The 7/7 Bomb Attacks: The Real Reasons

In the wake of the bomb attacks upon London on 7 July 2005, a number of high officials in Britain and in some other Western countries have asserted that the terrorists responsible for those heinous acts were motivated by a desire to destroy everything that Western civilization “holds dear”, its individual freedoms, its democracy, its secular way of life.

While Al-Qaeda and its allies (if this is the network that is guilty of 7/7) may be opposed to various aspects of Western civilization, it is apparent from their strategies and their pronouncements that what has angered and incensed them is not Western democracy or Western freedoms as such, but Washington’s hegemony, reinforced by its close allies, and its adverse impact upon the Arab and Muslim world. Even before the 9/11 episode, Al-Qaeda’s bombings in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in 1996; in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and in Yemen in 2000 were all targeted against US interests. Indeed, it was the establishment of US military bases in Saudi Arabia in 1991—the most tangible manifestation of hegemonic power—which prompted the Al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, to create his own shadowy network.

After 9/11, Osama has highlighted other long standing grievances to justify his operations. He has cited the colonial dismemberment of the Arab nation in the early part of the twentieth century and the Western imposition of Zionist Israel upon the Arab heartland a few decades later, as traumatic events which have resulted in the humiliation and subjugation of his people. It is in this context that he has also chosen to defend the rights of the oppressed Palestinian people : the cause celebre of the Arab and Muslim world.

The hegemonic control that Washington exercises over Arab oil through what Al-Qaeda regards as US client states is yet another issue which the network focuses upon. It is an issue which resonates with the masses. And since the US led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 and the Anglo American occupation of Iraq beginning March 2003, the truncated sovereignty of both states has become an important item in the Osama agenda. Besides, the death and destruction that occupation has wreaked upon Iraq in particular has galvanized Arab and Muslim sentiment right across the globe.

This is why while the overwhelming majority of Muslims regard the tactics employed by Al-Qaeda as abhorrent and repugnant, the community nonetheless empathizes with many of the issues which the network claims to champion. All the more reason why the British, American and other Western governments should make an attempt to resolve these issues—especially in relation to Palestine and Iraq — with sincerity and honesty, guided by a profound sense of justice.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar,
President,

International Movement for a Just World (JUST).
Malaysia.

11 July 2005.

United States: trade in torture by Stephen Grey

This is a story of private jets flying out of Germany, of kidnappings on European streets, and of torture. It has a cast of lawyers, spies, suspected terrorists, innocent bystanders and an ex-CIA boss who believes that ‘human rights is a very flexible concept’.

A Swedish immigration lawyer, Kjell Jönsson, was on the phone to a client, asylum seeker Mohamed al-Zery from Egypt, on the afternoon of 18 December 2001. “Suddenly there was a voice coming in, saying to al-Zery to end the telephone conversation,” Jönsson recalls. “It was the Swedish police, who had arrested him.”

Jönsson had requested the Swedish government to promise that there would be no quick decision on Zery’s application for refugee status: he feared that Zery would be tortured if sent back to Cairo. But Zery was expelled in the shortest time that Jönsson had encountered in 30 years of asylum work.

Five hours after the arrest of Zery and another Egyptian, Ahmed Agiza, both were deported from Stockholm’s Brömma airport. It was not revealed for another two years that there had been a US plane at the airport, plus a team of US agents who, it has been claimed, picked up the suspects, manacled their wrists and ankles, dressed them in orange overalls, drugged them, and bundled them into the plane.

Jönsson said the US team “were wearing black hoods and they had no uniforms; they were wearing jeans. The Swedish security police described them as very professional.” The whole operation took less than 10 minutes. “It was obvious that they have done things like this before.”

The events, including the presence of the US agents, were kept quiet for months. But in response to concern in Sweden, its parliament has set up an inquiry and already released documents that confirm what happened. In one, the head of the deportation operation with the Swedish security agency, Arne Andersson, said they had problems obtaining a plane that night and turned to the CIA: “In the end we accepted an offer from our American friends . . . in getting access to a plane that had direct over-flight permits over all of Europe and could do the deportation in a very quick way.”

When agreeing to the transfer of the prisoners to Egypt, the Swedish government had sought and obtained diplomatic assurances that both men would not be tortured and would receive regular consular visits from Swedish diplomats in Cairo. They received such visits in jail. The authorities told the Swedish parliament and a United Nations committee that the prisoners had made no complaints. But they had right from the first visit, they protested that they had been severely tortured. Jönsson says Zery was tortured repeatedly for almost two months. “He was kept in a very cold, very small cell and he was beaten; the most painful torture was . . . where electrodes were put to all sensitive parts of his body many times, under surveillance by a medical doctor.”

