's followers -- including another spiritual advisor from Chicago, Master Atheea -- met at the Liberty City warehouse.
An argument erupted, and Khanbey fired a shot past Atheea's left ear.
FORGOTTEN GUN
Miami police arrested Khanbey. The firearm he used to threaten Atheea belonged to Lemorin, who had a concealed-weapons permit. Lemorin told the FBI that he had left the gun -- a 9mm Hi-Point pistol -- at the warehouse and forgotten about it.
By the time of the shooting, Lemorin told agents, he had left Miami for Atlanta. He said he had rental car papers to prove it.
''He moved to Atlanta to try to make things better for himself,'' said Linda Polydor, who has two infant children with Lemorin and has known him since the two were students at Miami Edison Middle School.
``How could they think he could build a bomb and not even afford a pair of shoes?''
Miami Herald staff writers Nicole White and Trenton Daniel contributed to this report.
JAY WEAVER : jweaver@MiamiHerald.com
LIBERTY CITY SEVEN CASE
The FBI's interview with one of the Liberty City terrorist suspects offers fresh behind-the-scenes details of the group's alleged plot to blow up federal buildings and the Sears Tower.
by JAY WEAVER | August 6, 2006
At first glance, Lyglenson Lemorin appears to be just another follower of Narseal Batiste, the ringleader of the so-called Liberty City Seven terror group.
But close scrutiny of Lemorin's interview with FBI agents following his June arrest casts some doubt about his commitment to the group's alleged terror plans.
The first sign distancing the 31-year-old Haitian immigrant from Batiste and the other accused co-conspirators: the FBI busted him in Atlanta, not Miami.
Lemorin had moved to Atlanta after ending his involvement with Batiste's group, which was suspected of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and federal buildings in five U.S. cities.
In his post-arrest interview, he told the FBI that Batiste ''tricked everyone'' into pledging allegiance to al Qaeda and knew ''nothing good would come from this,'' saying he did not join in shooting video of alleged terror targets in Miami.
At another point, Lemorin told agents he didn't want to be in the ''al Qaeda circle'' and didn't like the ``al Qaeda talk.''
Since his June 22 arrest in Atlanta, Lemorin has been transferred to Miami. He is in custody along with the other six defendants -- all indicted on charges of conspiring with the terrorist group al Qaeda to bomb FBI buildings and the Sears Tower. Their trial is set for next March.
Prosecutors argue the seven defendants -- including Lemorin -- took the oath to al Qaeda in March before playing some role to carry out the alleged plot to wage a terror war against the United States.
''Following his arrest, Lemorin gave a detailed statement to the FBI admitting his involvement in the plot to overthrow the United States and bomb buildings,'' prosecutors Jacqueline Arango and Richard Getchell contend in court papers.
Lemorin got to know Batiste in 2005 when he went to work for his stucco and masonry business in Miami. He became friendly with Batiste and some of the other men who worked for his company and became acquainted with Batiste's spiritual side.
Batiste, a Chicago transplant, talked about building up a righteous nation of the Moorish Science Temple, a sect that blends Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Batiste and his men regularly met in a squat, concrete warehouse in Liberty City that they dubbed ''the Temple.'' Batiste taught them martial arts and military movements.
Last October, Batiste began talking with a North Miami store owner of Arabic descent about his mission to create a Moorish government within the United States. He explained to the shopkeeper that extreme Islamic groups, such as al Qaeda, could help.
The shopkeeper, an FBI informant, told the agents handling the undercover case. They had him introduce another informant -- an Arabic friend who posed as an al Qaeda representative -- to Batiste.
Despite suspicions about that informant, known as Mohammad, Batiste came to trust him.
LOYALTY OATH
And on March 10, he led Batiste in al Qaeda's loyalty oath inside a GMC truck. Lemorin was present but was asked to leave during the ceremony. Six days later, Lemorin and five other Batiste followers also took the pledge, in another Miami warehouse that was under FBI video surveillance.
But, according to Lemorin's interview with the FBI, some immediately expressed regrets.
''[Lemorin] believes that he was one of the first to object to the oath,'' FBI agents wrote in their summary. ``He advised that one other brother questioned Batiste also.
'During this time, Batiste questioned them, asking if they were scared or coward. Lemorin feared Batiste. . . . Lemorin stated that the oath was `the last straw.' ''
After the ceremony, Batiste and Mohammad allegedly talked in depth about their plans with the others present, according to prosecutors. Batiste wanted to destroy the Sears Tower, they said. Mohammad wanted Batiste's group to help al Qaeda blow up five FBI buildings in Miami, Chicago, Washington, New York and Los Angeles.
But in his FBI interview, Lemorin said he ``attempted to stray from the group.''
Mohammad later gave Batiste a video camera and rental van to do surveillance of the FBI building in North Miami Beach and other local federal buildings.
''I was present when [Mohammad] gave Brother Naz [Batiste] a video camera to film target locations . . . to destroy,'' Lemorin said in a signed written statement for the FBI's Atlanta office.
But in his post-arrest interview, Lemorin told FBI agents that he did not participate with Batiste and some of the others in taking video footage of local federal buildings. He told them that Mohammad planned to send the footage to al Qaeda to see the targets. ''[Lemorin] believed it was for them to do something bad to us,'' FBI agents wrote.
In mid-April -- after the arrival of one of Batiste's spiritual advisors from Chicago -- the group started to unravel. The advisor, Sultan Khanbey, accused Batiste of allowing an FBI snitch to infiltrate the organization, accused him of treason against the Moorish nation and held a ''trial'' against him. Khanbey kicked out Batiste.
Soon after, Khanbey and some of Batiste's followers -- including another spiritual advisor from Chicago, Master Atheea -- met at the Liberty City warehouse.
An argument erupted, and Khanbey fired a shot past Atheea's left ear.
FORGOTTEN GUN
Miami police arrested Khanbey. The firearm he used to threaten Atheea belonged to Lemorin, who had a concealed-weapons permit. Lemorin told the FBI that he had left the gun -- a 9mm Hi-Point pistol -- at the warehouse and forgotten about it.
By the time of the shooting, Lemorin told agents, he had left Miami for Atlanta. He said he had rental car papers to prove it.
''He moved to Atlanta to try to make things better for himself,'' said Linda Polydor, who has two infant children with Lemorin and has known him since the two were students at Miami Edison Middle School.
``How could they think he could build a bomb and not even afford a pair of shoes?''
Miami Herald staff writers Nicole White and Trenton Daniel contributed to this report.
JAY WEAVER : jweaver@MiamiHerald.com
LAT: Vietnam: The War Crimes Files -- Civilian Killings Went Unpunished
Sunday, August 06, 2006
VIETNAM: THE WAR CRIMES FILES | Civilian Killings Went Unpunished
Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities went far beyond My Lai.
By Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson | Special to The Times | August 6, 2006
The men of B Company were in a dangerous state of mind. They had lost five men in a firefight the day before. The morning of Feb. 8, 1968, brought unwelcome orders to resume their sweep of the countryside, a green patchwork of rice paddies along Vietnam's central coast.
They met no resistance as they entered a nondescript settlement in Quang Nam province. So Jamie Henry, a 20-year-old medic, set his rifle down in a hut, unfastened his bandoliers and lighted a cigarette.
Just then, the voice of a lieutenant crackled across the radio. He reported that he had rounded up 19 civilians, and wanted to know what to do with them. Henry later recalled the company commander's response:
Kill anything that moves.
Henry stepped outside the hut and saw a small crowd of women and children. Then the shooting began.
Moments later, the 19 villagers lay dead or dying.
Back home in California, Henry published an account of the slaughter and held a news conference to air his allegations. Yet he and other Vietnam veterans who spoke out about war crimes were branded traitors and fabricators. No one was ever prosecuted for the massacre.
Now, nearly 40 years later, declassified Army files show that Henry was telling the truth — about the Feb. 8 killings and a series of other atrocities by the men of B Company.
The files are part of a once-secret archive, assembled by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s, that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more extensive than was previously known.
The documents detail 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators — not including the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre.
Though not a complete accounting of Vietnam war crimes, the archive is the largest such collection to surface to date. About 9,000 pages, it includes investigative files, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports for top military brass.
The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese — families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews with investigators and letters to commanders, described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity.
Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.
Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns, a Vietnam veteran who served on the task force, says he once supported keeping the records secret but now believes they deserve wide attention in light of alleged attacks on civilians and abuse of prisoners in Iraq.
"We can't change current practices unless we acknowledge the past," says Johns, 78.
Among the substantiated cases in the archive:
• Seven massacres from 1967 through 1971 in which at least 137 civilians died.
• Seventy-eight other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted.
• One hundred forty-one instances in which U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock.
Investigators determined that evidence against 203 soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners was strong enough to warrant formal charges. These "founded" cases were referred to the soldiers' superiors for action.
Ultimately, 57 of them were court-martialed and just 23 convicted, the records show.
Fourteen received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts on a 13-year-old girl in an interrogation hut in 1967.
He served seven months of a 20-year term, the records show.
Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.
There was little interest in prosecuting Vietnam war crimes, says Steven Chucala, who in the early 1970s was legal advisor to the commanding officer of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. He says he disagreed with the attitude but understood it.
"Everyone wanted Vietnam to go away," says Chucala, now a civilian attorney for the Army at Ft. Belvoir in Virginia.
In many cases, suspects had left the service. The Army did not attempt to pursue them, despite a written opinion in 1969 by Robert E. Jordan III, then the Army's general counsel, that ex-soldiers could be prosecuted through courts-martial, military commissions or tribunals.
"I don't remember why it didn't go anywhere," says Jordan, now a lawyer in Washington.
Top Army brass should have demanded a tougher response, says retired Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard, who oversaw the task force as a brigadier general at the Pentagon in the early 1970s.
"We could have court-martialed them but didn't," Gard says of soldiers accused of war crimes. "The whole thing is terribly disturbing."
Early-Warning System
In March 1968, members of the 23rd Infantry Division slaughtered about 500 Vietnamese civilians in the hamlet of My Lai. Reporter Seymour Hersh exposed the massacre the following year.
By then, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam at the time of My Lai, had become Army chief of staff. A task force was assembled from members of his staff to monitor war crimes allegations and serve as an early-warning system.
Over the next few years, members of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group reviewed Army investigations and wrote reports and summaries for military brass and the White House.
The records were declassified in 1994, after 20 years as required by law, and moved to the National Archives in College Park, Md., where they went largely unnoticed.
The Times examined most of the files and obtained copies of about 3,000 pages — about a third of the total — before government officials removed them from the public shelves, saying they contained personal information that was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
In addition to the 320 substantiated incidents, the records contain material related to more than 500 alleged atrocities that Army investigators could not prove or that they discounted.
Johns says many war crimes did not make it into the archive. Some were prosecuted without being identified as war crimes, as required by military regulations. Others were never reported.
In a letter to Westmoreland in 1970, an anonymous sergeant described widespread, unreported killings of civilians by members of the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta — and blamed pressure from superiors to generate high body counts.
"A batalion [sic] would kill maybe 15 to 20 [civilians] a day. With 4 batalions in the brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy," the unnamed sergeant wrote. "If I am only 10% right, and believe me it's lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay [sic] each month for over a year."
A high-level Army review of the letter cited its "forcefulness," "sincerity" and "inescapable logic," and urged then-Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor to make sure the push for verifiable body counts did not "encourage the human tendency to inflate the count by violating established rules of engagement."
Investigators tried to find the letter writer and "prevent his complaints from reaching" then-Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland), according to an August 1971 memo to Westmoreland.
