                                                                               ISSN 1440-9828
                                                                              September 2007
                                                                  No 348

Civil Rights/Human Rights Ernst Zündel and the Politics of >Gotcha<

By Bruce Leichty, Immigration Attorney for Ernst Zündel

Jul 27, 2007, 14:40

On January 24, 2007, I was arguing before three judges in Cincinnati, on behalf of my German-born client Ernst Zündel and his wife Ingrid Rimland Zündel, when a curious thing happened.

Out of nowhere, it seemed, the presiding judge in the case, Judge Deborah Cook, a George Bush appointee of 2003, asked me coldly whether my clients were playing >>gotcha<< with the government.

"Gotcha" with the most powerful government on Earth - now that was a strange thing to be hearing in this marble-accented chamber. But don't get me wrong; I knew what the judge was suggesting.

For over a year, I had been relishing the opportunity to stand in front of a panel of judges at the 6th Circuit and essentially challenge them to find any error in my airtight legal argument - that Ernst Zündel, a [controversial] Holocaust revisionist who was awaiting U.S. permanent residence through his U.S. citizen wife Ingrid, had been arrested and whisked out of the United States illegally in 2003 based on premises that could not possibly hold up under impartial judicial scrutiny.

I was frankly elated that I had discovered the government's Achilles heel - that when federal agents had arrested and deported Ernst Zündel in 2/03 they had done so based on a false premise about Ernst Zündel's last entry into the United States. That turned Ernst Zündel's case into an extra-judicial rendition - and it had all the earmarks of one, because Ernst's fate was to be confined in Canada for two years and declared a national security threat under a law that allowed secret evidence - a law that the Canadian Supreme Court has now declared unconstitutional. After doing its dirty work, Canada then deported Zündel to Germany, where he was convicted of inciting racial hatred and sentenced to five years in prison - for nothing more than his political speech.

It all started with the U.S. federal agents in 2003. These agents postulated that Ernst Zündel had waived all his rights to due processing the United States under a program called the Visa Waiver Pilot Program. But I knew this was impossible, and I could explain it to anyone willing to put aside their prejudices for a few minutes: Ernst Zündel had last entered the U.S. in May 2000 when the Visa Waiver Pilot Program had already expired, and before Congress had belatedly authorized a permanent visa waiver program in October 2000.

When the pilot program expired, so did the authority of then-Attorney General Janet Reno to admit anyone from Germany without a visa. She didn't get her >>visa waiver<< authority restored until October 2000. Attorney General Reno decided that, while Congress mulled over the fate of the program, German visitors expecting to enter with visa waivers instead would be allowed into the United States under a program known as "parole."

So I was gratified that it didn't matter what Ernst Zündel thought when he crossed the Canada-U.S. border that night in May 2000, namely that he might need to flash his outdated visa waiver program authorization, but that what really mattered was the actual state of federal immigration law at the time. After all, in this country we don't hold people accountable to laws that they might have believed existed, but rather to laws that actually do exist.

I was gratified that, contrary to the opinion of the folksy District Court judge who had kicked Ernst's case out of his Knoxville, Tennessee court, this expert panel would have to agree that Ernst Zündel's own expectations were irrelevant.

Rather, the question would have to be: in May 2000, did Ernst sign away his rights to a court hearing, or didn't he?

I knew that he had signed nothing in May 2000. So did the government. Of course, the government claimed that he had signed a waiver of rights earlier, in March 2000, while the visa waiver pilot program was still in effect. But -- didn't that earlier waiver bind him only so long as the Attorney General herself still had the power to waive visas for Germans?

It was obvious as a matter of law that it did. Come May 2000, Ernst Zündel couldn't use the program and Janet Reno couldn't use it either. Janet Reno couldn't enforce a waiver of due process rights if her agents let Ernst into the country without a visa after her authority to do so had been withdrawn.

Therefore I knew that honest judges would have to find that Ernst Zündel had not waived any of his rights in order to enter the U.S. and that Reno's agents had instead targeted Ernst Zündel for his controversial opinions; they couldn't simply arrest Ernst Zündel in 2/03 and whisk him out of the country before considering his marriage. Our immigration laws have always had a high view of marriage to a U.S. citizen! Hundreds of Mexican nationals exercise those marriage-based rights every year before immigration officers -despite illegal entry!

Ernst knew that, too, soon after he entered the U.S. in May 2000. Tired of all his legal struggles in Canada, he and Ingrid consulted with a Tennessee immigration attorney in the summer of 2000, and they decided to get married then, and not later. In October 2000 they began life together in Tennessee assured in the knowledge that, like others who marry U.S. citizens after entering for some other reason, Ernst's status would be resolved through his marriage, without need for him to leave the United States. Their Tennessee attorney told them so.

And now Judge Cook was effectively challenging me in not so many words to admit that I had outmanoeuvred the government - that if my argument were accepted the United States government was backed into a corner with no way out, that I had somehow trapped the government by its own words or acts. That the United States government had been outsmarted.

