London Explodes, Washington tenses further

The crisis that now has Western cities becoming police states — New York, Madrid, London, Washington not only already having experienced mass casualities but constantly on guard and constantly expending great resources to try to prevent further attacks — has deep causes that have been brewing for years. At the top of the list so much political and ideological poison has oozed out of the Arab-Israeli conflict for decades now. The harsh military occupation of the Palestinians, the many millions of Palestinians refugees, the severe and still escalating torture and repression methods...all on top of such extensive CIA infiltrations and Pentagon bases now omnipresent throughout the Middle East region, are all part of the story. Add to this what is a kind of historical blowback from the Israeli-U.S.
invasion/occupation of Lebanon in 1982, the horrible situation in Chechnya, Israeli and U.S. assassinations of the leaders of the PLO and Hamas, plus all the combined bloodletting that has occured in Algeria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. This ’Clash of Civilizations’ did not have to be. There is so much historical responsibility and guilt to apportion, and at the top of the list sad to say are the policies that have been pursued by the U.S. and Israel for so many decades now. Indeed, none other than the American Secretary of State admitted before an elite American University audience in Cairo just a few weeks ago that ’six decades’ of U.S. policies have been misguided and wrong. But Ms. Rice forgot to add that there are results from wrong policies, that appologies without acts of contrition and compensation are of little consequence, not to mention how much the current policies are understandably mistrusted and considered hypocritical and disingenuous by most Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East and throughout the world.

As for Ms. Miller at the top of the news last night before the London story took over, consider that her ’act of civil-disobedience’ may be more an act of protection and self-aggrandizement than anything else. If she agreed to any of the compromise ways to ’testify’ before the Grand Jury, as did the TIME magazine reporter and quite a few other Washington press noteables, she would have to tell the whole truth or possibly face more severe perjury charges. Now imagine what info she might really have in view of her own track-record, including ’confidential’ connections that go from Chalabi, to the Israelis, to the Jewish Washington Neocons of which she is an honorary member. Indeed, her own sources and information may be quite separate from Karl Rove and the White House which others have already pointed to anyway. Beyond protecting herself from having to tell the truth and avoid perjury Judith Miller has now been catapulted into the limelight and is sure to get lots of more speaking engagements and book deals. For her spending a few months in the clink has so many pluses; telling what she really knows not so.

This said about Miller, and in fact putting aside this particular case in total, the continuing escalating government pressures and legal entanglements being used against both those who try to tell the truth and report the truth in Washington, should be great cause for concern to all citizens. The two great checks against political abuse and corruption in our system of government are the courts and the media, the ’fourth estate’. What is happening is that both the courts and the media are finding themselves under continuing assault from the military-industrial complex and under continuing pressures to conform to those holding political power. Add to this the educational community as well.

The result is that there is more and more fear among those who might in the public good come forward either in public, or through the media, to reveal what they know. And there are more and more roadblocks put in the way of those in a position to seriously and without pulling punches report what they find out. In result, and precisely what those with power desire, less and less serious and detailed information makes its way to the American public. The more secrecy there is, the more difficult it is to find out what is really going on, the more unaccountability there is for having and using power, the more the very system of government and the very social contract between governing class and governed is endangered. Indeed, these are among the greatest of dangers in today’s contemporary Washington.

http://www.middleeast.org/launch/redirect.cgi?c=2&num=331&a=43