The records do not say whether the writer was located, and there is no evidence in the files that his complaint was investigated further.
Pvt. Henry
James D. "Jamie" Henry was 19 in March 1967, when the Army shaved his hippie locks and packed him off to boot camp.
He had been living with his mother in Sonoma County, working as a hospital aide and moonlighting as a flower child in Haight-Ashbury, when he received a letter from his draft board. As thousands of hippies poured into San Francisco for the upcoming "Summer of Love," Henry headed for Ft. Polk, La.
Soon he was on his way to Vietnam, part of a 100,000-man influx that brought U.S. troop strength to 485,000 by the end of 1967. They entered a conflict growing ever bloodier for Americans — 9,378 U.S. troops would die in combat in 1967, 87% more than the year before.
Henry was a medic with B Company of the 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division. He described his experiences in a sworn statement to Army investigators several years later and in recent interviews with The Times.
In the fall of 1967, he was on his first patrol, marching along the edge of a rice paddy in Quang Nam province, when the soldiers encountered a teenage girl.
"The guy in the lead immediately stops her and puts his hand down her pants," Henry said. "I just thought, 'My God, what's going on?' "
A day or two later, he saw soldiers senselessly stabbing a pig.
"I talked to them about it, and they told me if I wanted to live very long, I should shut my mouth," he told Army investigators.
Henry may have kept his mouth shut, but he kept his eyes and ears open.
On Oct. 8, 1967, after a firefight near Chu Lai, members of his company spotted a 12-year-old boy out in a rainstorm. He was unarmed and clad only in shorts.
"Somebody caught him up on a hill, and they brought him down and the lieutenant asked who wanted to kill him," Henry told investigators.
Two volunteers stepped forward. One kicked the boy in the stomach. The other took him behind a rock and shot him, according to Henry's statement. They tossed his body in a river and reported him as an enemy combatant killed in action.
Three days later, B Company detained and beat an elderly man suspected of supporting the enemy. He had trouble keeping pace as the soldiers marched him up a steep hill.
"When I turned around, two men had him, one guy had his arms, one guy had his legs and they threw him off the hill onto a bunch of rocks," Henry's statement said.
On Oct. 15, some of the men took a break during a large-scale "search-and-destroy" operation. Henry said he overheard a lieutenant on the radio requesting permission to test-fire his weapon, and went to see what was happening.
He found two soldiers using a Vietnamese man for target practice, Henry said. They had discovered the victim sleeping in a hut and decided to kill him for sport.
"Everybody was taking pot shots at him, seeing how accurate they were," Henry said in his statement.
Back at base camp on Oct. 23, he said, members of the 1st Platoon told him they had ambushed five unarmed women and reported them as enemies killed in action. Later, members of another platoon told him they had seen the bodies.
Tet Offensive
Capt. Donald C. Reh, a 1964 graduate of West Point, took command of B Company in November 1967. Two months later, enemy forces launched a major offensive during Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year.
In the midst of the fighting, on Feb. 7, the commander of the 1st Battalion, Lt. Col. William W. Taylor Jr., ordered an assault on snipers hidden in a line of trees in a rural area of Quang Nam province. Five U.S. soldiers were killed. The troops complained bitterly about the order and the deaths, Henry said.
The next morning, the men packed up their gear and continued their sweep of the countryside. Soldiers discovered an unarmed man hiding in a hole and suspected that he had supported the enemy the previous day. A soldier pushed the man in front of an armored personnel carrier, Henry said in his statement.
"They drove over him forward which didn't kill him because he was squirming around, so the APC backed over him again," Henry's statement said.
Then B Company entered a hamlet to question residents and search for weapons. That's where Henry set down his weapon and lighted a cigarette in the shelter of a hut.
A radio operator sat down next to him, and Henry was listening to the chatter. He heard the leader of the 3rd Platoon ask Reh for instructions on what to do with 19 civilians.
"The lieutenant asked the captain what should be done with them. The captain asked the lieutenant if he remembered the op order (operation order) that came down that morning and he repeated the order which was 'kill anything that moves,' " Henry said in his statement. "I was a little shook … because I thought the lieutenant might do it."
Henry said he left the hut and walked toward Reh. He saw the captain pick up the phone again, and thought he might rescind the order.
Then soldiers pulled a naked woman of about 19 from a dwelling and brought her to where the other civilians were huddled, Henry said.
"She was thrown to the ground," he said in his statement. "The men around the civilians opened fire and all on automatic or at least it seemed all on automatic. It was over in a few seconds. There was a lot of blood and flesh and stuff flying around….
"I looked around at some of my friends and they all just had blank looks on their faces…. The captain made an announcement to all the company, I forget exactly what it was, but it didn't concern the people who had just been killed. We picked up our stuff and moved on."
Henry didn't forget, however. "Thirty seconds after the shooting stopped," he said, "I knew that I was going to do something about it."
Homecoming
For his combat service, Henry earned a Bronze Star with a V for valor, and a Combat Medical Badge, among other awards. A fellow member of his unit said in a sworn statement that Henry regularly disregarded his own safety to save soldiers' lives, and showed "compassion and decency" toward enemy prisoners.
When Henry finished his tour and arrived at Ft. Hood, Texas, in September 1968, he went to see an Army legal officer to report the atrocities he'd witnessed.
The officer advised him to keep quiet until he got out of the Army, "because of the million and one charges you can be brought up on for blinking your eye," Henry says. Still, the legal officer sent him to see a Criminal Investigation Division agent.
The agent was not receptive, Henry recalls.
"He wanted to know what I was trying to pull, what I was trying to put over on people, and so I was just quiet. I told him I wouldn't tell him anything and I wouldn't say anything until I got out of the Army, and I left," Henry says.
Honorably discharged in March 1969, Henry moved to Canoga Park, enrolled in community college and helped organize a campus chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
Then he ended his silence: He published his account of the massacre in the debut issue of Scanlan's Monthly, a short-lived muckraking magazine, which hit the newsstands on Feb. 27, 1970. Henry held a news conference the same day at the Los Angeles Press Club.
Records show that an Army operative attended incognito, took notes and reported back to the Pentagon.
A faded copy of Henry's brief statement, retrieved from the Army's files, begins:
"On February 8, 1968, nineteen (19) women and children were murdered in Viet-Nam by members of 3rd Platoon, 'B' Company, 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry….
"Incidents similar to those I have described occur on a daily basis and differ one from the other only in terms of numbers killed," he told reporters. A brief article about his remarks appeared inside the Los Angeles Times the next day.
Army investigators interviewed Henry the day after the news conference. His sworn statement filled 10 single-spaced typed pages. Henry did not expect anything to come of it: "I never got the impression they were ever doing anything."
In 1971, Henry joined more than 100 other veterans at the Winter Soldier Investigation, a forum on war crimes sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
The FBI put the three-day gathering at a Detroit hotel under surveillance, records show, and Nixon administration officials worked behind the scenes to discredit the speakers as impostors and fabricators.
Although the administration never publicly identified any fakers, one of the organization's leaders admitted exaggerating his rank and role during the war, and a cloud descended on the entire gathering.
"We tried to get as much publicity as we could, and it just never went anywhere," Henry says. "Nothing ever happened."
After years of dwelling on the war, he says, he "finally put it in a closet and shut the door."
The Investigation
Unknown to Henry, Army investigators pursued his allegations, tracking down members of his old unit over the next 3 1/2 years.
Witnesses described the killing of the young boy, the old man tossed over the cliff, the man used for target practice, the five unarmed women, the man thrown beneath the armored personnel carrier and other atrocities.
Their statements also provided vivid corroboration of the Feb. 8, 1968, massacre from men who had observed the day's events from various vantage points.
Staff Sgt. Wilson Bullock told an investigator at Ft. Carson, Colo., that his platoon had captured 19 "women, children, babies and two or three very old men" during the Tet offensive.
"All of these people were lined up and killed," he said in a sworn statement. "When it, the shooting, stopped, I began to return to the site when I observed a naked Vietnamese female run from the house to the huddle of people, saw that her baby had been shot. She picked the baby up and was then shot and the baby shot again."
Gregory Newman, another veteran of B Company, told an investigator at Ft. Myer, Va., that Capt. Reh had issued an order "to search and destroy and kill anything in the village that moved."
Newman said he was carrying out orders to kill the villagers' livestock when he saw a naked girl head toward a group of civilians.
"I saw them begging before they were shot," he recalled in a sworn statement.
Donald R. Richardson said he was at a command post outside the hamlet when he heard a platoon leader on the radio ask what to do with 19 civilians.
"The cpt said something about kill anything that moves and the lt on the other end said 'Their [sic] moving,' " according to Richardson's sworn account. "Just then the gunfire was heard."
William J. Nieset, a rifle squad leader, told investigators that he was standing next to a radio operator and heard Reh say: "My instructions from higher are to kill everything that moves."
Robert D. Miller said he was the radio operator for Lt. Johnny Mack Carter, commander of the 3rd Platoon. Miller said that when Carter asked Reh what to do with the 19 civilians, the captain instructed him to follow the "operation order."
Carter immediately sought two volunteers to shoot the civilians, Miller said under oath.
"I believe everyone knew what was going to happen," he said, "so no one volunteered except one guy known only to me as 'Crazy.' "
"A few minutes later, while the Vietnamese were huddled around in a circle Lt Carter and 'Crazy' started shooting them with their M-16's on automatic," Miller's statement says.
Carter had just left active duty when an investigator questioned him under oath in Palmetto, Fla., in March 1970.
"I do not recall any civilians being picked up and categorically stated that I did not order the killing of any civilians, nor do I know of any being killed," his statement said.
An Army investigator called Reh at Ft. Myer. Reh's attorney called back. The investigator made notes of their conversation: "If the interview of Reh concerns atrocities in Vietnam … then he had already advised Reh not to make any statement."
As for Lt. Col. Taylor, two soldiers described his actions that day.
Myran Ambeau, a rifleman, said he was standing five feet from the captain and heard him contact the battalion commander, who was in a helicopter overhead. (Ambeau did not identify Reh or Taylor by name.)
"The battalion commander told the captain, 'If they move, shoot them,' " according to a sworn statement that Ambeau gave an investigator in Little Rock, Ark. "The captain verified that he had heard the command, he then transmitted the instruction to Lt Carter.
"Approximately three minutes later, there was automatic weapons fire from the direction where the prisoners were being held."
Gary A. Bennett, one of Reh's radio operators, offered a somewhat different account. He said the captain asked what he should do with the detainees, and the battalion commander replied that it was a "search and destroy mission," according to an investigator's summary of an interview with Bennett.
Bennett said he did not believe the order authorized killing civilians and that, although he heard shooting, he knew nothing about a massacre, the summary says. Bennett refused to provide a sworn statement.
An Army investigator sat down with Taylor at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. Taylor said he had never issued an order to kill civilians and had heard nothing about a massacre on the date in question. But the investigator had asked Taylor about events occurring on Feb. 9, 1968 — a day after the incident.
Three and a half years later, an agent tracked Taylor down at Ft. Myer and asked him about Feb. 8. Taylor said he had no memory of the day and did not have time to provide a sworn statement. He said he had a "pressing engagement" with "an unidentified general officer," the agent wrote.
Investigators wrote they could not find Pvt. Frank Bonilla, the man known as "Crazy." The Times reached him at his home on Oahu in March.
Bonilla, now 58 and a hotel worker, says he recalls an order to kill the civilians, but says he does not remember who issued it. "Somebody had a radio, handed it to someone, maybe a lieutenant, said the man don't want to see nobody standing," he said.
