Ex-US diplomat blames Israel for Pakistani leader's death

Declan Walsh
Monday December 5, 2005

A retired US ambassador has reignited the debate about one of south Asia's greatest whodunits, the death in 1988 of Pakistan's president General Zia ul-Haq, by saying that Israel was responsible.

John Gunther Dean, then US ambassador to India, said he suspected Israel's secret service Mossad of downing Gen Zia's aircraft in an effort to stop Pakistan developing the nuclear bomb. But when he reported these suspicions to Washington, he was accused of being mentally unbalanced and subsequently forced into retirement. Almost 20 years later, Mr Dean, 80, was speaking out in an attempt to tell his side of the story.

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The circumstances of Gen Zia ul-Haq's death are as contentious as the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy. The military dictator died on August 17 1988, after leaving the town of Bahawalpur, in Punjab province, where he had been watching a trial of American M1 tanks.

Moments after Gen Zia's C-130 plane took off it wobbled then plunged to the ground, killing all on board including the US ambassador to Pakistan and a US general. Conspiracy theorists have focused on a crate of mangos placed on board moments before take-off. Some believe it was sprayed with VX, a poison gas, which only a few countries had.

Gen Zia had a long list of enemies, all of whom have been blamed for his death over the years. But Israel has received little attention. Mr Dean told the World Policy Journal that it was plausible Mossad had orchestrated an assassination plot, believing Gen Zia's boast that he was only "a screwdriver's turn away from the bomb". But when he told his superiors he was removed from his position in Delhi and his career ended. Mr Dean, a Jew who fled Nazi Germany, said he had no proof of Israeli responsibility. General Muhammad Ali Durrani, a retired Zia-era commander, told the journal the Israeli thesis was "far-fetched" and blamed the crash on the C-130, which he said had a history of faults.

Source: Guardian Unlimited

The Briefing (1.26.06)

ROLLING STONE - January 26, 2006

CIA Plot to Dupe Iran With Falwed Nuke Backfires
In a secret - code named Merlin - the CIA apparently recruited a Russian scientist to deliver plans for a nuclear bomb to Iranian agents. According to State of War, a new book by New York Times reporter James Risen, the idea was to dupe Tehran by inserting design flaws into the blueprints, causing the Iranians to waste years building a fission bomb that would ultimately fizzle. But the plan backfired when the Russian scientist noticed the all-too-obvious flaws and offered to help the Iranians fix them. Though initiated under President Clinton in 2000, Merlin was endorsed by the Bush administration, which may have tried the same ruse on North Korea.

Bush Bypasses Senate to Appoint Unqualified Crony
While the Senate was adjourned for Christmas, President Bush used his power of "recess appointment" to install Julie Myers as the nation's top immigration official. Myers makes up for her complete lack of experience with some high-level connections: She is the niece of former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers and the wife of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff's chief of staff. Bush's backdoor appointment avoided a showdown with Republican Sen. George Voinovich, who told Myers at her confirmation hearing that Chertoff should appear before the Senate and explain "why he thinks you're qualified for the job. Because based on your resume, I don't think you are."

President Reserves Right to Torture Terror Suspects
On December 15th, the president finally appeared to endorse the anti-torture statue authored by Sen. John McCain, declaring flatly that "this government does not torture." But when Bush signed the law on December 30th, he added a loophole: a "signing statement" asserting his authority to "protect the American people from further terrorist attacks." As a senior administration official explained, the statement allows Bush to waive the law - and torture terror suspects - in the name of national security. McCain quickly issued a statement noting that Congress refused to grant the president such a waiver - and pledged "strict oversight" to ensure the Bush implements the new law.
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Source: January 26, 2006 issue of Rolling Stone.

Israel Suspends Contact With Pat Robertson

JERUSALEM - Israel has suspended contact with evangelist Pat Robertson for suggesting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was divine punishment for withdrawing from the Gaza Strip.

The controversy has cast doubt on plans for a Christian tourism center that would showcase the growing flow of money and influence from U.S. church groups.

The decision, announced Wednesday by Israeli officials, does not affect other Christian groups that also consider it their spiritual duty to support Israel as fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

Israeli leaders see the Christian allies as tireless lobbyists in Washington and elsewhere. The evangelicals also funnel millions of dollars each year to Jewish settlers in the West Bank and — before last year's pullout — the Gaza Strip.

Tourism Minister Abraham Hirchson said he gave instructions to "stop all contact" with groups associated with Robertson. Last week, Robertson implied Sharon's massive stroke was a blow for "dividing God's land" with the withdrawal from Gaza and four West Bank settlements.