The term >>gotcha<< was not exactly neutral and dispassionate judicial language. It implies something devious, something substantively unfair. It evokes images of gamesmanship - of legal scholars or canon law experts or rabbis sitting in their parlors seeing who can one-up the other with their logic. I bridled at the suggestion.

And while I knew what prompted the question, I was also startled at the candor of the judge. Even considering the coded implications of her slang, to pose the question so openly smacked of desperation. The desperation itself was not a surprise, but the revelation was. (Was Judge Cook thinking of her own public humiliation, two weeks earlier, as a >>gotcha<< moment? On January 12, 2007, after an investigative reporter had uncovered two illegal campaign contributions she made after she had taken office as a federal judge, she apologized and backtracked from an earlier explanation that these contributions had been made by her lawyer husband. She explained instead that she hadn't been aware of the prohibition, since she had not attended federal judges' school.)

My answer to Judge Cook's question, formed hastily and framed in as dignified a tone as I could muster, was that we were not playing >>gotcha<< at all, but rather just urging the court to follow the law. It was very true. But in retrospect that was too prosaic an answer, too defensive to have been the best answer.

The gall! What I wish I would have declared to Judge Cook and her colleagues was that if there was any >>gotcha<< involving Ernst Zündel and the United States, the judge had it backwards - big time!

This certainly wasn't a case where Ernst Zündel and his sling shot-armed lawyer should stand accused of >>putting one over<< on the United States, but rather a case where the United States had pulled a Goliath-style "gotcha" on Ernst.

Ernst Zündel knew that thousands of people like him had remained in the U.S. and adjusted status based on their marriages to U.S. citizens; that it was the policy of the INS to respect those marriages EVEN IF they had entered with visa waivers. Now he was supposed to know that INS reserved the right to change course suddenly because this was just >>policy<< and not >>law?<< Gotcha!!

Ernst Zündel and his Tennessee attorney knew that once notified of an appointment date, if either of them had a conflict, it was the policy of INS to honor an initial rescheduling request and to automatically reschedule the appointment. Ernst Zündel was supposed to know that when his Tennessee attorney had to ask for rescheduling in 2001, this policy did not have to be honored? Gotcha!!

Ernst Zündel was supposed to know that the two letters about there scheduling sent by his attorney (one certified) would turn up missing in his INS file, thereby establishing a pretext for federal agents to say that Ernst had >>missed<< his adjustment interview? Gotcha!!

Ernst Zündel was supposed to know that instead there was a letter in his file issued by INS in January 2002 stating that he had been deemed to have abandoned his permanent residence application for failure to appear at his interview, when this letter was not even sent to him or his attorney until a full year later, after he was arrested? Gotcha!!

Ernst Zündel was supposed to know that after his wife found an attorney to ask for an emergency writ of habeas corpus in Knoxville, the judge would summarily deny the request without a hearing, while Ernst was still confined in Blount County Jail, where he was terrorized with dogs and their black-clad handlers? Gotcha!!

Or that when his attorney first sought a stay of that abrupt order from the Sixth Circuit, the Sixth Circuit would communicate with his INS adversaries by ex parte fax (without disclosure to his attorney) in order to confirm that Ernst was a >>visa waiver<< entrant (a falsity)? Gotcha!!

But of course there wasn't time to make all these points either. Under Judge Cook's glare and with the merciless clock ticking, I finished my argument. Judge Cook and her colleague, Judge Martha Daughtrey, had already taken up most of the time with hostile questions. It was left to me to entreat them to read the expiration provisions of the Visa Waiver statute and regulation very carefully. When she was on the Ohio Supreme Court prior to becoming a federal judge, Judge Cook had the reputation of being a >>strict constructionist.<< That was fine by me. Would she strictly construe this statute and regulation, too, even though it favored Ernst Zündel?

Would Judge Daughtrey, said to be one of the appeals court judges most sympathetic to the rights of habeas petitioners, recognize that Ernst Zündel had his liberties stripped from him without due process?

Would the silent Judge Herman Weber, a WWII veteran who had made difficult decisions respecting First Amendment rights as a district court trial judge, understand the implications of this case for the free speech rights of Ernst Zündel protected under the First Amendment? That the illegal actions of the U.S. government had set in motion a disastrous chain of events resulting in Ernst Zündel being handed over to countries whose repressive laws are the same as those that Americans fought and died over?

Would these three Cincinnati judges, perhaps feeling hemmed in and compelled to do something by law that they found repugnant based on their own emotions and conditioning, still honor the law?

Curious indeed. Was it not fair instead to expect these judges to realize that it was the outspoken dissident Ernst Zündel, and not the federal government, who was the victim of a diabolical >>gotcha<< in the bizarre saga of his botched extra-judicial rendition, forced separation from his wife and cruel interruption of his longed-for repose in the land of the free and home of the brave?

Could I not expect these judges to probe even more deeply, and to ask: >>Why?<< Why was Ernst Zündel snared in a perverse game of >>gotcha?<< After all, this is not a game to Ernst Zündel. It is not a game to any person of conscience.