Zery has now been freed, and has not been charged with any crime. But he is banned from leaving Egypt or from speaking openly about his time in prison. Agiza remains in an Egyptian prison. His mother, Hamida Shalibai, who has visited him many times, said in Cairo: “When he arrived in Egypt, they took him, hooded and handcuffed, to a building. He was led to an underground facility, going down a staircase. Then, they started interrogation, and torture. As soon as he was asked a question and he replied, ‘I don’t know’, they would apply electric shocks to his body, and beat him . . . During the first month of interrogation, he was naked, and not given any clothes. He almost froze to death.”

The confirmation that US agents were involved in the Swedish case provided the first concrete evidence that since 9/11 the US has been involved in organising a worldwide traffic in prisoners. Official and journalistic investigations show that the US has systematically organised the repatriation of Islamic militants to countries in the Arab world and East Asia where they can be imprisoned and interrogated using methods forbidden to US agents. Some call it torture by proxy. Prisoners have been captured and transported by the US not only from Afghanistan and Iraq, but from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Albania, Libya, Sudan, Kenya, Zambia, Gambia, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia.

The official term, coined by the CIA, is “extraordinary rendition”. No serving US official will discuss it in public. But a former senior official of the CIA, who left the agency last November, has provided a detailed and candid explanation. Michael Scheuer, who in the late 1990s headed the unit tasked with hunting down Osama bin Laden, was interviewed for a BBC Radio programme, File on Four. He confirmed the Swedish case was part of a much wider system.

Scheuer said the CIA invented rendition because it was ordered by the White House to deal with al-Qaida but had few options on what to do with terrorists it captured. “The practice of capturing people and taking them to third countries arose because the executive branch assigned to us the task of dismantling and disrupting and detaining terrorist cells and terrorist individuals,” he said. “And basically, when the CIA came back and said to the policymaker, where do you want to take them, the answer was - that’s your job. And so we developed this system of assisting countries to capture individuals overseas and bring them back to the particular country where they are wanted by the legal system.”

Among those at the centre of investigations into rendition is a lawyer at the Centre for Constitutional Rights, Barbara Olshansky. She is examining modern cases and how rendition is being justified legally. She believes the US is not only using third countries to interrogate prisoners but also its own offshore jail facilities run and operated by the CIA. She says that for more than 100 years the US seized fugitives outside its jurisdiction to bring them back to the US to face justice. General Manuel Noriega, the former president of Panama, was one high-profile example (1). That was ordinary rendition.

After the CIA began to fight al-Qaida, and especially since 9/11, extraordinary rendition emerged; the prisoner was captured, not for return to the US, but for transfer elsewhere. “Rendition started in the 1880s,” Olshansky says. “The US would always use any measure to get an individual back to be tried in front of a court here . . . Now this entire idea has been turned on its head. We now have extraordinary rendition, which means the US is capturing people and sending them to countries for interrogation under torture: rendering people for the purpose of extracting information. There is no planned justice at the end.”

Surprisingly, the CIA and other US agencies often use private executive jets to transfer prisoners. I obtained the confidential flight logs of a long-range Gulfstream V jet at the centre of the traffic. Since 2001 the plane has been to 49 destinations outside the US and has criss-crossed the world. It made frequent visits to Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Uzbekistan, all destinations from where the US has been repatriating prisoners.

The white jet, which has been photographed by plane spotters, has no marking except its US civilian registration number, until recently N379P. I have seen documentary evidence that it was the plane used to fly the Egyptians from Sweden. In October 2001 witnesses saw it in Karachi, Pakistan, when a group of masked men deported a terrorist suspect to Jordan.

According to a former covert officer with the CIA, Robert Baer, who has seen the flight logs, the jet is definitely involved in renditions. “The ultimate destinations of these flights are places that are involved in torture,” he says. Baer, who worked for the CIA in the Middle East for 21 years until he left in the mid-1990s, said such civilian jets were useful to the CIA because there were no military markings. “You can run these things out of shelf companies. You can set them up quickly, dismantle them when they are exposed; you can do it overnight - change the airplane if you have to. It’s fairly standard practice.”

Baer says rendition is about more than sending terrorists to be locked up in prison. Each country has its own value. “If you send a prisoner to Jordan you get a better interrogation. If you send a prisoner to Egypt you will probably never see him again; the same with Syria.” Countries such as Syria might seem to be US enemies but remain allies in the secret war against Islamic militancy. Baer says: “The simple rule in the Middle East is my enemy’s enemy is my friend . . . that’s the way it works. All of these countries are suffering in one way or another from Islamic fundamentalism, militant Islam.” For years the Syrians have offered to work with the US against Islamic militancy. “So at least until 11 September these offers were turned down. We generally avoided the Egyptians and the Syrians because they were so brutal.”