But Hirchson said the order did not apply to "all the evangelical community, God forbid."

Robertson is leading a group of evangelicals who have pledged to raise $50 million to build the Christian Heritage Center in Israel's northern Galilee region, where tradition says Jesus lived and taught.

Under a tentative agreement, Robertson's group was to put up the funding, while Israel would provide land and infrastructure. Hirchson had predicted it would draw up to 1 million pilgrims a year, generate $1.5 billion in spending and support about 40,000 jobs.

But the fate of the project is now in question, said Ido Hartuv, spokesman for the tourism ministry.

"We will not do business with him, only with other evangelicals who don't back these comments," Hartuv said. "We will do business with other evangelical leaders, friends of Israel, but not with him."

A spokeswoman for Robertson's ministry declined to comment on Israel's decision.

"We have not talked to the Israelis on this topic," said spokeswoman Angell Watts. "We continue to maintain our long-standing commitment to the Jewish people and the state of Israel."

Robertson's comments on Sharon drew condemnation from other Christian leaders and President Bush.

"God considers this land to be his," Robertson said on his TV program "The 700 Club." "You read the Bible and he says 'This is my land,' and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he is going to carve it up and give it away, God says, 'No, this is mine.'"

The "Christian Zionist" movement began to take shape in the 19th century, but in recent decades it strengthened into a powerful force with deep pockets. Some estimates place the annual figure of evangelical aid to Israel at more than $25 million. The Gaza withdrawal has become a new and potent rallying point.

In October, a group of Gaza settlers received a standing ovation from more than 5,000 Christians at a conference in Jerusalem sponsored by the International Christian Embassy, a private agency that promotes Christian ties to Israel.

Robertson's Christian Heritage Center is planned for 35 acres of rolling Galilee hills near key Christian sites, including Capernaum, the Mount of the Beatitudes, where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and Tabgha — on the shores of the Sea of Galilee — where Christians believe Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and fish.

Israel was considering leasing the land to the Christians for free.

Hartuv left the door open for continuing the project, but only with people who don't back Robertson's statements.

"We want to see who in the group supports his (Robertson's) statements. Those who support the statements cannot do business with us. Those that publicly support Ariel Sharon's recovery ... are welcome to do business with us," Hartuv said.

Source: AP via Yahoo! News

CBS Evening News gets new chief, no radical fixes

Third-place newscast is only network news show to see growth in viewers.

CBS Evening News is undergoing a quiet transformation and so far not the radical change that had been contemplated in the past year.

Another part of the shift began Monday as 60 Minutes veteran Rome Hartman took over as executive producer of the number three newscast, replacing Jim Murphy, who left before Christmas.

But Hartman and anchor Bob Schieffer say they aren't going to make wholesale changes to the house that Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather built.

"I'm going to try from the very start to raise the bar of our storytelling, reporting," Hartman said in a recent interview. "I want to break news, I want our reporting to be relentlessly original. But it's not going to be a radically different broadcast."

Hartman said there won't be different graphics or other eye-catching changes.

"You're not going to see anything radically different," Hartman said. "This is a good broadcast. It's been a good broadcast, and we're going to make it better."

Long an also-ran in the nightly newscasts, CBS has had more and more reasons for cheer recently at its West 57th Street Broadcast Center. After a serious wound from "Memogate"--the flawed report about President George W. Bush's Vietnam service--and Rather's departure after 24 years as anchor, Schieffer and the rest of the team have, since March, been righting the ship and launching the future of the news division. Ratings are up, as is morale.

Even as CBS News conducts its not-always-secret wooing of Today cohost Katie Couric, Hartman and Schieffer aren't treating the current CBS Evening News as temporary. The fate of the newscast, in one respect, has been in doubt for more than a year because Schieffer initially was a temporary anchor. And though CBS chief Leslie Moonves had been unimpressed with former CBS News president Andrew Heyward's efforts to remake the evening news, he's happy with what Schieffer has done.

Schieffer opened up the newscast and made it less stiff since he started in March. In an interview, Schieffer said he considers himself more of a "player-coach" who is trying to spotlight the next generation of CBS News. That's Lara Logan, Trish Regan, Sharon Alfonsi, and Lee Cowan, among others, as well as such other established correspondents as Gloria Borger, Bob Orr, and Jim Axelrod.

"These are people you can build a news department around. That's what we're going to do. My job is to make sure these people get on television," Schieffer said. He added: "You've got to have a good mix of veterans and younger people. I'm not the one that gets the news here. They're the ones who get the news."