Received via e-mail at Axis of Logic from Ingrid Zündel –

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_24990.shtml

"Red alert: Our national security is being outsourced. The most intriguing secrets of the 'war on terror' have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They're about the mammoth private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence operations today... the private spy industry has succeeded where no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA and is running the show." Those are the opening lines to a recent article in the Washington Post by R.J Hillhouse, a blogger and novelist who closely tracks the privatization of the nation's intelligence agencies.

According to Hillhouse more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Hillhouse's article in the Washington Post created a firestorm of controversy within the intelligence community. A week later the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded defending the use of private contractors.

Now Hillhouse has exposed that the reach of these corporations has extended into the Oval Office. Private companies are now heavily involved in creating the analytical products that underlie the nation's most important and most sensitive national security document – the President's Daily Brief. And there appears to be few safeguards from preventing corporations from inserting items favorable to itself or its clients into the President's Daily Brief in order to influence the country's national security agenda.

R.J. Hillhouse joins us now in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

R.J. Hillhouse. Writes the national security blog The Spy Who Billed Me. Her latest article "Outsourcing Intelligence" was posted on the Nation Magazine website this week. She is also the author of a new spy novel, "Outsourced."

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JUAN GONZALEZ: “Red alert: Our national security is being outsourced. The most intriguing secrets of the ‘war on terror’ have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They’re about the mammoth private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence operations today. […] The private spy industry has succeeded where no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA and is running the show.”

Those are the opening lines to a recent article in the Washington Post by R.J. Hillhouse, a blogger and novelist who closely tracks the privatization of the nation’s intelligence agencies. According to Hillhouse, more than 50% of the National Clandestine Service has been outsourced to private firms, such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

AMY GOODMAN: Hillhouse’s article in the Washington Post created a firestorm of controversy within the intelligence community. A week later, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded, defending the use of private contractors.

Now Hillhouse has exposed that the reach of these corporations has extended into the Oval Office. Private companies are now heavily involved in creating the analytical products that underlie the nation's most important and most sensitive national security document: the President’s Daily Brief. And there appears to be few safeguards from preventing corporations from inserting items favorable to themselves or to their clients into the President's Daily Brief in order to influence the country’s national security agenda.

R.J. Hillhouse joins us now from Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has written extensively about outsourcing of the war on terror in her blog, thespywhobilledme.com. She has also just published a novel called Outsourced. We welcome you to Democracy Now!, R.J. Hillhouse. First, talk about this expose, what you found.

R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, what I found is, as you said, private corporations have completely penetrated the intelligence apparatus of the United States. It’s impossible -- even in the response to me by the Director of National Intelligence that was published in the Washington Post, they admitted that without private corporations they would be unable to function. So what we’re seeing is basic responsibilities of government have been handed over to the private sector, which I really don't have a problem with, but how it has occurred is very problematic. There are layers of responsibility that have been handed to private sector, so the government has actually very little control in some of what’s going on in terms of espionage. There’s management layers, and private corporations actually run other corporations that are doing espionage work, the entire gamut of everything from the NSA, what is being done in pattern analysis with phone calls. Internet traffic is handled by some private corporations. Actual gathering of intelligence on the ground, running of covert operations on behalf of the CIA, it’s all in private hands. It seems that James Bond bills by the hour.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And you talk even about the presidential daily briefing. Could you explain how that has become privatized, as well?

R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, it’s not clear if the very final document is done by private corporations. It’s clear at every stage of the way, what’s called a government employee or blue badger will sign off on it. But all of the information that goes into it, the analytical products that become part of the President's Daily Brief, are produced by private corporations, because they're -- the work of analysts who receive their paychecks from corporations such as Booz Allen, Raytheon and others, is not distinguished from that of government employees. So that brings up a huge national security vulnerability, that one could very easily shape or nudge along US national security policy, because this is the most important national security document that we have in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain how the President's Daily Brief works -- first how that intelligence is gathered and then how it’s presented to him.

R.J. HILLHOUSE: The intelligence is gathered by the sixteen different intelligence agencies by statute that make up the intelligence community. That would include the more familiar, CIA, the NSA, Defense Intelligence, some [inaudible] various intelligence agencies, the National Counterterrorism Center. And each of those, the analysts first are gather -- people gather the product or the intelligence. In some cases, things have been outsourced, like in the CIA the actual case officers are outsourced. They gather that intelligence. It goes to analysts.

In the case of the CIA, the Directorate of Intelligence, my acquaintances tell me that over half is run by private corporations or staffed -- the work force is staffed by private corporations with really analytical supervisors signing off on it. So they all gather the intelligence in the field, which much of that is gathered by private corporations in these sixteen different intelligence agencies, is put into analytical products that talk about what the major topics or issues are in the different regions. It’s funneled up to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which sifts through this and determines which are the most important pressing issues, and those are taken and put into the President's Daily Brief, which the Director of National Intelligence briefs the President on each day.