Baer believes the CIA has been carrying out renditions for years, but they became bigger and more systematic after 9/11. He says hundreds of prisoners, more than were sent to Guantánamo, may have been sent by the US to Middle Eastern prisons and that 9/11 had “justified scrapping the Geneva Convention” and was the end of “our rule of law as we knew it in the West”.

Some defenders of rendition inside the US administration view its purpose as the removal of terrorists from the streets. After a terrorist suspect has been sent back to Egypt, the US takes no interest in what happens. But the case of an Australian suspect, Mamdouh Habib, indicates that renditions are also aimed at collecting intelligence, which can be extracted with torture, forbidden to US agents. Habib, a former coffee shop manager from Sydney, was arrested in Pakistan, close to the Afghan border, a month after 9/11.

He was handed over to US agents, who flew him to Cairo, where he was tortured for six months, according to his US lawyer, Professor Joe Margulies, of the MacArthur Justice Centre of the University of Chicago. Margulies says: “Mr Habib describes routine beatings. He was taken into a room and handcuffed and the room was gradually filled with water until the water was just beneath his chin. Can you imagine the terror of knowing you can’t escape?” On another occasion, he was suspended from a wall. “His feet rested on a drum with a metal bar through it. And when they passed an electric current on the drum he got a jolt of electricity and he had to move his feet, and he was left suspended by his hands. And it went on until he fainted.”

Under this interrogation, Margulies, says, Habib confessed to his involvement with al-Qaida and readily signed “every document they put in front of him”.

He was transferred back to US custody, sent to Afghanistan and then to Guantánamo. The confessions he signed in Egypt were used against him in military tribunals. According to Margulies: “Those combatant status review tribunals relied on the evidence secured in Egypt as a basis to detain Mr Habib.”

After Margulies and others lodged public protests over his torture, Habib was freed from Guantánamo in January and flown to Australia, where the government said he would not be charged with any crime, although intelligence officials there continue to accuse him of involvement with al-Qaida.

Most prisoners sent by the US to jails in the Middle East are not free to reveal their treatment. But a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, a mobile phone technician rendered to a Syrian jail by the US, is now free to speak. His story supports the assertion that prisoners are sent abroad to be questioned. In September 2002 Arar, returning home from a holiday in Tunisia, was changing planes at JFK airport in New York. He had often visited and worked in the US, so he expected no problems. But he was taken to an interrogation room and eventually an immigration holding centre, the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn.

It became clear that the reason for his arrest was information passed from Canada to the US. Canada was secretly investigating a terrorist suspect in Ottawa, and Arar had used the suspect’s name as an emergency contact when he signed a lease on a flat. Although he is a Syrian national by birth, Arar is a citizen of Canada and has lived there for 17 years. He was surprised to be asked questions in New York that could easily be dealt with in Ottawa.

Twelve days after his arrest, Arar was woken at 3am to be told he was being removed from the US. He was driven to New Jersey and, in chains, put aboard an executive jet. “I thought when they put me on this private jet with its leather seats, who am I for them to do that? What kind of information could I offer them? So when they fed me this nice dinner, I thought of the tradition in the Muslim world called Eid, where they slaughter an animal, and before they slaughter the animal they feed him. That’s exactly what I thought when I was in the plane. I was always thinking how I could avoid torture, because at that point I realised that the only reason why they were sending me somewhere was to be tortured for them to get information. I was 100% sure about that.“

After two stops for fuel, the plane arrived in Amman, Jordan, and Arar was taken by road to Damascus, to the headquarters of the Syrian secret police. He says he was placed in a cell little bigger than a coffin and was kept there for more than 10 months. His fears of torture were realised. “The interrogator said: ‘Do you know what this is?’. I said: ‘Yes, it’s a cable’ and he told me: ‘Open your right hand.’ I opened my right hand and he hit me like crazy. And the pain was so painful, and of course I started crying and then he told me to open my left hand, and I opened it and he missed, then hit my wrist. And then he asked me questions. If he does not think you are telling the truth, then he hits again. An hour or two later he put me in this room where sometimes I could hear people being tortured.”

After three days short of a year in Syrian custody, Arar was released and flown home to Ottawa. No charges have ever been laid against him by Canada or Syria. In Canada his case has caused a political outcry and there is a public inquiry. Like many modern torture victims, Arar has no physical scars. Professional interrogators are too clever. His scars are psychological.

But the head of Amnesty International in Canada, Alex Neve, is convinced that Arar is telling the truth: “I believe it for a number of reasons. I interviewed him in considerable detail, and in the course of my many years of work with Amnesty International I have interviewed torture survivors here in Canada, in refugee camps, individuals who have just been released from jail cells; and I found his experience to be consistent and credible with what I have known and learned and experienced at other interviews.”