While still firmly in third place, CBS is the only nightly newscast season-to-date to see an increase in total viewers (up 216,000 through January 1, compared with about 600,000 declines at ABC and NBC). That improvement is due in no small measure to Murphy, whose six-year tenure was the longest of any executive producer in CBS Evening News history.

"We could not have done this without him," Schieffer said.

Schieffer's own future? He said he's having fun and enjoying himself but knows the assignment isn't permanent.

"It depends on Katie," Schieffer said of the options Couric is said to be weighing as her contract at NBC News expires. "I hope we can get her here."

Source: Reuters via Yahoo! News

The Last Word: Noam Chomsky

A Tale of Two Quagmires
Newsweek International

Jan. 9, 2006 issue - Noam Chomsky has been called one of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century, but it's an accolade the 77-year-old MIT professor doesn't take very seriously. "People just want to hear something outside the rigid dogma they're used to," he says. "They're not going to hear it in the media." The linguistics prodigy turned political theorist has been a leading mind in the antiwar movement since the early '60s; he's also still a prolific author, producing more than six books in the past five years. He spoke to NEWSWEEK's Michael Hastings about the current geopolitical climate. Excerpts:

Hastings: Where do you see Iraq heading right now?
Chomsky: Well, it's extremely difficult to talk about this because of a very rigid doctrine that prevails in the United States and Britain which prevents us from looking at the situation realistically. The doctrine, to oversimplify, is that we have to believe the United States would have so-called liberated Iraq even if its main products were lettuce and pickles and [the] main energy resource of the world were in central Africa. Anyone who doesn't accept that is dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or a lunatic or something. But anyone with a functioning brain knows that that's not true—as all Iraqis do, for example. The United States invaded Iraq because its major resource is oil. And it gives the United States, to quote [Zbigniew] Brzezinski, "critical leverage" over its competitors, Europe and Japan. That's a policy that goes way back to the second world war. That's the fundamental reason for invading Iraq, not anything else.

Once we recognize that, we're able to begin talking about where Iraq is going. For example, there's a lot of talk about the United States bringing [about] a sovereign independent Iraq. That can't possibly be true. All you have to do is ask yourself what the policies would be in a more-or-less democratic Iraq. We know what they're likely to be. A democratic Iraq will have a Shiite majority, [with] close links to Iran. Furthermore, it's right across the border from Saudi Arabia, where there's a Shiite population which has been brutally repressed by the U.S.-backed fundamentalist tyranny. If there are any moves toward sovereignty in Shiite Iraq, or at least some sort of freedom, there are going to be effects across the border. That happens to be where most of Saudi Arabia's oil is. So you can see the ultimate nightmare developing from Washington's point of view.

You were involved in the antiwar movement in the 1960s. What do you think of the Vietnam-Iraq analogy?
I think there is no analogy whatsoever. That analogy is based on a misunderstanding of Iraq, and a misunderstanding of Vietnam. The misunderstanding of Iraq I've already described. The misunderstanding of Vietnam had to do with the war aims. The United States went to war in Vietnam for a very good reason. They were afraid Vietnam would be a successful model of independent development and that would have a virus effect—infect others who might try to follow the same course. There was a very simple war aim—destroy Vietnam. And they did it. The United States basically achieved its war aims in Vietnam by [1967]. It's called a loss, a defeat, because they didn't achieve the maximal aims, the maximal aims being turning it into something like the Philippines. They didn't do that. [But] they did achieve the major aims. It was possible to destroy Vietnam and leave. You can't destroy Iraq and leave. It's inconceivable.

Was the antiwar movement more successful in the '60s than it is today?
I think it's the other way around. The United States attacked Vietnam in 1962. It took years before any protest developed. Iraq is the first time in hundreds of years of European and American history that a war was massively protested before it was launched. There was huge protest in February 2003. It had never happened in the history of the West.

Where do you put George W. Bush in the pantheon of American presidents?
He's more or less a symbol, but I think the people around him are the most dangerous administration in American history. I think they're driving the world to destruction. There are two major threats that face the world, threats of the destruction of the species, and they're not a joke. One of them is nuclear war, and the other is environmental catastrophe, and they are driving toward destruction in both domains. They're compelling competitors to escalate their own offensive military capacity—Russia, China, now Iran. That means putting their offensive nuclear missiles on hair-trigger alert.

The Bush administration has succeeded in making the United States one of the most feared and hated countries in the world. The talent of these guys is unbelievable. They have even succeeded at alienating Canada. I mean, that takes genius, literally.

Source: Newsweek International