I mean, we’re all, I think, familiar with the President's Daily Brief, if nothing else, from that famous, I believe it was August 6th Daily Brief from 2001: Bin Laden determined to strike in the US. It’s meant to be able to give a heads-up to the President, to the very top of government officials, as to what the potential national security problems are that have to pay attention to that very day. And it’s quite chilling when one realizes that because there is no distinction between the work of private corporations, or the work of corporations -- some of these are publicly traded, but I say “private” to differentiate from the public sector -- the work of corporations and the work of government employees. And so, there is great potential to introduce things into the intelligence stream or simply to nudge things in a certain direction. I mean, there also would be the possibility of political manipulation.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, given the possibility, obviously, that there are accountability issues and ethics issues involved by so much privatization of intelligence work, there would also seem to me to be intelligence issues, questions involved, security issues, in terms of how are these people vetted and also, at least within the agencies, like Central Intelligence, they have career employees who they can follow throughout decades sometimes in terms of their reliability. But how are these private contractors vetted?

R.J. HILLHOUSE: That’s an excellent point. At this stage of the game it’s not as frightening as what will happen over the next five and ten years. The people are vetted in the same way through the security backgrounds, on polygraphs, etc., as a government employee is. At this case most of them are former government employees that have gone over to the private sector. But the real danger occurs when -- and those people have been socialized and trained and been held in government yoke for twenty, thirty years, so it’s very unlikely that they would behave against the interest of the US government.

But then, of course, there’s this next generation of spies. What’s going to happen as corporations begin to raise their own case officers, train them in corporate values, rather than the values of public service? And at the same time, we’ve got hemorrhaging going on at the CIA, where over half of the employees of the CIA have been there for five years or less. So we have a situation where it’s really kids running the CIA. So we have a great deal of instability in the system. And as turnover occurs, as companies lose contracts, of course, people become unemployed, and that also is a great counterintelligence danger with what happens to down-on-their-luck spies.

AMY GOODMAN: R.J. Hillhouse, Ronald Sanders, Associate Director of National Intelligence, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, wrote a letter of objection to the Washington Post about your July 8th Outlook article, “Private Spies: Who Runs the CIA? Outsiders for Hire.” He says it was “way off base. It suggested [that] the use of contract personnel by intelligence agencies [such as] the CIA is somehow damaging to national security.” He writes, “Quite the contrary -- we could not accomplish our intelligence missions without them. U.S. intelligence agencies were dramatically downsized in the 1990s, in some cases by as much as 40 percent. Whatever else their pre-Sept. 11 failings, our agencies simply [did not] have enough people to do the job.” Your response, R.J.?

R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, first, I would agree with him on most of that, because those were not -- that was not the point that I made, that the use of private contractors isn't the problem. The problem is how it’s been structured. It’s comes about very quickly and in a wartime situation, so it’s been cobbled together, and it’s a very fragile system, and that’s what I point to. I think many of these private companies are actually doing very good work, but what we need to see is that it’s done in a smarter way, where it’s a more accountable way.

And we need to look at everything that these corporations are doing and see, should that be a government employee or this should be a corporation, because what we’re looking at is entire branches of the CIA are farmed out to private corporations. So you'll see twenty, what they’re called, “green badgers,” or workers for a private corporation, reporting to a single blue badger, or government employee. And within the layers of green, there could be other companies that are reporting -- are part of that branch. So it’s multiple, multiple corporations reporting back to a single government employee, who most likely is a very junior person, because of the high level of turnover at the CIA. So, clearly, that one blue badger or employee is not going to know everything that’s going on. So there’s some real accountability issues and questions about the -- not just the scope, but the use of contractors. I mean, I completely agree that they couldn't do it without the contractors.

AMY GOODMAN: And how does weapons of mass destruction fit into this, the lie that was spread? Do you see that as part of this picture or the result of this outsourcing?

R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, I wouldn't say it's a result of the outsourcing. Where I would fit WMDs in is simply a great example of the manipulation of intelligence that can occur when there is a political will to do so. And in this case, there was a formidable bureaucracy to prevent the manipulation of intelligence. I mean, much had to be put in place in order to use the bad intelligence from curveball to stovepipe everything up to the Office of the Vice President and to really do a workaround from the bureaucracy of the CIA that was trying, in many parts of it, to prevent manipulation of the intelligence.

But now what we see is, theoretically, it would be a lot easier to do something like the specter of weapons of mass destruction in another country, because corporations control the intelligence. They control the gathering of it. They control the intelligence in multiple different agencies, so suddenly you could have something being reported in the CIA the same time the NSA is picking up on it and perhaps the Military Intelligence Agency could be picking up. But with their current system, there would be no way to detect that it could actually be the same company that’s behind it, that’s feeding things into the intelligence stream. So that’s how I would tie weapons of mass destruction into it.