Who is responsible for this system of rendition, and who in Washington authorised it? At the Fall’s Church, Virginia, home of Michael Scheuer, we spoke about the tactics of the war on terror and about why, when he headed the Osama bin Laden unit at the CIA, they developed rendition as a tactic against al-Qaida. Scheuer is outspoken - while at the CIA he wrote two critical books (published anonymously) about anti-terror activities. But he has never before been so candid about such a sensitive matter.

Scheuer insists that every rendition operation was approved by lawyers: “There is a large legal department within the CIA, and there is a section of the department of justice that is involved in legal interpretations for intelligence work, and there is a team of lawyers at the national security council. And on all of these things those lawyers are involved in one way or another and have signed off on the procedure. The idea that somehow this is a rogue operation that someone has dreamed up is just absurd.” Scheuer recalls that when he organised such operations, the authority had to come from director of central intelligence or his assistant director. “So basically the number one and two men in the intelligence community are the ones who sign off.”

Scheuer says that with each rendition, he is convinced that “these people deserved to be off the street”. But mistakes would happen, as they always did, and innocents might be captured. “It is impossible not to have a mistake in the business of espionage and intelligence,” he says. “There was never anything flip or blasé about the way this was approached. It was a deadly serious business, and if we were wrong, we were wrong. But the evidence pointed us toward what we did.”

Scheuer has few qualms about the danger that such men might be tortured: “The bottom line is getting anyone off the street who you’re confident has been involved or is planning to be involved in operations that could kill Americans is a worthwhile activity.”

Even if he might be tortured? “It wouldn’t be us torturing them. And I also think that there is a lot of Hollywood involved in our portrayal of torture in Egypt and in Saudi Arabia. It’s rather hypocritical to worry about what the Egyptians do to people who are terrorists and not condemn the Israelis for what they do to people they deem terrorists. Human rights is a very flexible concept. It kind of depends on how hypocritical you want to be on a particular day.”

To be fair to Scheuer, he has concerns about rendition as a long-term tactic. He believes that dictatorial regimes such as Egypt and Jordan cause Islamic militancy, so it makes little strategic sense to be working closely with them. “Any kind of a detainee capture is a technical success, but in the strategic sense we are losing, and one of the main reasons is because of our support for dictatorships in the Muslim world.”

But, he says, the US has little option about what to do with these prisoners. Politicians do not want terrorists brought back to US soil and dealt with in US courts. “We’re in a lot of positions around the world where we don’t have a lot of options, and sometimes you have to work with the devil.” As long as US policymakers did not decide how to deal with prisoners under the US legal system, the CIA had no choice but “do what you can with what you have”.

Scheuer estimates that there have been about 100 CIA renditions of Sunni terrorists. Others, including Robert Baer, think the figure is much higher and that in the post-9/11 world the US department of defence under Donald Rumsfeld is now in the business of moving prisoners around the world, while the US military has shifted hundreds of prisoners to jails in the Middle East.

The US department of defence and the CIA declined to speak about rendition and its justification. I did speak to a vice-president of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank linked to the Bush administration. Danielle Pletka was a former senior staffer on the Senate foreign relations committee. “I’m not a big fan of torture,” she says. She does not endorse Syria or the way Egypt runs its prisons or security system.“Unfortunately, there are times in war when it is necessary to do things in a way that is absolutely and completely abhorrent to most good, decent people. While I don’t want to say that the US has engaged routinely in such practices, because I don’t think that it is routine by any standard . . . if it is absolutely imperative to find something out at that moment, then it is imperative to find something out at that moment, and Club Med is not the place to do it.”

What is the legality of these operations? Pletka says that, as a non-lawyer, she cannot answer such questions. The United Nations convention against torture, ratified by the US and endorsed by President Bush, states that “no state shall expel, return or extradite a person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture”. Every year the US state department condemns and details human rights abuse and torture in countries such as Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Last year’s report on Egypt described torture as “common and persistent”.

So how can rendition be legal? No one at the justice department would comment. The US legal justification is a state secret. Official Washington’s coyness about defending rendition may have something to do with the increased threat of being held to account in the courts. Apart from the danger of lawsuits in US courts, there are judicial investigations opening into alleged CIA abductions on European soil.

Germany has been a key base for the CIA jets. The flight logs I have seen show frequent stops of the Gulfstream jet, and a Boeing 737 jet used for rendition, at Frankfurt airport. There is a judicial inquiry under way in Germany into the case of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen from Ulm who claimed he was kidnapped in Skopje, Macedonia, on 31 December 2003. He was flown three weeks later to Afghanistan and a US prison facility where, he has claimed, he was repeatedly beaten before being released four months later and dumped on a roadside in Albania.

At first his claims seemed unbelievable, but flight logs I obtained from aviation sources show clear evidence that the CIA’s Boeing 737 transported him to Skopje on 23 January 2004. My documents show the plane flew in from Majorca and then took Masri to Kabul via Baghdad. Such evidence could put the CIA in a difficult position with its German counterparts, who may be forced to treat the case as an illegal kidnap.