Bonilla says he answered a call for volunteers but never pulled the trigger.
"I couldn't do it. There were women and kids," he says. "A lot of guys thought that I had something to do with it because they saw me going up there…. Nope … I just turned the other way. It was like, 'This ain't happening.' "
Afterward, he says, "I remember sitting down with my head between my knees. Is that for real? Someone said, 'Keep your mouth shut or you're not going home.' "
He says he does not know who did the shooting.
The Outcome
The Criminal Investigation Division assigned Warrant Officer Jonathan P. Coulson in Los Angeles to complete the investigation and write a final report on the "Henry Allegation." He sent his findings to headquarters in Washington in January 1974.
Evidence showed that the massacre did occur, the report said. The investigation also confirmed all but one of the other killings that Henry had described. The one exception was the elderly man thrown off a cliff. Coulson said it could not be determined whether the victim was alive when soldiers tossed him.
The evidence supported murder charges in five incidents against nine "subjects," including Carter and Bonilla, Coulson wrote. Those two carried out the Feb. 8 massacre, along with "other unidentified members of their element," the report said.
Investigators determined that there was not enough evidence to charge Reh with murder, because of conflicting accounts "as to the actual language" he used.
But Reh could be charged with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the killings, the report said.
Coulson conferred with an Army legal advisor, Capt. Robert S. Briney, about whether the evidence supported charges against Taylor.
They decided it did not. Even if Taylor gave an order to kill the Vietnamese if they moved, the two concluded, "it does not constitute an order to kill the prisoners in the manner in which they were executed."
The War Crimes Working Group records give no indication that action was taken against any of the men named in the report.
Briney, now an attorney in Phoenix, says he has forgotten details of the case but recalls a reluctance within the Army to pursue such charges.
"They thought the war, if not over, was pretty much over. Why bring this stuff up again?" he says.
Years Later
Taylor retired in 1977 with the rank of colonel. In a recent interview outside his home in northern Virginia, he said, "I would not have given an order to kill civilians. It's not in my makeup. I've been in enough wars to know that it's not the right thing to do."
Reh, who left active duty in 1978 and now lives in Northern California, declined to be interviewed by The Times.
Carter, a retired postal worker living in Florida, says he has no memory of his combat experiences. "I guess I've wiped Vietnam and all that out of my mind. I don't remember shooting anyone or ordering anyone to shoot," he says.
He says he does not dispute that a massacre took place. "I don't doubt it, but I don't remember…. Sometimes people just snap."
Henry was re-interviewed by an Army investigator in 1972, and was never contacted again. He drifted away from the antiwar movement, moved north and became a logger in California's Sierra Nevada foothills. He says he had no idea he had been vindicated — until The Times contacted him in 2005.
Last fall, he read the case file over a pot of coffee at his dining room table in a comfortably worn house, where he lives with his wife, Patty.
"I was a wreck for a couple days," Henry, now 59, wrote later in an e-mail. "It was like a time warp that put me right back in the middle of that mess. Some things long forgotten came back to life. Some of them were good and some were not.
"Now that whole stinking war is back. After you left, I just sat in my chair and shook for a couple hours. A slight emotional stress fracture?? Don't know, but it soon passed and I decided to just keep going with this business. If it was right then, then it still is."
Times researcher Janet Lundblad contributed to this report.
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About this report
Nick Turse is a freelance journalist living in New Jersey. Deborah Nelson is a staff writer in The Times' Washington bureau.
This report is based in part on records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group filed at the National Archives in College Park, Md. The collection includes 241 case summaries that chronicle more than 300 substantiated atrocities by U.S. forces and 500 unconfirmed allegations.
The archive includes reports of war crimes by the 101st Airborne Division's Tiger Force that the Army listed as unconfirmed. The Toledo Blade documented the atrocities in a 2003 newspaper series.
Turse came across the collection in 2002 while researching his doctoral dissertation for the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University.
Turse and Nelson also reviewed Army inspector general records in the National Archives; FBI and Army Criminal Investigation Division records; documents shared by military veterans; and case files and related records in the Col. Henry Tufts Archive at the University of Michigan.
A selection of documents used in preparing this report can be found at latimes.com/vietnam.
Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities went far beyond My Lai.
By Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson | Special to The Times | August 6, 2006
The men of B Company were in a dangerous state of mind. They had lost five men in a firefight the day before. The morning of Feb. 8, 1968, brought unwelcome orders to resume their sweep of the countryside, a green patchwork of rice paddies along Vietnam's central coast.
They met no resistance as they entered a nondescript settlement in Quang Nam province. So Jamie Henry, a 20-year-old medic, set his rifle down in a hut, unfastened his bandoliers and lighted a cigarette.
Just then, the voice of a lieutenant crackled across the radio. He reported that he had rounded up 19 civilians, and wanted to know what to do with them. Henry later recalled the company commander's response:
Kill anything that moves.
Henry stepped outside the hut and saw a small crowd of women and children. Then the shooting began.
Moments later, the 19 villagers lay dead or dying.
Back home in California, Henry published an account of the slaughter and held a news conference to air his allegations. Yet he and other Vietnam veterans who spoke out about war crimes were branded traitors and fabricators. No one was ever prosecuted for the massacre.
Now, nearly 40 years later, declassified Army files show that Henry was telling the truth — about the Feb. 8 killings and a series of other atrocities by the men of B Company.
The files are part of a once-secret archive, assembled by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s, that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more extensive than was previously known.
The documents detail 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators — not including the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre.
Though not a complete accounting of Vietnam war crimes, the archive is the largest such collection to surface to date. About 9,000 pages, it includes investigative files, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports for top military brass.
The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese — families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews with investigators and letters to commanders, described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity.
Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.
Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns, a Vietnam veteran who served on the task force, says he once supported keeping the records secret but now believes they deserve wide attention in light of alleged attacks on civilians and abuse of prisoners in Iraq.
"We can't change current practices unless we acknowledge the past," says Johns, 78.
Among the substantiated cases in the archive:
• Seven massacres from 1967 through 1971 in which at least 137 civilians died.
• Seventy-eight other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted.
• One hundred forty-one instances in which U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock.
Investigators determined that evidence against 203 soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners was strong enough to warrant formal charges. These "founded" cases were referred to the soldiers' superiors for action.
Ultimately, 57 of them were court-martialed and just 23 convicted, the records show.
Fourteen received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts on a 13-year-old girl in an interrogation hut in 1967.
He served seven months of a 20-year term, the records show.
Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.
There was little interest in prosecuting Vietnam war crimes, says Steven Chucala, who in the early 1970s was legal advisor to the commanding officer of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. He says he disagreed with the attitude but understood it.
"Everyone wanted Vietnam to go away," says Chucala, now a civilian attorney for the Army at Ft. Belvoir in Virginia.
In many cases, suspects had left the service. The Army did not attempt to pursue them, despite a written opinion in 1969 by Robert E. Jordan III, then the Army's general counsel, that ex-soldiers could be prosecuted through courts-martial, military commissions or tribunals.
"I don't remember why it didn't go anywhere," says Jordan, now a lawyer in Washington.
Top Army brass should have demanded a tougher response, says retired Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard, who oversaw the task force as a brigadier general at the Pentagon in the early 1970s.
"We could have court-martialed them but didn't," Gard says of soldiers accused of war crimes. "The whole thing is terribly disturbing."
Early-Warning System
In March 1968, members of the 23rd Infantry Division slaughtered about 500 Vietnamese civilians in the hamlet of My Lai. Reporter Seymour Hersh exposed the massacre the following year.
By then, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam at the time of My Lai, had become Army chief of staff. A task force was assembled from members of his staff to monitor war crimes allegations and serve as an early-warning system.
Over the next few years, members of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group reviewed Army investigations and wrote reports and summaries for military brass and the White House.
The records were declassified in 1994, after 20 years as required by law, and moved to the National Archives in College Park, Md., where they went largely unnoticed.
The Times examined most of the files and obtained copies of about 3,000 pages — about a third of the total — before government officials removed them from the public shelves, saying they contained personal information that was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
In addition to the 320 substantiated incidents, the records contain material related to more than 500 alleged atrocities that Army investigators could not prove or that they discounted.
Johns says many war crimes did not make it into the archive. Some were prosecuted without being identified as war crimes, as required by military regulations. Others were never reported.
In a letter to Westmoreland in 1970, an anonymous sergeant described widespread, unreported killings of civilians by members of the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta — and blamed pressure from superiors to generate high body counts.
"A batalion [sic] would kill maybe 15 to 20 [civilians] a day. With 4 batalions in the brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy," the unnamed sergeant wrote. "If I am only 10% right, and believe me it's lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay [sic] each month for over a year."
A high-level Army review of the letter cited its "forcefulness," "sincerity" and "inescapable logic," and urged then-Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor to make sure the push for verifiable body counts did not "encourage the human tendency to inflate the count by violating established rules of engagement."
Investigators tried to find the letter writer and "prevent his complaints from reaching" then-Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland), according to an August 1971 memo to Westmoreland.
The records do not say whether the writer was located, and there is no evidence in the files that his complaint was investigated further.
Pvt. Henry
James D. "Jamie" Henry was 19 in March 1967, when the Army shaved his hippie locks and packed him off to boot camp.
He had been living with his mother in Sonoma County, working as a hospital aide and moonlighting as a flower child in Haight-Ashbury, when he received a letter from his draft board. As thousands of hippies poured into San Francisco for the upcoming "Summer of Love," Henry headed for Ft. Polk, La.
Soon he was on his way to Vietnam, part of a 100,000-man influx that brought U.S. troop strength to 485,000 by the end of 1967. They entered a conflict growing ever bloodier for Americans — 9,378 U.S. troops would die in combat in 1967, 87% more than the year before.
Henry was a medic with B Company of the 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division. He described his experiences in a sworn statement to Army investigators several years later and in recent interviews with The Times.
In the fall of 1967, he was on his first patrol, marching along the edge of a rice paddy in Quang Nam province, when the soldiers encountered a teenage girl.
"The guy in the lead immediately stops her and puts his hand down her pants," Henry said. "I just thought, 'My God, what's going on?' "
A day or two later, he saw soldiers senselessly stabbing a pig.
"I talked to them about it, and they told me if I wanted to live very long, I should shut my mouth," he told Army investigators.
Henry may have kept his mouth shut, but he kept his eyes and ears open.
On Oct. 8, 1967, after a firefight near Chu Lai, members of his company spotted a 12-year-old boy out in a rainstorm. He was unarmed and clad only in shorts.
"Somebody caught him up on a hill, and they brought him down and the lieutenant asked who wanted to kill him," Henry told investigators.
Two volunteers stepped forward. One kicked the boy in the stomach. The other took him behind a rock and shot him, according to Henry's statement. They tossed his body in a river and reported him as an enemy combatant killed in action.
Three days later, B Company detained and beat an elderly man suspected of supporting the enemy. He had trouble keeping pace as the soldiers marched him up a steep hill.
"When I turned around, two men had him, one guy had his arms, one guy had his legs and they threw him off the hill onto a bunch of rocks," Henry's statement said.
On Oct. 15, some of the men took a break during a large-scale "search-and-destroy" operation. Henry said he overheard a lieutenant on the radio requesting permission to test-fire his weapon, and went to see what was happening.
He found two soldiers using a Vietnamese man for target practice, Henry said. They had discovered the victim sleeping in a hut and decided to kill him for sport.
"Everybody was taking pot shots at him, seeing how accurate they were," Henry said in his statement.
Back at base camp on Oct. 23, he said, members of the 1st Platoon told him they had ambushed five unarmed women and reported them as enemies killed in action. Later, members of another platoon told him they had seen the bodies.