AMY GOODMAN: R.J. Hillhouse, we’re going to come back to you, but we’re going to break first. R.J. Hillhouse writes a national security blog, thespywhobilledme.com. I want to ask about that PowerPoint presentation you got a hold of from the Office of National Intelligence and also ask about your book Outsourced, a novel. Stay with us. [break]

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to R.J. Hillhouse, runs the blog, thespywhobilledme.com. Latest article, "Outsourcing Intelligence,” is posted on The Nation magazine website. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. I’d like to ask you about your novel. In addition to all of the research that you do on intelligence, you have now produced this fictional account, Outsourced. Why fiction?

R.J. HILLHOUSE: Because I found that there were things that could only be written about in fiction. It’s amazing for someone who has lived in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to find that in this country we’re in a similar place. In the repressive regimes, literature has often played the role of bringing things to light that could not otherwise be discussed. And I found that there are some things that are going on in the intelligence community or things that are going on with our government with relationships between corporate and government that it was only safe to discuss under the guise of fiction. So it’s an unusual transformation that a novelist would actually be ahead of media in this. I mean, it is the norm for me to be contacted each week by people from New York Times, Washington Post and others to try to learn about what’s going on in outsourcing. So it’s very strange as a novelist that I actually have moved ahead of that.

And I’ve not only been at the center of controversy in the intelligence community, I’ve also been in the center of controversy in the literary world, because I believe that and I’ve been very public about it, that thriller writers, that novelists, have failed us today. They haven't helped us understand the darker truths of what’s going on in the war on terror, the ambiguities, the changes that have occurred in how we’re fighting the war on terror and what that shows us about ourselves. Unfortunately, thriller writers have failed us. As you know, it’s mainly -- and I’ll call it for what it is -- beach reach that we see, that we don't see literature playing this larger role in society, but rather, the novels become a race of, we have to stop the terrorists from, what would be in a jargon, a, b, or c weapons -- atomic, biological or [chemical] weapons -- and it just -- it underscores the narrative of our time, which is, be afraid, be very afraid, and only a hero who will violate the Geneva Conventions, only a hero who will violate the Constitution will save us. So I tried to do something very different with Outsourced.

AMY GOODMAN: R.J. Hillhouse, you focus on Iraq -- you focus on Iraq and Uzbekistan in this novel, and also in this novel you say Osama bin Laden has been captured, but they’re just afraid to announce it for fear of terror attacks. Talk more about the core of this story, this fictional account.

R.J. HILLHOUSE: I believe that core of the story is left best left in Outsourced and in discussing it in the fictional account. I mean, I also deal with some other very hot issues that are best discussed only in fiction, such as black sites run by the CIA, the secret prisons. In Outsourced, those black sites have been privatized to private corporations. Private corporations are running the facilities’ management contracts. Private corporations are running the facilities’ security contract. So various things like that can only be discussed in fiction until the mainstream media gets its act together.

AMY GOODMAN: Back on the story that you have been breaking news with in the Washington Post and at The Nation, you recently obtained an Office of the Director of National Intelligence PowerPoint presentation that reveals that 70% of the US Intelligence budget is allocated to private contractors. 70%.

R.J. HILLHOUSE: It’s an absolutely stunning figure. It was actually the journalist Tim Shorrock that first found that PowerPoint presentation and the slide that showed the 70%. My contribution to it was recognizing that because, based of the information in it and in a hidden table in the presentation, it was possible to reverse-engineer the national intelligence budget, which appears that we’re really spending about $60 billion on intelligence each year, and out of that, $42 billion is going to private corporations. So what we see happening is the mainstream media has not been writing about this, has not been exploring it, but we’ve had a $42 billion industry come take over major responsibilities of government, when no one was noticing except a novelist. As I said, it’s quite a turn of events.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And from what you have been able to tell, the impact of all of the intelligence failures around 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction and the reorganization of the nation's intelligence agencies, what’s been the result of that?

R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, many of the changes have occurred in the intelligence agency. I’m not sure that they -- we could relate those directly to what’s occurred with outsourcing. And, of course, the manipulation of intelligence, that had nothing to do with private corporations, although, as I’ve pointed out, it would be possible to do that quite easily or much more easily now than before.

But what we’ve seen is the CIA and other parts of the national intelligence community failed us when it came to 9/11, and unfortunately, because of changes that have gone on in the last five years, those agencies are much, much weaker than they’ve ever been before. I mean, I would even question whether the CIA will survive another year, and if it does survive on the current trajectory, is it a CIA that we want to have, with, I mean, currently very high turnover rate? They’re in great denial with what’s going on. There have been some measures to try to stop it, but they’re half-measures at best. Over 50% of the people working there with less than five years experience, and this is a profession that it takes a -- there is a great long learning curve. And within the people that are 50%-or-less five-years experience, there’s high turnover among those, as well. And at the same time, you’ve got another half of the agency is outsourced to private corporations. So there’s some real questions of health of our intelligence apparatus, and it has definitely declined since 9/11. And those are some of the things that I look at fictionally in Outsourced.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for joining us. I want to thank Nesreen for being with us, coming up, the teacher who will be joining us, but I want to thank R.J. Hillhouse, who has written the new book called Outsourced, a novel, and has breaking stories on that issue, among them, "Outsourcing Intelligence,” posted on The Nation magazine website.