In Italy there is now a judicial investigation into the kidnapping of a suspected al-Qaida activist in Milan. It is claimed that US agents, without legal permission, kidnapped a suspect from the streets of a close European ally. At noon on 16 February 2003 an Egyptian, Abu Omar, disappeared in Milan’s Via Guerzona during a 10-minute walk from his home to a local mosque. An eyewitness said he was stopped on the street by three white men, with a van drawn up on the pavement. He had been under surveillance by Italian authorities but they denied any role in his disappearance. The claim is that he was seized by US agents, taken to the US Aviano air base and flown to Egypt.

The deputy prosecutor of Milan, Armando Spataro, who is the magistrate investigating the case, refuses to accuse the US but is treating the case as involuntary kidnap and is certain that Omar is now in Egypt. If the US was involved, would it be a crime? “If it were true, it would be a serious breach of Italian law. It would be absolutely illegal,” he says.

Source: Le Monde Diplomatique, 4 April 2005

Media and Religion by Chandra Muzaffar

The media has always been an avenue for the expression of religion. Even in societies which see themselves as ‘secular’, religious festivals and ceremonies are widely reported. The activities of religious organizations make their way into the media. Religious belief systems, rituals and symbols are sometimes discussed in newspaper articles or radio and television programmes. Religious personalities attract media headlines.

The presence of religion in the media is not a problem. It is when elements within a religious community use, abuse and exploit religious sentiments for some nefarious purpose through the media that we should become concerned. Such misuse of the media is not new. If the exploitation of religion through the media has become more serious, it is because the impact of both religion and the media upon society is much greater today than it was a few decades ago.

In almost every religious community today, there is a fringe that distorts some sacred belief or other and then disseminates this perverted view through the media. Unfortunately, the mainstream media tends to give the impression that this is happening only within the Muslim community. Of course there are Muslim extremists who preach hatred of the ‘infidel’ and have made violence their credo but there is also the Christian Right – especially Christian Zionists – who spew venom and vile anger against the Muslim Other. A segment of the media, specifically American television, has been a powerful and influential ally of the Christian Right as it propagates a dogma that justifies empire and military hegemony – a dogma which many Christian thinkers would argue subverts the sublime message of Jesus. Likewise, a segment of the Israeli media has helped to buttress the Jewish Right with its belligerent attitude towards Palestinian Muslims and Christians in contradiction to the true teachings of the Tohrah which display some concern for the unity of humankind, just as a segment of the Hindi media has played a major role in promoting a form of Hindu bigotry which makes a mockery of the religion’s spirit of inclusiveness and accommodation.

An ethical journalist who is genuinely concerned about bigotry and extremism will be critical of such tendencies in all religions, including his own, and will not be selective or biased in his approach. At the same time, through study and research, he will discover that in all religions there is also an inclusive, universal dimension premised upon the oneness of the human family. Indeed, the media should help the masses understand how profound and authentic this dimension of religion is, and how it can contribute towards the evolution of a global civilization in the future. Here again one observes that the mainstream Western media which often sets the tone for the non-Western media has seldom highlighted the all embracing universal vision of a common humanity that lies at the very heart of the Quran and has moulded Islamic philosophy and mysticism through the ages.

In analyzing the inclusive as against the exclusive, the universal as against the particularistic in religion, the media should attempt to relate them to socio-political and socio-economic structures at the national and global levels. A leadership in a certain society may choose to emphasise the exclusive and particularistic aspects of religion in order to perpetuate its political dominance in the name of the community it claims to represent. On the other hand a group aspiring to come to power may be more inclined towards the inclusive and universal dimensions of a certain religion as a way of maximizing support from a wide spectrum of ethnically diverse communities found in that society. At a certain point in time, the exclusive approach to religion may serve the economic interests of a certain class; at some other time an inclusive approach may help to enhance the economic well-being of a particular community. Similarly, at the global level at this juncture in history it is apparent that those who are determined to perpetuate their political and economic hegemony are closely aligned to certain elements in the Christian and Jewish communities – the Christian and Jewish Right—who have an exclusive religious outlook. Interestingly, certain Muslim groups who are challenging this global hegemony through terror and violence also adhere to an exclusive and narrow interpretation of Islam. It is perhaps even more significant from a long term perspective that there are groups of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and followers of other faiths who are opposed to both global hegemony in all its manifestations and the terror tactics employed by some of the adversaries of hegemony. The interactions among these different religious groups and the common positions that they have adopted on the imperative need for a peaceful global transformation have received very little coverage in the mainstream media. This proves that the media has not really understood the established and emerging trends within different religious communities and how they interface with the structures of power and wealth especially in the global arena.