Tet Offensive
Capt. Donald C. Reh, a 1964 graduate of West Point, took command of B Company in November 1967. Two months later, enemy forces launched a major offensive during Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year.
In the midst of the fighting, on Feb. 7, the commander of the 1st Battalion, Lt. Col. William W. Taylor Jr., ordered an assault on snipers hidden in a line of trees in a rural area of Quang Nam province. Five U.S. soldiers were killed. The troops complained bitterly about the order and the deaths, Henry said.
The next morning, the men packed up their gear and continued their sweep of the countryside. Soldiers discovered an unarmed man hiding in a hole and suspected that he had supported the enemy the previous day. A soldier pushed the man in front of an armored personnel carrier, Henry said in his statement.
"They drove over him forward which didn't kill him because he was squirming around, so the APC backed over him again," Henry's statement said.
Then B Company entered a hamlet to question residents and search for weapons. That's where Henry set down his weapon and lighted a cigarette in the shelter of a hut.
A radio operator sat down next to him, and Henry was listening to the chatter. He heard the leader of the 3rd Platoon ask Reh for instructions on what to do with 19 civilians.
"The lieutenant asked the captain what should be done with them. The captain asked the lieutenant if he remembered the op order (operation order) that came down that morning and he repeated the order which was 'kill anything that moves,' " Henry said in his statement. "I was a little shook … because I thought the lieutenant might do it."
Henry said he left the hut and walked toward Reh. He saw the captain pick up the phone again, and thought he might rescind the order.
Then soldiers pulled a naked woman of about 19 from a dwelling and brought her to where the other civilians were huddled, Henry said.
"She was thrown to the ground," he said in his statement. "The men around the civilians opened fire and all on automatic or at least it seemed all on automatic. It was over in a few seconds. There was a lot of blood and flesh and stuff flying around….
"I looked around at some of my friends and they all just had blank looks on their faces…. The captain made an announcement to all the company, I forget exactly what it was, but it didn't concern the people who had just been killed. We picked up our stuff and moved on."
Henry didn't forget, however. "Thirty seconds after the shooting stopped," he said, "I knew that I was going to do something about it."
Homecoming
For his combat service, Henry earned a Bronze Star with a V for valor, and a Combat Medical Badge, among other awards. A fellow member of his unit said in a sworn statement that Henry regularly disregarded his own safety to save soldiers' lives, and showed "compassion and decency" toward enemy prisoners.
When Henry finished his tour and arrived at Ft. Hood, Texas, in September 1968, he went to see an Army legal officer to report the atrocities he'd witnessed.
The officer advised him to keep quiet until he got out of the Army, "because of the million and one charges you can be brought up on for blinking your eye," Henry says. Still, the legal officer sent him to see a Criminal Investigation Division agent.
The agent was not receptive, Henry recalls.
"He wanted to know what I was trying to pull, what I was trying to put over on people, and so I was just quiet. I told him I wouldn't tell him anything and I wouldn't say anything until I got out of the Army, and I left," Henry says.
Honorably discharged in March 1969, Henry moved to Canoga Park, enrolled in community college and helped organize a campus chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
Then he ended his silence: He published his account of the massacre in the debut issue of Scanlan's Monthly, a short-lived muckraking magazine, which hit the newsstands on Feb. 27, 1970. Henry held a news conference the same day at the Los Angeles Press Club.
Records show that an Army operative attended incognito, took notes and reported back to the Pentagon.
A faded copy of Henry's brief statement, retrieved from the Army's files, begins:
"On February 8, 1968, nineteen (19) women and children were murdered in Viet-Nam by members of 3rd Platoon, 'B' Company, 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry….
"Incidents similar to those I have described occur on a daily basis and differ one from the other only in terms of numbers killed," he told reporters. A brief article about his remarks appeared inside the Los Angeles Times the next day.
Army investigators interviewed Henry the day after the news conference. His sworn statement filled 10 single-spaced typed pages. Henry did not expect anything to come of it: "I never got the impression they were ever doing anything."
In 1971, Henry joined more than 100 other veterans at the Winter Soldier Investigation, a forum on war crimes sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
The FBI put the three-day gathering at a Detroit hotel under surveillance, records show, and Nixon administration officials worked behind the scenes to discredit the speakers as impostors and fabricators.
Although the administration never publicly identified any fakers, one of the organization's leaders admitted exaggerating his rank and role during the war, and a cloud descended on the entire gathering.
"We tried to get as much publicity as we could, and it just never went anywhere," Henry says. "Nothing ever happened."
After years of dwelling on the war, he says, he "finally put it in a closet and shut the door."
The Investigation
Unknown to Henry, Army investigators pursued his allegations, tracking down members of his old unit over the next 3 1/2 years.
Witnesses described the killing of the young boy, the old man tossed over the cliff, the man used for target practice, the five unarmed women, the man thrown beneath the armored personnel carrier and other atrocities.
Their statements also provided vivid corroboration of the Feb. 8, 1968, massacre from men who had observed the day's events from various vantage points.
Staff Sgt. Wilson Bullock told an investigator at Ft. Carson, Colo., that his platoon had captured 19 "women, children, babies and two or three very old men" during the Tet offensive.
"All of these people were lined up and killed," he said in a sworn statement. "When it, the shooting, stopped, I began to return to the site when I observed a naked Vietnamese female run from the house to the huddle of people, saw that her baby had been shot. She picked the baby up and was then shot and the baby shot again."
Gregory Newman, another veteran of B Company, told an investigator at Ft. Myer, Va., that Capt. Reh had issued an order "to search and destroy and kill anything in the village that moved."
Newman said he was carrying out orders to kill the villagers' livestock when he saw a naked girl head toward a group of civilians.
"I saw them begging before they were shot," he recalled in a sworn statement.
Donald R. Richardson said he was at a command post outside the hamlet when he heard a platoon leader on the radio ask what to do with 19 civilians.
"The cpt said something about kill anything that moves and the lt on the other end said 'Their [sic] moving,' " according to Richardson's sworn account. "Just then the gunfire was heard."
William J. Nieset, a rifle squad leader, told investigators that he was standing next to a radio operator and heard Reh say: "My instructions from higher are to kill everything that moves."
Robert D. Miller said he was the radio operator for Lt. Johnny Mack Carter, commander of the 3rd Platoon. Miller said that when Carter asked Reh what to do with the 19 civilians, the captain instructed him to follow the "operation order."
Carter immediately sought two volunteers to shoot the civilians, Miller said under oath.
"I believe everyone knew what was going to happen," he said, "so no one volunteered except one guy known only to me as 'Crazy.' "
"A few minutes later, while the Vietnamese were huddled around in a circle Lt Carter and 'Crazy' started shooting them with their M-16's on automatic," Miller's statement says.
Carter had just left active duty when an investigator questioned him under oath in Palmetto, Fla., in March 1970.
"I do not recall any civilians being picked up and categorically stated that I did not order the killing of any civilians, nor do I know of any being killed," his statement said.
An Army investigator called Reh at Ft. Myer. Reh's attorney called back. The investigator made notes of their conversation: "If the interview of Reh concerns atrocities in Vietnam … then he had already advised Reh not to make any statement."
As for Lt. Col. Taylor, two soldiers described his actions that day.
Myran Ambeau, a rifleman, said he was standing five feet from the captain and heard him contact the battalion commander, who was in a helicopter overhead. (Ambeau did not identify Reh or Taylor by name.)
"The battalion commander told the captain, 'If they move, shoot them,' " according to a sworn statement that Ambeau gave an investigator in Little Rock, Ark. "The captain verified that he had heard the command, he then transmitted the instruction to Lt Carter.
"Approximately three minutes later, there was automatic weapons fire from the direction where the prisoners were being held."
Gary A. Bennett, one of Reh's radio operators, offered a somewhat different account. He said the captain asked what he should do with the detainees, and the battalion commander replied that it was a "search and destroy mission," according to an investigator's summary of an interview with Bennett.
Bennett said he did not believe the order authorized killing civilians and that, although he heard shooting, he knew nothing about a massacre, the summary says. Bennett refused to provide a sworn statement.
An Army investigator sat down with Taylor at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. Taylor said he had never issued an order to kill civilians and had heard nothing about a massacre on the date in question. But the investigator had asked Taylor about events occurring on Feb. 9, 1968 — a day after the incident.
Three and a half years later, an agent tracked Taylor down at Ft. Myer and asked him about Feb. 8. Taylor said he had no memory of the day and did not have time to provide a sworn statement. He said he had a "pressing engagement" with "an unidentified general officer," the agent wrote.
Investigators wrote they could not find Pvt. Frank Bonilla, the man known as "Crazy." The Times reached him at his home on Oahu in March.
Bonilla, now 58 and a hotel worker, says he recalls an order to kill the civilians, but says he does not remember who issued it. "Somebody had a radio, handed it to someone, maybe a lieutenant, said the man don't want to see nobody standing," he said.
Bonilla says he answered a call for volunteers but never pulled the trigger.
"I couldn't do it. There were women and kids," he says. "A lot of guys thought that I had something to do with it because they saw me going up there…. Nope … I just turned the other way. It was like, 'This ain't happening.' "
Afterward, he says, "I remember sitting down with my head between my knees. Is that for real? Someone said, 'Keep your mouth shut or you're not going home.' "
He says he does not know who did the shooting.
The Outcome
The Criminal Investigation Division assigned Warrant Officer Jonathan P. Coulson in Los Angeles to complete the investigation and write a final report on the "Henry Allegation." He sent his findings to headquarters in Washington in January 1974.
Evidence showed that the massacre did occur, the report said. The investigation also confirmed all but one of the other killings that Henry had described. The one exception was the elderly man thrown off a cliff. Coulson said it could not be determined whether the victim was alive when soldiers tossed him.
The evidence supported murder charges in five incidents against nine "subjects," including Carter and Bonilla, Coulson wrote. Those two carried out the Feb. 8 massacre, along with "other unidentified members of their element," the report said.
Investigators determined that there was not enough evidence to charge Reh with murder, because of conflicting accounts "as to the actual language" he used.
But Reh could be charged with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the killings, the report said.
Coulson conferred with an Army legal advisor, Capt. Robert S. Briney, about whether the evidence supported charges against Taylor.
They decided it did not. Even if Taylor gave an order to kill the Vietnamese if they moved, the two concluded, "it does not constitute an order to kill the prisoners in the manner in which they were executed."
The War Crimes Working Group records give no indication that action was taken against any of the men named in the report.
Briney, now an attorney in Phoenix, says he has forgotten details of the case but recalls a reluctance within the Army to pursue such charges.
"They thought the war, if not over, was pretty much over. Why bring this stuff up again?" he says.
Years Later
Taylor retired in 1977 with the rank of colonel. In a recent interview outside his home in northern Virginia, he said, "I would not have given an order to kill civilians. It's not in my makeup. I've been in enough wars to know that it's not the right thing to do."
Reh, who left active duty in 1978 and now lives in Northern California, declined to be interviewed by The Times.
Carter, a retired postal worker living in Florida, says he has no memory of his combat experiences. "I guess I've wiped Vietnam and all that out of my mind. I don't remember shooting anyone or ordering anyone to shoot," he says.
He says he does not dispute that a massacre took place. "I don't doubt it, but I don't remember…. Sometimes people just snap."
Henry was re-interviewed by an Army investigator in 1972, and was never contacted again. He drifted away from the antiwar movement, moved north and became a logger in California's Sierra Nevada foothills. He says he had no idea he had been vindicated — until The Times contacted him in 2005.