www.democracynow.org

A Polish priest reportedly bashed Jews over a potential government compensation deal on confiscated property. www.jta.org , July 10, 2007

Tadeusz Rydzyk, a Roman Catholic priest and the owner of Radio Maryja, which has a history of broadcasting anti-Semitic sentiments, is reported to have said in a recording obtained by the Polish magazine Wprost:

>>You know what this is about: Poland giving (the Jews) $65 billion. They will come to you and say, 'Give me your coat! Take off your trousers! Give me your shoes!' <<

http://www.antisemitism.org.il/eng/events/23226/Poland_A_Polish_priest_reportedly_

bashed_Jews_over_a_potential_government_compensation_deal_on_confiscated_property.

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From: stewart beattie - phineas07@yahoo.com.au Sent: Sunday, 29 July 2007 10:16 AM

*An open letter to the Director of Public Prosecutions for Tasmania

Dear Sir,

The revelations that have emerged in the last few days with regard to the Federal DPP’s case against the Gold Coast-based doctor Mohamed Haneef reveal just the tip of a very rotten the iceberg I believe, indicating the depths to which our system of community policing, justice and politics has sunk – quickly I may add, over the past 12-14 years.

The breathtaking speed at which Haneef was arrested by nation-wide actions of the Australian Federal Police, aided by various state police forces, and via the vociferous applaud springing from the Member for Benelong (some may know as “the Prime Minister” – for there is no such office in The Constitution), all thinking Australians must have found offensive at least and more than likely quite abhorrent.

However, and thankfully, even under the foreboding shadow of the newly enacted and draconian anti-terrorism laws, journalists began to probe for explanations as to evidence sufficient to warrant the blackening of this man’s character nationally and globally before the accused had even come to trial. The raucous chatter pre-empting the guilt of the accused was arguably loudest from Members of the Commonwealth Parliament, such as Phillip Ruddock, John Howard, Kevin Andrews and their ilk, not to mention Mick Keelty the AFP head. But the wheels soon began to fall off the wagon conveying the outrageous moves and countermoves to keep the accused detained despite a Magistrate’s order to the contrary!

First politicians and Keelty told of a lone specimen of empirical evidence, claimed to positively enmesh Haneef in a partnership (even when considered carefully a tenuous link at best I should think) with alleged terrorists in the UK. It was claimed a SIM card used in a mobile phone had been allegedly given to one of his relative, and that that card had been recovered from the burn-out car at an airport, thus proving the terrorist link.

The magistrate sitting for Haneef’s preliminary hearing apparently was not convinced that the accused posed a threat to the community as he was released on surety of bail. Though in a move which demonstrated peremption, Kevin Andrews, a Minister of The Crown acting in the portfolio of Immigration, had his agents indict Haneef at the courthouse door. As I pointed out, this detention could only be justified by a presumption on the part of Kevin Andrews of Haneef’s guilt before the fact!

It was at this point, the whole miscarriage of justice collapsed for those who have usurped the freedoms Australians, freedoms incidentally we all once took for granted as inalienable.

For then it was revealed, the charges against Haneef regarding the SIM card were based on a bare-faced lie. The SIM card was not recovered by UK police from the burnt-out car, “instead, the SIM card had been found in the home of Kafeel's brother, Sabeel, in Liverpool several hundred kilometres from the attack scene.”

This revelation had the monkeys climbing the wall! Howard has put an ocean between himself and his two bureaucrats: Bugg and Keelty.

"Bearing in mind that the detention of the man was undertaken by the police and not at the request or direction or encouragement of the Government, and that the case was prepared and presented by the Director of [Public] Prosecutions, I think that the right thing now is for those two men to explain the process and explain the reasons," John Howard is reported to have stated. Has not the organ grinder put the organ handle in the hands of his monkeys?

This situation reminds me immediately of the 1996 case prosecuted by none other than the same public servant Damien Bugg QC – then the DPP for Tasmania – against Martin Bryant, like the SIM card which was “…several hundred kilometres from the attack scene.”

Martin Bryant was about 58 km away from Seascape Cottage taking coffee, when David Martin was murdered there in the forenoon of Sunday 28^th April, 1996.

When is the present Director of Public Prosecutions for Tasmania going to reopen the Crown’s case against the intellectually damaged and incarcerated for life Martin Bryant?

I remain,

Yours Sincerely, Stewart Beattie

***

Australia is following Canada's model of legal persecution

Australia's federal public prosecutors are modelling their action plan against Dr Haneef on the Canadian model of legal prosecution/persecution used against Holocaust Revisionist Ernst Zündel who spend two years in detention, 2003-2005, before being deported to Germany where he received another five years for refusing to believe in the Holocaust.

Zündel was held in custody on the pretext that he was a national security risk. After his deportation the matter was challenged in the Supreme Court, which declared illegal the Security Certificate system of deportation, of course much too late for Zündel.