When the mainstream media tries to comprehend certain trends within a particular religious community it tends to use categories of analysis which may in fact be meaningless in the context of the community’s own vocabulary. An outstanding example of this is the use of the term ‘fundamentalist’ to describe someone who in the media’s opinion is ‘bigoted’, ‘conservative,’ even ‘extremist’. To apply the term to a Muslim makes little sense since all Muslims are required by their religion to uphold the fundamentals of their faith, the most important of which is the belief in the oneness of God. Conservative Muslims invariably go beyond the fundamentals and demand for instance that Muslim governments implement the Islamic penal code and enforce a certain Islamic dress code for women in order to prove their fidelity to the faith. It is Muslims who make such demands that the Western media regards as ‘fundamentalists’ and yet from an Islamic perspective these Muslims would be guilty of elevating the non fundamentals of the religion to the level of fundamentals. By imposing a term which owes its origin to the orientation of certain groups within early twentieth century American Christianity upon Islam and Muslims, the media has not only caused unnecessary confusion but has also perhaps unwittingly strengthened the hand of conservative Muslims! From another perspective, the application of the term ‘fundamentalist’ to the followers of non-Christian Protestant religions without considering the specific characteristics of ‘the other’ religion is an outstanding example of contemporary intellectual imperialism disseminated through the media.

What all this shows is that the contemporary media has to deepen and broaden its knowledge and understanding of the different religions and how they impact upon society. It is true that the majority of journalists in today’s world are not well versed in religions (in the plural) and the relationship between religions and social forces. Indeed, many of them, even when they are operating in societies where the people are by and large religious, tend to be somewhat estranged from matters of faith. With religion playing a much more prominent role today in the public sphere, it is no longer possible for journalists to stay away from religion. This is why they should not only learn about religion; they should also develop some empathy for faith and the practice of faith.

This is one of the major challenges that awaits the journalist and the media in the twenty first century.

The above article is a summary of a presentation made at the Asia Media Summit organised by the Asia Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development (AIBD) in Kuala Lumpur in May 2005.

Israel’s war crimes against the USS Liberty and its crew on June 8, 1967—midway in the Six-Day War between Israel and Arab states—provoked a shocking U.S. response, a cover up that shielded Israeli from U.S. outrage and marked the beginning of America’s 38 years of Israel-centric foreign policies. It signaled a costly, radical turn for the worse that sent U.S. prestige and credibility plunging and loaded on the American people ever-growing new burdens—even war—with no end in sight. .

The assault remains perplexing—and deeply painful—to the few Americans aware of its details but no more so than the strange behavior of President Lyndon B. Johnson while the attack was still underway. Most Americans have no knowledge of the assault on Liberty or the cover up, but these occurrences are certain to make indelible pages in future history books.

When attacked, the Liberty, an unarmed reconnaissance ship of the U.S. Navy, was moving slowly in international waters off the coast of Gaza and the Sinai. The day’s horrors are detailed in a report filed on behalf of the ship’s survivors in a U.S. circuit court in California on June 8. Among the Israeli crimes cited in the lawsuit are the following:-
—sustained rocket, cannon and torpedo fire from air and sea that killed U.S. 34 sailors, wounded 173 others, and riddled the defenseless ship with holes, one of them 40 feetwide;
—gun fire that destroyed rubber lifeboats that were put in the water when the ship’s captain ordered preparations to abandon ship;
—the firing of napalm on the open deck where defenseless sailors were attempting to protect the ship,

The assault was deliberate. It did not begin until three hours after Israeli command headquarters received positive identification that the target was an unarmed U.S. Navy reconnaissance ship The proof came from a series of close-in aerial surveillance flights by Israeli aircraft early that morning. The American flag flew in a brisk breeze at the ship’s stern throughout the day. Large U.S. Navy insignia were clearly visible on the ship’s hull.

When Israeli General Moshe Dayan issued the order to sink the Liberty, one of the generals on his staff vainly protested: “This is pure murder.” On learning the ship’s identity, several Israeli pilots refused to take part. .

Testimony of survivors leaves no doubt that Israel’s high command intended to sink the ship, kill all personnel aboard, and leave no trace of Israel’s guilt.. At the least, it was monstrous ingratitude. At the very moment Israeli forces murdered U.S. sailors, President Lyndon B. Johnson was secretly providing unmarked U.S. military aircraft and personnel to aid Israel in its war against Arab states.

It is difficult to imagine a goal so attractive it would lead the government of Israel, a beleaguered nation whose only substantial international support came from the United States, to attempt to destroy its benefactor’s military vessel and crew..