Last fall, he read the case file over a pot of coffee at his dining room table in a comfortably worn house, where he lives with his wife, Patty.
"I was a wreck for a couple days," Henry, now 59, wrote later in an e-mail. "It was like a time warp that put me right back in the middle of that mess. Some things long forgotten came back to life. Some of them were good and some were not.
"Now that whole stinking war is back. After you left, I just sat in my chair and shook for a couple hours. A slight emotional stress fracture?? Don't know, but it soon passed and I decided to just keep going with this business. If it was right then, then it still is."
Times researcher Janet Lundblad contributed to this report.
*
About this report
Nick Turse is a freelance journalist living in New Jersey. Deborah Nelson is a staff writer in The Times' Washington bureau.
This report is based in part on records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group filed at the National Archives in College Park, Md. The collection includes 241 case summaries that chronicle more than 300 substantiated atrocities by U.S. forces and 500 unconfirmed allegations.
The archive includes reports of war crimes by the 101st Airborne Division's Tiger Force that the Army listed as unconfirmed. The Toledo Blade documented the atrocities in a 2003 newspaper series.
Turse came across the collection in 2002 while researching his doctoral dissertation for the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University.
Turse and Nelson also reviewed Army inspector general records in the National Archives; FBI and Army Criminal Investigation Division records; documents shared by military veterans; and case files and related records in the Col. Henry Tufts Archive at the University of Michigan.
A selection of documents used in preparing this report can be found at latimes.com/vietnam.
Soo News [Canada]: Conspiracy Theories: What Is The Bilderberg Group?
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Conspiracy Theories: What Is The Bilderberg Group?
Darren Taylor | SooNews.ca | August 6, 2006
It is secretive and consists of the world’s most financially and politically powerful people. It is the Bilderberg Group. Just what are they up to?
The members meet at least once a year at the most expensive hotels, and their meetings are behind closed doors, unlike the annual G8 Summits, which are little more than photo opportunities for the political leaders of the world’s top eight industrialized nations.
Its members include U.S. President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, retired banker David Rockefeller and others.
The Bilderberg Group can trace its roots to Joseph Retinger, a Polish-born, British-based political advisor, who, among many others of his mindset, believed that world affairs should be controlled by one world government, one world currency and one world leader.
After discussing his ideas with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1952, world leaders met at the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, in the Netherlands, in 1954. The group has kept the name “Bilderberg” and has met at least once a year, in expensive hotels around the world.
The meetings usually consist of about 120 people from the world’s elite, mostly from North America and Europe, with few of the “Bilderbergers” being elected heads of state, the bulk of them being business figures, media barons (even though reporters can’t get near the meetings) and intellectuals.
One may scoff at the idea of any sinister conspiracy theory behind the Bilderbergers, thinking ‘the rich and powerful are holding snobby annual cocktail parties, so what?’
But--consider what has happened at recent Bilderberg meetings, the most recent held in Ottawa in June 2006.
Bilderbergers including Kissinger, Rockefeller, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Richard Perle (a senior foreign policy advisor to President George Bush), as well as Canadians Frank McKenna (former New Brunswick Premier) and Gordon Nixon (President and CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada), were reportedly present at the Group’s Brookstreet Hotel meeting place in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata.
Why were the guests driven to the hotel in black limos and SUVs with the windows on the vehicles completely tinted black?
Why did the local police have to show ID to an intimidating group of men working for a private security firm which surrounded the hotel, men dressed in black suits and wearing dark shades?
CTV News anchor Lloyd Robertson asked on air if the rumours that Prime Minister Stephen Harper was present were true.
The reporter at the scene (or as close to the scene as he could get) merely confirmed that Harper was indeed invited, but could only say “Lloyd, if Harper was here, not even we knew about it.”
When the Bilderberg Group met in France in 2003, French police were miffed their authority was overrided by that of the security guards protecting the group.
Very secretive for a group holding “cocktail parties.”
Conspiracy theorists claim that the Bilderbergers’ power is so great that they have succeeded in keeping cures for cancer under wraps, to keep their friends in the pharmaceutical industry happy—and rich.
It is also claimed that they have wielded their influence to make sure technology that could allow vehicles to travel 75 kilometres on a litre of gasoline under wraps as well—which makes their friends in the oil industry happy and rich.
American journalist James Tucker claims the Bilderberg Group, after meeting in Germany in 2005, decided to jack up the price of oil. Tucker points out that the price of a barrel of oil started to climb from 40 dollars a barrel to 70 dollars a barrel.
It is believed that the Bilderbergs install and replace world leaders at will.
Conspiracy theorists say they hand-pick politicians who are friendly to big business and are responsible for their successful election campaigns, referring to former U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair as examples.
Clinton spoke at a Bilderberg meeting in 1991. Could it be that the Bilderbergs, feeling that an aging George Bush was due for replacement by a younger, more charismatic leader, engineered Clinton’s Presidential campaign victory just one year later?
After all, who except the most keen political observers had ever heard of Bill Clinton before 1992? He was a saxophone-playing Governor of a very backward Southern state (Arkansas), who had been booed offstage by his own party members after making a rambling speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention.
In 1955, the Bilderberg Group called for a unified Europe. The Bilderberg Group was not the first to envision such an entity (Winston Churchill called for a “United States of Europe” to keep the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc in check during the early Cold War years). But not long after the Bilderberg call for European unification (a year and a half, in fact) the European Common Market was born. That Common Market has grown into the ever-more-powerful, ever-expanding European Union which we know today. Some European Union leaders have, in fact, called for the EU membership to expand to well over 100 countries, and to eventually divide the entire world into 10 Free Trade zones (our NAFTA zone being one of them), with a European-based One World Government calling the shots.
The Bilderbergers, The Illuminati and those advocating a “New World Order” (like former U.S. President George Bush, father of current President George W. Bush) are all free traders. Start dismantling economic barriers, which has happened in the EU and NAFTA nations, and you therefore start destroying national identities—and sovereignty.
Free trade, it can be argued, is a bloodless way of conquering the globe and paving the way for a New World Order, or One World Government, something which Joseph Retinger dreamed of.
Just another conspiracy theory?
One thing is certain.
When the world’s most powerful people meet amid such tight security and utter secrecy, when their meetings are not allowed to be covered by the media, and when their bodyguards’ authority overrides that of the police of the countries that host their meetings—something odd, perhaps something very sinister--is going on.
Darren Taylor | SooNews.ca | August 6, 2006
It is secretive and consists of the world’s most financially and politically powerful people. It is the Bilderberg Group. Just what are they up to?
The members meet at least once a year at the most expensive hotels, and their meetings are behind closed doors, unlike the annual G8 Summits, which are little more than photo opportunities for the political leaders of the world’s top eight industrialized nations.
Its members include U.S. President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, retired banker David Rockefeller and others.
The Bilderberg Group can trace its roots to Joseph Retinger, a Polish-born, British-based political advisor, who, among many others of his mindset, believed that world affairs should be controlled by one world government, one world currency and one world leader.
After discussing his ideas with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1952, world leaders met at the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, in the Netherlands, in 1954. The group has kept the name “Bilderberg” and has met at least once a year, in expensive hotels around the world.
The meetings usually consist of about 120 people from the world’s elite, mostly from North America and Europe, with few of the “Bilderbergers” being elected heads of state, the bulk of them being business figures, media barons (even though reporters can’t get near the meetings) and intellectuals.
One may scoff at the idea of any sinister conspiracy theory behind the Bilderbergers, thinking ‘the rich and powerful are holding snobby annual cocktail parties, so what?’
But--consider what has happened at recent Bilderberg meetings, the most recent held in Ottawa in June 2006.
Bilderbergers including Kissinger, Rockefeller, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Richard Perle (a senior foreign policy advisor to President George Bush), as well as Canadians Frank McKenna (former New Brunswick Premier) and Gordon Nixon (President and CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada), were reportedly present at the Group’s Brookstreet Hotel meeting place in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata.
Why were the guests driven to the hotel in black limos and SUVs with the windows on the vehicles completely tinted black?
Why did the local police have to show ID to an intimidating group of men working for a private security firm which surrounded the hotel, men dressed in black suits and wearing dark shades?
CTV News anchor Lloyd Robertson asked on air if the rumours that Prime Minister Stephen Harper was present were true.
The reporter at the scene (or as close to the scene as he could get) merely confirmed that Harper was indeed invited, but could only say “Lloyd, if Harper was here, not even we knew about it.”
When the Bilderberg Group met in France in 2003, French police were miffed their authority was overrided by that of the security guards protecting the group.
Very secretive for a group holding “cocktail parties.”
Conspiracy theorists claim that the Bilderbergers’ power is so great that they have succeeded in keeping cures for cancer under wraps, to keep their friends in the pharmaceutical industry happy—and rich.
It is also claimed that they have wielded their influence to make sure technology that could allow vehicles to travel 75 kilometres on a litre of gasoline under wraps as well—which makes their friends in the oil industry happy and rich.
American journalist James Tucker claims the Bilderberg Group, after meeting in Germany in 2005, decided to jack up the price of oil. Tucker points out that the price of a barrel of oil started to climb from 40 dollars a barrel to 70 dollars a barrel.
It is believed that the Bilderbergs install and replace world leaders at will.
Conspiracy theorists say they hand-pick politicians who are friendly to big business and are responsible for their successful election campaigns, referring to former U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair as examples.
Clinton spoke at a Bilderberg meeting in 1991. Could it be that the Bilderbergs, feeling that an aging George Bush was due for replacement by a younger, more charismatic leader, engineered Clinton’s Presidential campaign victory just one year later?
After all, who except the most keen political observers had ever heard of Bill Clinton before 1992? He was a saxophone-playing Governor of a very backward Southern state (Arkansas), who had been booed offstage by his own party members after making a rambling speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention.
In 1955, the Bilderberg Group called for a unified Europe. The Bilderberg Group was not the first to envision such an entity (Winston Churchill called for a “United States of Europe” to keep the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc in check during the early Cold War years). But not long after the Bilderberg call for European unification (a year and a half, in fact) the European Common Market was born. That Common Market has grown into the ever-more-powerful, ever-expanding European Union which we know today. Some European Union leaders have, in fact, called for the EU membership to expand to well over 100 countries, and to eventually divide the entire world into 10 Free Trade zones (our NAFTA zone being one of them), with a European-based One World Government calling the shots.
The Bilderbergers, The Illuminati and those advocating a “New World Order” (like former U.S. President George Bush, father of current President George W. Bush) are all free traders. Start dismantling economic barriers, which has happened in the EU and NAFTA nations, and you therefore start destroying national identities—and sovereignty.
Free trade, it can be argued, is a bloodless way of conquering the globe and paving the way for a New World Order, or One World Government, something which Joseph Retinger dreamed of.
Just another conspiracy theory?
One thing is certain.
When the world’s most powerful people meet amid such tight security and utter secrecy, when their meetings are not allowed to be covered by the media, and when their bodyguards’ authority overrides that of the police of the countries that host their meetings—something odd, perhaps something very sinister--is going on.
Sun Herald : Lemorin distinguishes himself from Liberty City Seven
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Lemorin distinguishes himself from Liberty City Seven
By Jay Weaver | McClatchy Newspapers | August 5, 2006
MIAMI - At first glance, Lyglenson Lemorin appears to be just another follower of Narseal Batiste, the ringleader of the so-called Liberty City Seven terror group.
But close scrutiny of Lemorin's interview with FBI agents following his June arrest casts some doubt about his commitment to the group's alleged terror plans.