The fact that Stephen Keim, SC, released the first AFP-Haneef interview transcript to the Australian - and that editor Chris Mitchell published it in The Australian - is a most important step in retaining for Australia a transparent system of justice – Fredrick Töben.

Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour , 26 July 2007

On July 16, I attended Christians United for Israel's annual Washington-Israel Summit. Founded by San Antonio-based megachurch pastor John Hagee, CUFI has added the grassroots muscle of the Christian right to the already potent Israel lobby. Hagee and his minions have forged close ties with the Bush White House and members of Congress from Sen. Joseph Lieberman to Sen. John McCain. In its call for a unilateral military attack on Iran and the expansion of Israeli territory, CUFI has found unwavering encouragement from traditional pro-Israel groups like AIPAC and elements of the Israeli government.

But CUFI has an ulterior agenda: its support for Israel derives from the belief of Hagee and his flock that Jesus will return to Jerusalem after the battle of Armageddon and cleanse the earth of evil. In the end, all the non-believers - Jews, Muslims, Hindus, mainline Christians, etc. - must convert or suffer the torture of eternal damnation. Over a dozen CUFI members eagerly revealed to me their excitement at the prospect of Armageddon occurring tomorrow. Among the rapture ready was Republican Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. None of this seemed to matter to Lieberman, who delivered a long sermon hailing Hagee as nothing less than a modern-day Moses. Lieberman went on to describe Hagee's flock as "even greater than the multitude Moses commanded."

Throughout CUFI's Israel Summit, videographer Thomas Shomaker and I were hounded by PR agents seeking to prevent us from interviewing attendees about the End Times. The conference, we were told, was about "one message" - evangelical Christians supporting Israel. We were instructed to only interview CUFI leaders capable of sticking to the talking point that their support for Israel has, as Hagee declared, "nothing to do with the End Times." But I was forbidden from asking Hagee about statements he made in his book, "Jerusalem Countdown," that appeared to blame Jews for their own persecution.

After doing just that during a press conference, I was removed from the conference by off-duty DC cops summoned by members of Hagee's family. I have covered the Christian right intensely for over four years. During this time, I attended dozens of Christian right conferences, regularly monitored movement publications and radio shows, and interviewed scores of its key leaders. I have never witnessed any spectacle as politically extreme, outrageous, or bizarre as the one Christians United for Israel produced last week in Washington. See for yourself.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maxblumenthal/raptrereadytheunauth_b_57826.html

"It’s time to set the stage for resolution of this conflict, and that requires a legal definition of rights to exist, issued either by the ICJ, or through negotiations on borders, and where Israel will exist, first."

Does Israel have a “right” to exist? One would imagine with all of the emphasis being placed upon this supposed ‘right” that the idea of a Jewish only state is an idea that had been voted and agreed upon by a majority of the indigenous Palestinian population and their descendants prior to the occupation, and not in response to the threat of starvation, and at the point of a gun, a tank, an F-16 and a nuclear arsenal, backed up by threats and the political mischief of the United States and Europe.

Use of the word “right” implies that a law exists somewhere that mandates the establishment of a Jewish only state in Palestine. To those who argue that indeed the British mandate represents such a law, I answer that Britain had no right to mandate a Jewish only state on land that it also had no “right” to either partition, or to give away. Israel is an entity that by normal legal standards was established illegally, including the esoteric argument in respect to who it was exactly that followed Moses out of Egypt, and whether or not the exodus was an exclusively “Jewish” phenomenon. There really is no legal, or other basis for the recognition of this supposed right of Israel to exist as a Zionist implanted entity claiming rights to sovereignty in Palestine, and also to dominance over the Palestinian people.

Whereas in most cases the need and desire to move forward discourages too much hindsight, since Israel, the US and the EU feel that recognition of this non existent right is the basis for recognition of the very real, and non-negotiable human rights of the Palestinians, not to be starved to death, and continuously rounded up, and victimized by home demolitions, murder by illegal Israeli military raids and operations, and targeted assassinations in Palestine, it seems that resolving the issue of “right” to exist is the jumping off point for what might be called, the basic agreements in respect to Israel and Palestine as competing interests.

Whose claimed right to the disputed land is the legitimate right? There is a body of international law that makes the legal parameters for this discussion very clear, and that gives us some clues as to how legally this dispute might be resolved, yet since it does not play to the favor of Israel, these laws have been symbolically buried beneath the more emotional, hysterical and racist rhetoric of the Zionist and pro-Zionist ideologues and their Arab puppets, who never saw a law protecting the rights of Gentiles, and especially Christians and Muslims, that they didn’t hate and seek to either abolish or force into obsolescence.

Peacemakers will no doubt, if read this, scratch their heads and ask what is to be gained by such a discussion. The answer is quite simple, the absurdity of the demand that Palestine recognize a right for Israel to acquire land by military conquest, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and every other international law that seeks to discourage military domination of smaller and non nuclear nation/states by larger more aggressive and nuclear armed nation/ states, dictates such an examination of the law, and discussion if not negotiation on this issue of rights to exist.