Liberty survivors believe Israel’s most likely goal was luring the United States into joining the Jewish state as a fighting partner in its war against Arab nations. The scenario: Israel would secretly perpetrate a U.S. Navy disaster but fabricate evidence that blamed on Egypt, the leading Arab combatant; an outraged America would declare war, shouting “Remember the Liberty”; and U.S. forces would soon be battling Arabs as Israel’s war partner, a tempting scheme. With all-out help from the U.S. forces, Israel could expect its nation’s security guaranteed far into the future. Another Israeli motivation might have been fear that Liberty radiomen would intercept evidence of Israel’s decision to invade Syria the next day and transmit that potentially-damaging message to Washington. The scheme could work only if Israel destroyed the Liberty and its entire crew but left none of its own fingerprints..

Whatever the motivation, the risk of disclosure was immense. If only one U.S. sailor survived to tell the true story or just one outraged Israeli officer spoke out, the American people would demand severe retribution against Israel, not Egypt.

The scheme might have worked, except for the ingenuity of Liberty radiomen. It failed because, despite Israel’s intense jamming of airways and bombardment that wrecked the ship’s radio equipment, the crew managed to transmit one lone message—a call for help that was received by a nearby U.S. aircraft carrier as well as Israeli intelligence.

The message spoiled Israeli plans to blame Egypt. Instead of being able to welcome Washington as its new full-scale partner in arms against Arabs, Israel had the task of convincing President Johnson that it was just a tragic case of mistaken identity:
Israel dispatched a helicopter to the crime scene. Aboard were senior Israeli officders, together with the U.S. naval attaché in TelAviv. The Israelis offered help to Liberty survivors—an offer scornfully refused by the ship’s skipper, Commander William McGonagle, still on the bridge despite severe leg wounds. Israel also sent regrets to the White House, claiming, falsely, that Israeli forces believed their target was Egyptian.

Even more astounding was the behavior of President Lyndon B. Johnson during the assault and the days immediately following. He behaved as if his chief responsibility was to protect Israel from harm and criticism.

When Johnson learned that a U.S. carrier had launched fighter aircraft to defend the Liberty from Israeli attack, he ordered the aircraft to turn back and return to the carrier, the only time in U.S. naval history that rescue aircraft were called back while a Navy vessel was under assault. It was stark evidence that Johnson considered Israeli sensitivities and the well-being of Israeli attack personnel more important than the lives of Liberty crewmen.

After the assault, Johnson continued to place Israel’s interests above Liberty survivors. He immediately took steps to protect Israel from any public protest. He accepted quickly Israel’s excuse of mistaken identity, although his administration knew it to be false. He ordered a Navy Court of Inquiry but instructed its chairman, Admiral Isaac Kidd, to absolve Israel of guilt. [In a recent sworn statement, retired Navy Captain Ward Boston, Jr., a member of the Court of Inquiry, declared that he and Kidd were convinced all along that the assault was deliberate, not a case of mistaken identity.]

The president also ordered Kidd to keep survivors from talking about their ordeal. As soon as they were brought ashore, Kidd complied with presidential command by threatening the sailors, some still bedridden, with court martial and imprisonment if they said anything publicly. In his inquiry, Kidd interviewed only a few of the survivors.

When the court completed its report, Kidd admitted privately to a colleague that he knew it was misleading. Before it was released to the media and without Kidd’s approval, its text was further sanitized for Israel’s benefit by Department of Defense civilian attorneys. One of the items they deleted was testimony by survivor Lloyd Painter who told the court he witnessed Israeli forces deliberately shooting lifeboats to pieces. Medals were issued to survivors but in quiet ceremonies far from the White House and the president.

Over the years, Liberty survivors have pleaded repeatedly with administration officials, congressional committees, individual Members of Congress and the media for full disclosure of the truth. Only a few periodicals and networks responded. Of the few individual Members of Congress who spoke out, none in a leadership position.

The court’s false and misleading inquiry was the only official one ever held. Johnson’s successors in the presidency kept the cover up tight. Many public documents related to the assault remain classified.

Why the cover up?

Three years ago, Condoleeza Rice, now President George W. Bush’s secretary of state and then his national security adviser, unwittingly explained why in a remarkable burst of candor. She said: “We have an Israel-centric foreign policy.” Rice’s statement was profound and accurate. Although she spoke nearly a half-century after the assault her words explain why the cover up began and why it continues to this day.

Since 1967, many people in and out of government have learned the truth abut the cover up. Why were they silent? Why did the reporters ignore tips that would surely lead to top-rated news stories?

The sad and simple truth is that most Americans, especially those in public office and even those in the presidency, have a deadly fear of being called anti-Semitic. They will not utter or write criticism of Israel, no matter how well documented, for fear it will draw that unwarranted and unwelcome charge. Former U.S. Ambassador the UN George W. Ball once stated that the most powerful instrument of intimidation employed by Israel’s U.S. lobby is the “reckless charge of anti-Semitism.”