The first sign distancing the 31-year-old Haitian immigrant from Batiste and the other accused co-conspirators: the FBI busted him in Atlanta, not Miami.
Lemorin had moved to Atlanta after ending his involvement with Batiste's group, which was suspected of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and federal buildings in five U.S. cities.
In his post-arrest interview, he told the FBI that Batiste "tricked everyone" into pledging allegiance to al-Qaida and knew "nothing good would come from this," saying he did not join in shooting video of alleged terror targets in Miami.
At another point, Lemorin told agents he didn't want to be in the "al-Qaida circle" and didn't like the "al-Qaida talk."
Since his June 22 arrest in Atlanta, Lemorin has been transferred to Miami. He is in custody along with the other six defendants - all indicted on charges of conspiring with the terrorist group al-Qaida to bomb FBI buildings and the Sears Tower. Their trial is set for next March.
Prosecutors argue the seven defendants - including Lemorin - took the oath to al-Qaida in March before playing some role to carry out the alleged plot to wage a terror war against the United States.
"Following his arrest, Lemorin gave a detailed statement to the FBI admitting his involvement in the plot to overthrow the United States and bomb buildings," prosecutors Jacqueline Arango and Richard Getchell contend in court papers.
Lemorin got to know Batiste in 2005 when he went to work for his stucco and masonry business in Miami. He became friendly with Batiste and some of the other men who worked for his company and became acquainted with Batiste's spiritual side.
Batiste, a Chicago transplant, talked about building up a righteous nation of the Moorish Science Temple, a sect that blends Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Batiste and his men regularly met in a squat, concrete warehouse in Liberty City that they dubbed "the Temple." Batiste taught them martial arts and military movements.
Last October, Batiste began talking with a North Miami store owner of Arabic descent about his mission to create a Moorish government within the United States. He explained to the shopkeeper that extreme Islamic groups, such as al-Qaida, could help.
The shopkeeper, an FBI informant, told the agents handling the undercover case. They had him introduce another informant - an Arabic friend who posed as an al-Qaida representative - to Batiste.
Despite suspicions about that informant, known as Mohammad, Batiste came to trust him.
And on March 10, an informant led Batiste in al-Qaida's loyalty oath inside a GMC truck. Lemorin was present but was asked to leave during the ceremony. Six days later, Lemorin and five other Batiste followers also took the pledge, in another Miami warehouse that was under FBI video surveillance.
But, according to Lemorin's interview with the FBI, some immediately expressed regrets.
"Lemorin believes that he was one of the first to object to the oath," FBI agents wrote in their summary. "He advised that one other brother questioned Batiste also.
"During this time, Batiste questioned them, asking if they were scared or coward. Lemorin feared Batiste . . . Lemorin stated that the oath was `the last straw.'"
After the ceremony, Batiste and Mohammad allegedly talked in depth about their plans with the others present, according to prosecutors. Batiste wanted to destroy the Sears Tower, they said. Mohammad wanted Batiste's group to help al-Qaida blow up five FBI buildings in Miami, Chicago, Washington, New York and Los Angeles.
But in his FBI interview, Lemorin said "he attempted to stray from the group."
Mohammad later gave Batiste a video camera and rental van to do surveillance of the FBI building in North Miami Beach and other local federal buildings.
"I was present when Mohammad gave Brother Naz Batiste a video camera to film target locations . . . to destroy," Lemorin said in a signed written statement for the FBI's Atlanta office.
But in his post-arrest interview, Lemorin told FBI agents that he did not participate with Batiste and some of the others in taking video footage of local federal buildings. He told them that Mohammad planned to send the footage to al-Qaida to see the targets. "Lemorin believed it was for them to do something bad to us," FBI agents wrote.
In mid-April - after the arrival of one of Batiste's spiritual advisors from Chicago - the group started to unravel. The advisor, Sultan Khanbey, accused Batiste of allowing an FBI snitch to infiltrate the organization, accused him of treason against the Moorish nation and held a "trial" against him. Khanbey kicked out Batiste.
Soon after, Khanbey and some of Batiste's followers - including another spiritual advisor from Chicago, Master Atheea - met at the Liberty City warehouse.
An argument erupted, and Khanbey fired a shot past Atheea's left ear.
Miami police arrested Khanbey. The firearm he used to threaten Atheea belonged to Lemorin, who had a concealed-weapons permit. Lemorin told the FBI that he had left the gun - a 9mm Hi-Point pistol - at the warehouse and forgotten about it.
By the time of the shooting, Lemorin told agents, he had left Miami for Atlanta. He said he had rental car papers to prove it.
"He moved to Atlanta to try to make things better for himself," said Linda Polydor, who has two infant children with Lemorin and has known him since the two were students at Miami Edison Middle School.
"How could they think he could build a bomb and not even afford a pair of shoes."
---
Miami Herald staff writers Nicole White and Trenton Daniel contributed to this report.
By Jay Weaver | McClatchy Newspapers | August 5, 2006
MIAMI - At first glance, Lyglenson Lemorin appears to be just another follower of Narseal Batiste, the ringleader of the so-called Liberty City Seven terror group.
But close scrutiny of Lemorin's interview with FBI agents following his June arrest casts some doubt about his commitment to the group's alleged terror plans.
The first sign distancing the 31-year-old Haitian immigrant from Batiste and the other accused co-conspirators: the FBI busted him in Atlanta, not Miami.
Lemorin had moved to Atlanta after ending his involvement with Batiste's group, which was suspected of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and federal buildings in five U.S. cities.
In his post-arrest interview, he told the FBI that Batiste "tricked everyone" into pledging allegiance to al-Qaida and knew "nothing good would come from this," saying he did not join in shooting video of alleged terror targets in Miami.
At another point, Lemorin told agents he didn't want to be in the "al-Qaida circle" and didn't like the "al-Qaida talk."
Since his June 22 arrest in Atlanta, Lemorin has been transferred to Miami. He is in custody along with the other six defendants - all indicted on charges of conspiring with the terrorist group al-Qaida to bomb FBI buildings and the Sears Tower. Their trial is set for next March.
Prosecutors argue the seven defendants - including Lemorin - took the oath to al-Qaida in March before playing some role to carry out the alleged plot to wage a terror war against the United States.
"Following his arrest, Lemorin gave a detailed statement to the FBI admitting his involvement in the plot to overthrow the United States and bomb buildings," prosecutors Jacqueline Arango and Richard Getchell contend in court papers.
Lemorin got to know Batiste in 2005 when he went to work for his stucco and masonry business in Miami. He became friendly with Batiste and some of the other men who worked for his company and became acquainted with Batiste's spiritual side.
Batiste, a Chicago transplant, talked about building up a righteous nation of the Moorish Science Temple, a sect that blends Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Batiste and his men regularly met in a squat, concrete warehouse in Liberty City that they dubbed "the Temple." Batiste taught them martial arts and military movements.
Last October, Batiste began talking with a North Miami store owner of Arabic descent about his mission to create a Moorish government within the United States. He explained to the shopkeeper that extreme Islamic groups, such as al-Qaida, could help.
The shopkeeper, an FBI informant, told the agents handling the undercover case. They had him introduce another informant - an Arabic friend who posed as an al-Qaida representative - to Batiste.
Despite suspicions about that informant, known as Mohammad, Batiste came to trust him.
And on March 10, an informant led Batiste in al-Qaida's loyalty oath inside a GMC truck. Lemorin was present but was asked to leave during the ceremony. Six days later, Lemorin and five other Batiste followers also took the pledge, in another Miami warehouse that was under FBI video surveillance.
But, according to Lemorin's interview with the FBI, some immediately expressed regrets.
"Lemorin believes that he was one of the first to object to the oath," FBI agents wrote in their summary. "He advised that one other brother questioned Batiste also.
"During this time, Batiste questioned them, asking if they were scared or coward. Lemorin feared Batiste . . . Lemorin stated that the oath was `the last straw.'"
After the ceremony, Batiste and Mohammad allegedly talked in depth about their plans with the others present, according to prosecutors. Batiste wanted to destroy the Sears Tower, they said. Mohammad wanted Batiste's group to help al-Qaida blow up five FBI buildings in Miami, Chicago, Washington, New York and Los Angeles.
But in his FBI interview, Lemorin said "he attempted to stray from the group."
Mohammad later gave Batiste a video camera and rental van to do surveillance of the FBI building in North Miami Beach and other local federal buildings.
"I was present when Mohammad gave Brother Naz Batiste a video camera to film target locations . . . to destroy," Lemorin said in a signed written statement for the FBI's Atlanta office.
But in his post-arrest interview, Lemorin told FBI agents that he did not participate with Batiste and some of the others in taking video footage of local federal buildings. He told them that Mohammad planned to send the footage to al-Qaida to see the targets. "Lemorin believed it was for them to do something bad to us," FBI agents wrote.
In mid-April - after the arrival of one of Batiste's spiritual advisors from Chicago - the group started to unravel. The advisor, Sultan Khanbey, accused Batiste of allowing an FBI snitch to infiltrate the organization, accused him of treason against the Moorish nation and held a "trial" against him. Khanbey kicked out Batiste.
Soon after, Khanbey and some of Batiste's followers - including another spiritual advisor from Chicago, Master Atheea - met at the Liberty City warehouse.
An argument erupted, and Khanbey fired a shot past Atheea's left ear.
Miami police arrested Khanbey. The firearm he used to threaten Atheea belonged to Lemorin, who had a concealed-weapons permit. Lemorin told the FBI that he had left the gun - a 9mm Hi-Point pistol - at the warehouse and forgotten about it.
By the time of the shooting, Lemorin told agents, he had left Miami for Atlanta. He said he had rental car papers to prove it.
"He moved to Atlanta to try to make things better for himself," said Linda Polydor, who has two infant children with Lemorin and has known him since the two were students at Miami Edison Middle School.
"How could they think he could build a bomb and not even afford a pair of shoes."
---
Miami Herald staff writers Nicole White and Trenton Daniel contributed to this report.
APN : Donzella James Contesting Primary in Georgia
Friday, August 04, 2006
BREAKING: Donzella James Contesting Primary in Georgia
by Matthew Cardinale | Atlanta Progressive News | August 4, 2006
(APN) ATLANTA -- US Congressional Candidate Donzella James has filed a legal contest of the results of her Primary race against US Rep. David Scott (D-GA), Atlanta Progressive News has learned. The suit has been filed in State Court in Fulton County, Georgia.
The lawsuit asserts Georgia’s election “results” are meaningless because they run on E-voting machines which have no verifiable paper trail or audit system.
“People know there’s a problem with auditing these machines. But no opponent has ever challenged after the race,” Donzella James told Atlanta Progressive News.
The lawsuit also lists instances of machine breakdowns and malfunctions in Georgia’s 13th Congressional District during the Primary. These instances are similar to those documented by US Rep. Cynthia McKinney’s (D-GA) Campaign in the 4th District, and discussed exclusively by Atlanta Progressive News.
The lawsuit is believed to set a national precedent.
“Good, I’m glad she’s challenging, she should!” Brad Friedman of the noted elections integrity website, BradBlog, said in a phone interview.
The Donzella James Campaign isn’t taking the same approach as say, Kerry/Edwards 2004. They aren’t trying to calculate the known malfunctions to see if they add up to greater than the margin of vote difference between more progressive James and the moderate Scott (35%). The point is, because of the lack of a paper trail, there is no way to determine how many unknown malfunctions there are.
“When you figure out something is wrong with these systems, you can’t get in there to see how much has gone wrong in these systems. It’s in the ether,” Friedman said.