There is a strand of thought which suggests that capitulation to Israel’s demanded and self created and defined “right” to exit is nothing more than a another attempt by Zionist to abolish international law through so-called negotiated agreements which in their opinion, nullifies all relevant law on such issues, even though the Geneva Conventions rules out negations on topics already settled in international law, and especially such negations between a belligerent occupier, and its victims. The reasons for this Geneva Convention approach are obvious, and particularly so in respect to the Palestine/ Israel conflict.

Since there is no body of law to support Israel’s illegal behavior, its self created rights, etc., Israel’s legitimacy, and acceptance of its’ Talmudic justice is dependent upon negotiations where they call the shots. By self-admission, Zionism is aimed at securing the supremacy of the Jewish race over all others, and to acquire a land wherein their supremacist ideals can take root and expand. The only means by which to attain the legitimacy and recognition that Israel, as a Zionist state, desperately needs and desires is to force Palestine into recognition of the fictional right. It is very sad that the EU and the US, aided by the so-called “Church” are willing to concede, not only to this racist, but also self defeating idea. It is even sadder and shameful that these same interests would actually act to abolish through fraud, all international law relevant to the relations between nations that seek to protect sovereign borders and to define the sovereign rights of all people, and not only Jews.

To accept that Israel has a right to exist in Palestine, means that we also recognize the right of Israel to exist as a so-called “Jewish Only” state wherever it lays claim to its rights according to a fantasy map which outlines its desired borders, which includes Iraq, Sudan, and most of the Arab lands. To legitimize the map, Israel also has created a history that existed only in the minds of Theodore Hertzl, a secularist, and those who realized that his scheme to illegally confiscate land, and to establish an exclusively Jewish Only state, created by non-Jewish East European Zionist in the heart of the Muslim and Arab world, could succeed, so long as the powerful Western nations could be convinced that a well armed Israel, not bridled by laws, morality or custom could serve Zionist Christianity and its subservient European and US client governments, as an outpost in the Middle East against the spreading influence of Islam.

With Islam now spreading both East and West, and manifesting not only as the religious but also the political choice of a growing number of adherents East and West, it should be clear that Hertzl’s plan did not work, and that Israel is not capable, even with nuclear weapons to stop the spread of Islam. What it has achieved is an unparalleled hatred of the US for our, until now “unconditional” support for the criminal Zionist project, and also for our cooperation in its illegal occupation of Palestine, and its proxy wars in Iraq and Sudan.

There is hope. Rather than to premise the human rights of the Palestinian people upon recognition of the fictional right to exist of Israel, it might be smarter to leave discussions of Israel’s right to exist to negotiators who would decide whether to seek to resolve this issue through the international court who could determine the legal borders of both entities and where any right to exit does legally exist for both interests, according to international law. Negotiators might also decide to attempt to resolve the issue of borders themselves, guided by the law and only within legal parameters which would who automatically return the Israel to the 1967 borders, since it is illegal to acquire land through military conquest. The result is that we would be left to examine the British mandate, and to decide either to cure its defects, or to throw it out completely, deferring instead to the UN partition of 1948. Its basis is also flimsy, but in comparison to world war, it is more desirable.

This issue of borders, once resolved automatically leads to a renunciation of violence by both the Israelis and the Palestinians, since there would no longer be any border dispute that allows for ambiguity as to the illegality of military operations on the lands of either by the other.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will make a serious mistake if he continues to press for a popular referendum on a solution to this conflict at this stage, or should he continue to promote the Israeli prison peace plan. Why he feels that either of these approaches are worthy of his time and effort escape most people, and he should reconsider, taking into consideration that not only will Palestine be affected by his ill conceived actions, but also the entire Arab world. We should get the cart and the horse in their proper positions before any talk of peace can ensue. That means that we must first legally define Israel, and where it has a right to exist, and the same for Palestine.

The Palestinian people of course have the right to determine what their own political definition and configuration will be, whether that is a state, or a bi-national state, etc. What is not purely a Palestinian issue is Israel’s right to exist as a Zionist entity in the Muslim world that will expand through military conquest into other Arab and Muslim lands, and that is the issue that stands before us today, and unfortunately the human rights of the Palestinian people, which are unalienable, have been put at stake the United States, EU and Israel in an attempt to isolate Palestine, and force it into submission. Once accomplished, Israel will, as before seek to complete its conquest of the lands in which it has claimed already, and arbitrarily to own rights.

After so many years of hell in Palestine, a little purgatory can’t hurt much worse. It’s time to set the stage for resolution of this conflict, and that requires a legal definition of rights to exist, issued either by the ICJ, or through negotiations on borders, and where Israel will exist, first.

Source: Media Monitors Network

Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour , 26 July 2007

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maxblumenthal/raptrereadytheunauth_b_57826.html

ZioNazi medal? - Sunday, May 13, 2007