The fear is endemic but rarely mentioned. It reaches all government offices and intimidates all levels and sections of our society—business, education, academia, preachers, publishing and other media. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the only president to demand that Israel abide by international law. In 1956, on the eve of his successful bid for reelection, he forced Israel to halt its illegal military assault on Egypt’s Suez Canal.

Among those who know the facts about Israeli influence, almost all can supply an excuse to remain silent. The few willing to speak out get little or no attention.

Pro-Israel forces long ago successfully redefined anti-Semitism to mean any criticism of the State of Israel. The new definition is false, malicious and damaging to our national interests, but the Liberty crew and their supporters are among the few willing to risk an anti-Semitic smear.

The cover up of the Liberty was the first convincing proof that pro-Israel forces had won absolute control of U.S. Middle East policy. Pressure from friends who were passionate zealots for Israel forced him to violate his oath of office by ordering back the fighter planes and then imposing a tight cover up an act that was surely an act of ingratitude seldom if ever matched in history.

As a consequence, most citizens are unaware that our U.S. Middle East policy has not been crafted by lobbies for two politically-powerful religious communities whose goals are narrowly focused. One community is relatively small in number but powerful in influence. It consists mainly of secular Jews, as well as ultra-Orthodox Jews. They are perhaps best described as extreme Zionists. The other community is very large, consisting of millions of Christians who accept a controversial interpretation of the Bible’s Book of Revelations.

Both groups believe present-day Israel is a resurrection of ancient Israel and a preeminent part of God’s plan. Both believe the Jewish state must be kept strong and united until the arrival on earth of each group’s messiah.

They have attained such political power that Congress dutifully appropriates billions to Israel without conditions or serious discussion, much less real debate. Because of this unrestricted aid year after year, Israeli leaders have been able to violate human rights, engage in lawless behavior, abandon the idealism of Judaism, and lure America into damning complicity in this inhuman and unlawful conduct.

The complicity reached a fateful peak in 1982 when the U.S. government supplied the arms and material that Israel used in slaughtering 18,000 Beirut civilians, then, adding insult to injury, immediately replenished Israel’s supply of weapons and ammunition when the slaughter ended. . Osama bin Laden recently stated publicly that he planned 9/11 as the payback for the U.S. supportive role.

The lobby’s grip on our government is unhealthy for both Israel and the United States. It is also unhealthy for both Christianity and Judaism. If our nation is to emerge from today’s peril, we must face openly and critically the role of these religious groups and their passionate, dangerous attachment to the government of Israel. If we keep tip-toeing around reality, we risk still greater peril tomorrow.

The Liberty cover up will someday be recognized as an historic but fateful turning point for America. It convinced Israeli leaders that they could get by with anything, even mass murder of U.S. sailors, with only sympathetic, helpful reaction from Washington.

It proved ultimately to be a fateful blunder for both Israel and America. It inaugurated ever-mounting U.S. aid to Israel, all of it unconditional and without accountability required. It cleared the path for Israel to mount still broader conquest and more flagrant abuse of human rights. It reinforced Israel’s contempt for legal constraints and world opinion.

As I ponder the awful price paid by the Liberty survivors, I marvel—and recoil—at the grip the government of Israel, a small nation of about five million people, maintains over America, a nation of nearly 300 million.

After many years in politics, I am convinced that America’s greatest burden today is the quiet but firm domination of our national life by Israel, a phenomenon that reaches far broader and deeper than the fate of the Liberty and its crew, important as their fate is to hundreds of families and in the proud annals of the U.S. Navy. Israel’s assault, although an egregious example of this how costly this burden can be, is not the only example, nor the most recent one.

Our longstanding Israel-centric policies are the main reason why America, once revered worldwide, is today reviled worldwide. Our war in Iraq and even 9/11 can be traced to the extreme anti-Arab bias in our Israel-centric foreign policies.

If the truth about the assault on the Liberty had been officially disclosed in detail at any point since 1967, public outrage would have forced an immediate end to our Israel-centric foreign policy. Unconditional aid to Israel would come to a halt. All future U.S. aid would be tied to firm conditions and to accountability procedures like those demanded of all other aid recipients. Israel would no longer be lured into lawbreaking by protective, unconditional U.S. military, political and economic support. Years ago, I heard Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s preeminent political and military leader, state plainly that Israel would have no choice but to obey U.S. requirements if they were conditions of eligibility for U.S. aid.

The report filed in federal court by Liberty survivors could become America’s turn for the better. If the Bush administration responds positively, the benefits can be great A bright new day can dawn for America. Our nation’s relationship with powerful religious groups can become rational, as adherents for the first time become aware of Israel’s perfidy.

Mr. Findley is a former Republican Congressman and one of the most respected critics of US foreign policy in the Middle East today