The organization BlackBoxVoting revealed this week that technology experts have discovered the worst known security flaw ever in E-voting machines, in the Diebold machines that are used in Georgia and one other state. (Developing...)
Attorney Paul Lehto, who is contesting the Busby/Bilbray race in San Diego where voting machines were taken home with poll workers, has offered to provide legal advice to Donzella James. Expecting voters to trust E-voting as presently done is “like asking everyone to put blindfolds on,” Lehto said. “I endorse this. It’s exciting that there’s an elections contest in Georgia.”
Local organization VoterGA has also offered to help.
“We filed on Monday evening a petition to contest the election. The Clerk of Courts certified it. Yesterday we certified the petition sent to Secretary of State Cathy Cox’s Office. They in turn will respond and will recognize a hearing issue on this matter,” Johnny Wilson, of the James Camapign, said.
APN has also learned the US Dept. Of Justice (USDOJ) is conducting a preliminary investigation into evidence of elections problems in Georgia’s 4th District, according to a leading poll watcher who submitted the complaint. USDOJ is working on a comment but it was not in by press deadline. (Developing...)
James’s elections contest is essentially making the same central claims as the VoterGA lawsuit, which APN has also been following. VoterGA’s lawsuit does not challenge any specific election but is aimed at an injunction against the way Georgia’s elections are currently carried out. James’s suit, on the other hand, is using the same principles to question a specific election.
“We’ll be glad to help her any way she needs help,” Garland Favorito of VoterGA said.
“She’s asking the same questions that we are, on how could Georgia elections be legitimate if there is no direct physical evidence of voter intent? It is a very appropriate question for which the Secretary of State can provide no reasonable answer,” Favorito said.
“A recount is only a reprint of previous unverifiable results,” Favorito said.
James’s lawsuit does not seek a recount; it seeks for the present “results” to be overturned.
“The grounds for contest are based on the belief... a mistake or fraud had been made by Secretary of State to advertise, publish, display, distribute and announce “result of the count by the Election Committee” without an authentic and verifiable paper trail to independently verify that voters, voting for Donzella James, had their votes recorded,” the lawsuit filing says in “Count Two.”
“How do we know that the votes that went for opponent were not cast for contestant?” the filing says.
“How do we know that, absent of a paper trail, the outcome matches the voter tally produced by the electronic machine?” the filing says [commas added for flow].
The lawsuit also claims known malfunctions with E-voting such as machines breaking down and people not receiving the correct party ballot.
“When I went into my voting precinct, and I was the third person in line, there were two people in front of me, and those people were having problems with the machines. One of the machines had to be shut off immediately. They gave the people in front of me the wrong card. And then when it got to me I even got a Republican ballot,” James told Atlanta Progressive News.
“Okay, I knew and some of the people there knew, but suppose people who are not politically astute say, ‘Oh their name wasn’t on my ballot, so I must not be in their district’.”
“We only named a couple irregularities we reported from that day,” James said.
“I know in Clayton, Fulton, Douglas, and Cobb Counties, there were numerous complaints from candidates about those polls. If we put all of them together, we’d have several pages of complaints,” James said.
“The integrity of the vote is being questioned as a result of the voting machines, and we have apathy and complacency among voters throughout the nation, and we want to make sure we restore the integrity so they know their vote truly counts and they know they are making a difference and they do have input in their district and what happens in the electoral process,” James said.
Donzella James served in the Georgia State Legislature for several years, and during the most recent years of that time, she was one of the leading critics of E-Voting, she said.
Atlanta Progressive News will continue to follow this story.
About the author:
Matthew Cardinale is the News Editor and National Correspondent for Atlanta Progressive News and may be reached at matthew@atlantaprogressivenews.com.
Syndication policy:
This article may be reprinted in full at no cost where Atlanta Progressive News is credited.
by Matthew Cardinale | Atlanta Progressive News | August 4, 2006
(APN) ATLANTA -- US Congressional Candidate Donzella James has filed a legal contest of the results of her Primary race against US Rep. David Scott (D-GA), Atlanta Progressive News has learned. The suit has been filed in State Court in Fulton County, Georgia.
The lawsuit asserts Georgia’s election “results” are meaningless because they run on E-voting machines which have no verifiable paper trail or audit system.
“People know there’s a problem with auditing these machines. But no opponent has ever challenged after the race,” Donzella James told Atlanta Progressive News.
The lawsuit also lists instances of machine breakdowns and malfunctions in Georgia’s 13th Congressional District during the Primary. These instances are similar to those documented by US Rep. Cynthia McKinney’s (D-GA) Campaign in the 4th District, and discussed exclusively by Atlanta Progressive News.
The lawsuit is believed to set a national precedent.
“Good, I’m glad she’s challenging, she should!” Brad Friedman of the noted elections integrity website, BradBlog, said in a phone interview.
The Donzella James Campaign isn’t taking the same approach as say, Kerry/Edwards 2004. They aren’t trying to calculate the known malfunctions to see if they add up to greater than the margin of vote difference between more progressive James and the moderate Scott (35%). The point is, because of the lack of a paper trail, there is no way to determine how many unknown malfunctions there are.
“When you figure out something is wrong with these systems, you can’t get in there to see how much has gone wrong in these systems. It’s in the ether,” Friedman said.
The organization BlackBoxVoting revealed this week that technology experts have discovered the worst known security flaw ever in E-voting machines, in the Diebold machines that are used in Georgia and one other state. (Developing...)
Attorney Paul Lehto, who is contesting the Busby/Bilbray race in San Diego where voting machines were taken home with poll workers, has offered to provide legal advice to Donzella James. Expecting voters to trust E-voting as presently done is “like asking everyone to put blindfolds on,” Lehto said. “I endorse this. It’s exciting that there’s an elections contest in Georgia.”
Local organization VoterGA has also offered to help.
“We filed on Monday evening a petition to contest the election. The Clerk of Courts certified it. Yesterday we certified the petition sent to Secretary of State Cathy Cox’s Office. They in turn will respond and will recognize a hearing issue on this matter,” Johnny Wilson, of the James Camapign, said.
APN has also learned the US Dept. Of Justice (USDOJ) is conducting a preliminary investigation into evidence of elections problems in Georgia’s 4th District, according to a leading poll watcher who submitted the complaint. USDOJ is working on a comment but it was not in by press deadline. (Developing...)
James’s elections contest is essentially making the same central claims as the VoterGA lawsuit, which APN has also been following. VoterGA’s lawsuit does not challenge any specific election but is aimed at an injunction against the way Georgia’s elections are currently carried out. James’s suit, on the other hand, is using the same principles to question a specific election.
“We’ll be glad to help her any way she needs help,” Garland Favorito of VoterGA said.
“She’s asking the same questions that we are, on how could Georgia elections be legitimate if there is no direct physical evidence of voter intent? It is a very appropriate question for which the Secretary of State can provide no reasonable answer,” Favorito said.
“A recount is only a reprint of previous unverifiable results,” Favorito said.
James’s lawsuit does not seek a recount; it seeks for the present “results” to be overturned.
“The grounds for contest are based on the belief... a mistake or fraud had been made by Secretary of State to advertise, publish, display, distribute and announce “result of the count by the Election Committee” without an authentic and verifiable paper trail to independently verify that voters, voting for Donzella James, had their votes recorded,” the lawsuit filing says in “Count Two.”
“How do we know that the votes that went for opponent were not cast for contestant?” the filing says.
“How do we know that, absent of a paper trail, the outcome matches the voter tally produced by the electronic machine?” the filing says [commas added for flow].
The lawsuit also claims known malfunctions with E-voting such as machines breaking down and people not receiving the correct party ballot.
“When I went into my voting precinct, and I was the third person in line, there were two people in front of me, and those people were having problems with the machines. One of the machines had to be shut off immediately. They gave the people in front of me the wrong card. And then when it got to me I even got a Republican ballot,” James told Atlanta Progressive News.
“Okay, I knew and some of the people there knew, but suppose people who are not politically astute say, ‘Oh their name wasn’t on my ballot, so I must not be in their district’.”
“We only named a couple irregularities we reported from that day,” James said.
“I know in Clayton, Fulton, Douglas, and Cobb Counties, there were numerous complaints from candidates about those polls. If we put all of them together, we’d have several pages of complaints,” James said.
“The integrity of the vote is being questioned as a result of the voting machines, and we have apathy and complacency among voters throughout the nation, and we want to make sure we restore the integrity so they know their vote truly counts and they know they are making a difference and they do have input in their district and what happens in the electoral process,” James said.
Donzella James served in the Georgia State Legislature for several years, and during the most recent years of that time, she was one of the leading critics of E-Voting, she said.
Atlanta Progressive News will continue to follow this story.
About the author:
Matthew Cardinale is the News Editor and National Correspondent for Atlanta Progressive News and may be reached at matthew@atlantaprogressivenews.com.
Syndication policy:
This article may be reprinted in full at no cost where Atlanta Progressive News is credited.
NYT : OP/Ed: Strong-Arming the Vote
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Strong-Arming the Vote
New York Times | Op/Ed | August 3, 2006
President Bush’s Justice Department has been criticized for letting partisanship guide its work on voting and elections. And party politics certainly appears to have been a driving force in a legal maneuver it just pulled off in Alabama, where it persuaded a federal judge to take important election powers away from the Democratic secretary of state and give them to a Republican governor. The Justice Department says it is trying to enforce the election law, but that is unconvincing. There are plenty of ways to enforce the law without creating the impression that it is tilting the electoral landscape in favor of Republicans.
Alabama is one of many states that have been late in meeting a federal requirement to create a computerized statewide list of voters. Secretary of State Nancy Worley says the delay is due to factors outside her control. Her critics disagree. But whatever the reason, the Justice Department has every right to try to speed things along. The trouble is, rather than work with Ms. Worley to get the job done, it decided to go to court to take away her authority and hand it to Gov. Bob Riley.
Sadly, a federal judge agreed yesterday to do just that, in a one-sided proceeding that felt a lot like a kangaroo court. The Justice Department and the Alabama attorney general, Troy King, both argued that Governor Riley should control the voter database. Mr. King, a Republican, was appointed to his job by Governor Riley after serving as his legal adviser, and when Ms. Worley realized that Mr. King would not represent her interests, she asked him to let her hire a lawyer to argue her side. He refused. The Alabama Democratic Party tried to intervene in the case, so it could argue against giving control of the voter rolls to the governor. The judge, who was recently named to the bench by President Bush, would not let the Democrats in.
The Justice Department’s request to shift Ms. Worley’s powers to Governor Riley is extraordinary. Normally, the government would seek an order telling a state official what to do, or it would ask to have a nonpartisan person appointed as a special master. And the Justice Department’s aggressive stance stands in stark contrast to the forgiving approach it has taken to Republican secretaries of state. After Katherine Harris removed eligible voters from the rolls in Florida in 2000, and Kenneth Blackwell tried to block eligible people from registering in Ohio in 2004, the Justice Department made no effort to limit their powers.
Controlling the voting rolls can yield important advantages, as Ms. Harris proved in 2000. The Justice Department’s actions in Alabama appear to be less about enforcing the law than about wresting control of the voter rolls from the opposition party, and making a Democratic secretary of state who is up for re-election in a few months look bad.
It would not be the first time the Bush Justice Department seemed to play party politics with elections. Political appointees approved the pro-Republican Congressional redistricting plan in Texas and a voter ID law in Georgia, despite objections from staff lawyers that the plans violated the Voting Rights Act.
The Justice Department has enormous power over state elections. It is important that this power be used in a way that appears — and is — nonpartisan. Undercutting a Democratic secretary of state, and taking the extraordinary step of handing her powers to a Republican governor, meets neither test. The Justice Department is giving the impression that it is less concerned that elections be lawful and fair than that they come out a particular way.
New York Times | Op/Ed | August 3, 2006
President Bush’s Justice Department has been criticized for letting partisanship guide its work on voting and elections. And party politics certainly appears to have been a driving force in a legal maneuver it just pulled off in Alabama, where it persuaded a federal judge to take important election powers away from the Democratic secretary of state and give them to a Republican governor. The Justice Department says it is trying to enforce the election law, but that is unconvincing. There are plenty of ways to enforce the law without creating the impression that it is tilting the electoral landscape in favor of Republicans.
Alabama is one of many states that have been late in meeting a federal requirement to create a computerized statewide list of voters. Secretary of State Nancy Worley says the delay is due to factors outside her control. Her critics disagree. But whatever the reason, the Justice Department has every right to try to speed things along. The trouble is, rather than work with Ms. Worley to get the job done, it decided to go to court to take away her authority and hand it to Gov. Bob Riley.
Sadly, a federal judge agreed yesterday to do just that, in a one-sided proceeding that felt a lot like a kangaroo court. The Justice Department and the Alabama attorney general, Troy King, both argued that Governor Riley should control the voter database. Mr. King, a Republican, was appointed to his job by Governor Riley after serving as his legal adviser, and when Ms. Worley realized that Mr. King would not represent her interests, she asked him to let her hire a lawyer to argue her side. He refused. The Alabama Democratic Party tried to intervene in the case, so it could argue against giving control of the voter rolls to the governor. The judge, who was recently named to the bench by President Bush, would not let the Democrats in.
The Justice Department’s request to shift Ms. Worley’s powers to Governor Riley is extraordinary. Normally, the government would seek an order telling a state official what to do, or it would ask to have a nonpartisan person appointed as a special master. And the Justice Department’s aggressive stance stands in stark contrast to the forgiving approach it has taken to Republican secretaries of state. After Katherine Harris removed eligible voters from the rolls in Florida in 2000, and Kenneth Blackwell tried to block eligible people from registering in Ohio in 2004, the Justice Department made no effort to limit their powers.
Controlling the voting rolls can yield important advantages, as Ms. Harris proved in 2000. The Justice Department’s actions in Alabama appear to be less about enforcing the law than about wresting control of the voter rolls from the opposition party, and making a Democratic secretary of state who is up for re-election in a few months look bad.
It would not be the first time the Bush Justice Department seemed to play party politics with elections. Political appointees approved the pro-Republican Congressional redistricting plan in Texas and a voter ID law in Georgia, despite objections from staff lawyers that the plans violated the Voting Rights Act.
The Justice Department has enormous power over state elections. It is important that this power be used in a way that appears — and is — nonpartisan. Undercutting a Democratic secretary of state, and taking the extraordinary step of handing her powers to a Republican governor, meets neither test. The Justice Department is giving the impression that it is less concerned that elections be lawful and fair than that they come out a particular way.
WP : Jimmy Carter: Stop the Band-Aid Treatment
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Stop the Band-Aid Treatment
We Need Policies for a Real, Lasting Middle East Peace
By Jimmy Carter | published by the Washington Post | August 1, 2006
The Middle East is a tinderbox, with some key players on all sides waiting for every opportunity to destroy their enemies with bullets, bombs and missiles. One of the special vulnerabilities of Israel, and a repetitive cause of violence, is the holding of prisoners. Militant Palestinians and Lebanese know that a captured Israeli soldier or civilian is either a cause of conflict or a valuable bargaining chip for prisoner exchange. This assumption is based on a number of such trades, including 1,150 Arabs, mostly Palestinians, for three Israeli soldiers in 1985; 123 Lebanese for the remains of two Israeli soldiers in 1996; and 433 Palestinians and others for an Israeli businessman and the bodies of three soldiers in 2004.
This stratagem precipitated the renewed violence that erupted in June when Palestinians dug a tunnel under the barrier that surrounds Gaza and assaulted some Israeli soldiers, killing two and capturing one. They offered to exchange the soldier for the release of 95 women and 313 children who are among almost 10,000 Arabs in Israeli prisons, but this time Israel rejected a swap and attacked Gaza in an attempt to free the soldier and stop rocket fire into Israel. The resulting destruction brought reconciliation between warring Palestinian factions and support for them throughout the Arab world.
Hezbollah militants then killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others, and insisted on Israel's withdrawal from disputed territory and an exchange for some of the several thousand incarcerated Lebanese. With American backing, Israeli bombs and missiles rained down on Lebanon. Hezbollah rockets from Syria and Iran struck northern Israel.
It is inarguable that Israel has a right to defend itself against attacks on its citizens, but it is inhumane and counterproductive to punish civilian populations in the illogical hope that somehow they will blame Hamas and Hezbollah for provoking the devastating response. The result instead has been that broad Arab and worldwide support has been rallied for these groups, while condemnation of both Israel and the United States has intensified.
Israel belatedly announced, but did not carry out, a two-day cessation in bombing Lebanon, responding to the global condemnation of an air attack on the Lebanese village of Qana, where 57 civilians were killed this past weekend and where 106 died from the same cause 10 years ago. As before there were expressions of "deep regret," a promise of "immediate investigation" and the explanation that dropped leaflets had warned families in the region to leave their homes. The urgent need in Lebanon is that Israeli attacks stop, the nation's regular military forces control the southern region, Hezbollah cease as a separate fighting force, and future attacks against Israel be prevented. Israel should withdraw from all Lebanese territory, including Shebaa Farms, and release the Lebanese prisoners. Yet yesterday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected a cease-fire.
These are ambitious hopes, but even if the U.N. Security Council adopts and implements a resolution that would lead to such an eventual solution, it will provide just another band-aid and temporary relief. Tragically, the current conflict is part of the inevitably repetitive cycle of violence that results from the absence of a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East, exacerbated by the almost unprecedented six-year absence of any real effort to achieve such a goal.
Leaders on both sides ignore strong majorities that crave peace, allowing extremist-led violence to preempt all opportunities for building a political consensus. Traumatized Israelis cling to the false hope that their lives will be made safer by incremental unilateral withdrawals from occupied areas, while Palestinians see their remnant territories reduced to little more than human dumping grounds surrounded by a provocative "security barrier" that embarrasses Israel's friends and that fails to bring safety or stability.
The general parameters of a long-term, two-state agreement are well known. There will be no substantive and permanent peace for any peoples in this troubled region as long as Israel is violating key U.N. resolutions, official American policy and the international "road map" for peace by occupying Arab lands and oppressing the Palestinians. Except for mutually agreeable negotiated modifications, Israel's official pre-1967 borders must be honored. As were all previous administrations since the founding of Israel, U.S. government leaders must be in the forefront of achieving this long-delayed goal.
A major impediment to progress is Washington's strange policy that dialogue on controversial issues will be extended only as a reward for subservient behavior and will be withheld from those who reject U.S. assertions. Direct engagement with the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Palestinian Authority and the government in Damascus will be necessary if secure negotiated settlements are to be achieved. Failure to address the issues and leaders involved risks the creation of an arc of even greater instability running from Jerusalem through Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran.
The people of the Middle East deserve peace and justice, and we in the international community owe them our strong leadership and support.
Former president Carter is the founder of the nonprofit Carter Center in Atlanta.
We Need Policies for a Real, Lasting Middle East Peace
By Jimmy Carter | published by the Washington Post | August 1, 2006
The Middle East is a tinderbox, with some key players on all sides waiting for every opportunity to destroy their enemies with bullets, bombs and missiles. One of the special vulnerabilities of Israel, and a repetitive cause of violence, is the holding of prisoners. Militant Palestinians and Lebanese know that a captured Israeli soldier or civilian is either a cause of conflict or a valuable bargaining chip for prisoner exchange. This assumption is based on a number of such trades, including 1,150 Arabs, mostly Palestinians, for three Israeli soldiers in 1985; 123 Lebanese for the remains of two Israeli soldiers in 1996; and 433 Palestinians and others for an Israeli businessman and the bodies of three soldiers in 2004.
This stratagem precipitated the renewed violence that erupted in June when Palestinians dug a tunnel under the barrier that surrounds Gaza and assaulted some Israeli soldiers, killing two and capturing one. They offered to exchange the soldier for the release of 95 women and 313 children who are among almost 10,000 Arabs in Israeli prisons, but this time Israel rejected a swap and attacked Gaza in an attempt to free the soldier and stop rocket fire into Israel. The resulting destruction brought reconciliation between warring Palestinian factions and support for them throughout the Arab world.
Hezbollah militants then killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others, and insisted on Israel's withdrawal from disputed territory and an exchange for some of the several thousand incarcerated Lebanese. With American backing, Israeli bombs and missiles rained down on Lebanon. Hezbollah rockets from Syria and Iran struck northern Israel.
It is inarguable that Israel has a right to defend itself against attacks on its citizens, but it is inhumane and counterproductive to punish civilian populations in the illogical hope that somehow they will blame Hamas and Hezbollah for provoking the devastating response. The result instead has been that broad Arab and worldwide support has been rallied for these groups, while condemnation of both Israel and the United States has intensified.
Israel belatedly announced, but did not carry out, a two-day cessation in bombing Lebanon, responding to the global condemnation of an air attack on the Lebanese village of Qana, where 57 civilians were killed this past weekend and where 106 died from the same cause 10 years ago. As before there were expressions of "deep regret," a promise of "immediate investigation" and the explanation that dropped leaflets had warned families in the region to leave their homes. The urgent need in Lebanon is that Israeli attacks stop, the nation's regular military forces control the southern region, Hezbollah cease as a separate fighting force, and future attacks against Israel be prevented. Israel should withdraw from all Lebanese territory, including Shebaa Farms, and release the Lebanese prisoners. Yet yesterday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected a cease-fire.
These are ambitious hopes, but even if the U.N. Security Council adopts and implements a resolution that would lead to such an eventual solution, it will provide just another band-aid and temporary relief. Tragically, the current conflict is part of the inevitably repetitive cycle of violence that results from the absence of a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East, exacerbated by the almost unprecedented six-year absence of any real effort to achieve such a goal.
Leaders on both sides ignore strong majorities that crave peace, allowing extremist-led violence to preempt all opportunities for building a political consensus. Traumatized Israelis cling to the false hope that their lives will be made safer by incremental unilateral withdrawals from occupied areas, while Palestinians see their remnant territories reduced to little more than human dumping grounds surrounded by a provocative "security barrier" that embarrasses Israel's friends and that fails to bring safety or stability.
The general parameters of a long-term, two-state agreement are well known. There will be no substantive and permanent peace for any peoples in this troubled region as long as Israel is violating key U.N. resolutions, official American policy and the international "road map" for peace by occupying Arab lands and oppressing the Palestinians. Except for mutually agreeable negotiated modifications, Israel's official pre-1967 borders must be honored. As were all previous administrations since the founding of Israel, U.S. government leaders must be in the forefront of achieving this long-delayed goal.
A major impediment to progress is Washington's strange policy that dialogue on controversial issues will be extended only as a reward for subservient behavior and will be withheld from those who reject U.S. assertions. Direct engagement with the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Palestinian Authority and the government in Damascus will be necessary if secure negotiated settlements are to be achieved. Failure to address the issues and leaders involved risks the creation of an arc of even greater instability running from Jerusalem through Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran.
The people of the Middle East deserve peace and justice, and we in the international community owe them our strong leadership and support.
Former president Carter is the founder of the nonprofit Carter Center in Atlanta.
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