THE VERY DARK SIDE OF U.S. HISTORY

If Americans knew how to deal with other people,
they could bring peace to the world. 
Alas, they have not learned enough yet. 
The true American feels that he is 
100 percent welcome anywhere he goes. ~  Nguyen Cao Ky

Surprise ~ The Very Dark Side of U.S. History

Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the "good guys" spreading "democracy" and "liberty" around the world. Or, as of the last decade, to combat terrorism, these words from a nation that has more than participated and initiated a great share of terrorism itself. 

When the United States inflicts unnecessary death and destruction, it's viewed as a mistake or an aberration. In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a "mistake" nor an "aberration" but rather conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the "dark side."

The above is quite possibly the greatest lie Americans have been kept in the dark about.

Americans are slowly learning how they have been kept in the dark about the true nature of their country. Consider Iraq, a war based on lies and imperialistic greed, a war fought primarily to assist its "great" ally Israel to attain its imperialistic goals in the Middle East:

A majority of Americans now know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that claims to the contrary were intentional lies.

A majority of Americans now know the US Government lied when it claimed Iraq's WMDs were a threat to the United States.

A majority of Americans now know the mainstream media lied when it claimed Iraq's WMDs were a threat to the United States.

A majority of Americans now know that the US Government has been torturing innocent Iraqis for information on WMDs the US Government already knew they could not possibly have.

A majority of Americans now know their government can and does engage in the most monstrous lies possible, and that hundred of thousands of people have been killed, crippled, and tortured for that lie.

There is no law that compels Americans to believe their government when it lies. No legislation exists that obliges Americans to pay for the things their government has done. There is no moral principle under which Americans are required to obey a government that lies. Indeed, morality and prudence demands that a government that lies be openly defied. 

The Germans ended WW2 in shock at what their government had really been doing. Americans cannot claim that innocence. We DO know. The information has been available for a long time, and the majority of Americans know what their government is doing, and the rest of the world knows that Americans know. 

The green type is my Snippits and Snappits added to the original article.

October 8, 2010 

By Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry

There is a dark ~ seldom acknowledged ~ thread that runs through U.S. military doctrine, dating back to the early days of the Republic.

This military tradition has explicitly defended the selective use of terror, whether in suppressing Native American resistance on the frontiers in the 19th Century or in protecting U.S. interests abroad in the 20th Century or fighting the "war on terror" over the last decade.

The American people are largely oblivious to this hidden tradition because most of the literature advocating state-sponsored terror is carefully confined to national security circles and rarely spills out into the public debate, which is instead dominated by feel-good messages about well-intentioned U.S. interventions abroad.

Over the decades, congressional and journalistic investigations have exposed some of these abuses. But when that does happen, the cases are usually deemed anomalies or excesses by out-of-control soldiers.

But the historical record shows that terror tactics have long been a dark side of U.S. military doctrine. The theories survive today in textbooks on counterinsurgency warfare, "low-intensity" conflict and "counter-terrorism."

To starve the Plains tribes of their main resource for existence, there was a slaughter of American bison in the 1800s, these bison skulls are waiting to be ground for fertilizer, most likely in the American midwest. The slaughter was so “effective” that the population of bison in the U.S. is estimated to have dropped from around 60 million in 1800 to as few as 750 in 1890. The people starved, shivered, and mourned the loss of these animals.

Some historians trace the formal acceptance of those brutal tenets to the 1860s when the U.S. Army was facing challenge from a rebellious South and resistance from Native Americans in the West. Out of those crises emerged the modern military concept of "total war" ~ which considers attacks on civilians and their economic infrastructure an integral part of a victorious strategy.

In 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman cut a swath of destruction through civilian territory in Georgia and the Carolinas. His plan was to destroy the South's will to fight and its ability to sustain a large army in the field. The devastation left plantations in flames and brought widespread Confederate complaints of rape and murder of civilians.

 The Sand Creek Massacre, sleeping women and children along with a few braves.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, Col. John M. Chivington and the Third Colorado Cavalry were employing their own terror tactics to pacify Cheyennes. A scout named John Smith later described the attack at Sand Creek, Colorado, on unsuspecting Indians at a peaceful encampment:

"They were scalped; their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word." [U.S. Cong., Senate, 39 Cong., 2nd Sess., "The Chivington Massacre," Reports of the Committees.]

From Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown:

At 8:00 am more than 700 cavalry men under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington and Major Scott J. Anthony, rode in and fired on the huddled Indians from two directions. After the initial charge the US soldiers dismounted and continued the indiscriminate killing of men, women, and children. During the killing unspeakable atrocities and mutilations were committed by the soldiers. Accounts from two white men, John S. Smith and Lieutenant James Connor, described the acts of dehumanization."

According to John S. Smith, Colonel Chivington knew these Indians to be peaceful before the massacre. Smith witnessed, as did helpless Indian mothers and fathers, young children having their sex organs cut away. U.S. soldiers mutilated Native American women, cutting away their breasts and removing all other sex organs.

After the Massacre, soldiers displayed the women's severed body parts on their hats and stretched them over their saddle-bows while riding in the ranks. The sex organs of every male were removed in the most grotesque manner. 

One soldier boasted that he would make a tobacco pouch with the removed privates of White Antelope, a respected elder.  Others used the breasts to make tobacco pouches. Conner witnessed a soldier displaying the body parts of a woman on a stick. The fingers of Indians were cut off to get at the rings on them. 

Connor remembered a baby only a few months old who had been hidden in the feed box of a wagon for protection. When the soldiers discovered the baby some time later, the baby was thrown onto the frozen ground to die. In going over the site the next day, it was noted that every corpse was mutilated in some way, and scalped.

Two other men, Robert Bent and James Beckwourth were forced to ride with Chivington that morning. They recorded similar images. Beckwourth noted that before the massacre, White Antelope (age 75) ran out to meet the soldiers. He came running out to meet the command, holding up his hands and saying Stop! Stop! He spoke in as plain English as I can. He stopped and folded his arms until shot down. 

Bent remembered seeing the shooting of a little girl carrying a white flag. He also remembered seeing an Indian woman on the ground whose leg had been shattered by a shell. As she lay helpless, a soldier drew his saber, breaking the arm she had risen in defense. She then rolled over on her other side. The soldier did not leave until breaking her other arm with his saber, whereupon he left without killing her. 

Bent saw a pregnant woman who had been cut open and disemboweled. Her unborn child lay mutilated almost beyond human recognition beside her. Quite a number of mothers were slain; still clinging to their babies. Such was the scene that cold gray morning at Sand Creek, November 29, 1864.

Though Smith's objectivity was challenged at the time, today even defenders of the Sand Creek raid concede that most women and children there were killed and mutilated. [See Lt. Col. William R. Dunn, I Stand by Sand Creek.]

Yet, in the 1860s, many whites in Colorado saw the slaughter as the only realistic way to bring peace, just as Sherman viewed his "march to the sea" as necessary to force the South's surrender.

The brutal tactics in the West also helped clear the way for the transcontinental railroad, built fortunes for favored businessmen and consolidated Republican political power for more than six decades, until the Great Depression of the 1930s. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Indian Genocide and Republican Power."]

As Dee Brown writes in Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, a history of the building of the transcontinental railroads, Lincoln’s 1862 Pacific Railway Act “assured the fortunes of a dynasty of American families . . . the Brewsters, Bushnells, Olcotts, Harkers, Harrisons, Trowbridges, Lanworthys, Reids, Ogdens, Bradfords, Noyeses, Brooks, Cornells, and dozens of others,” all of whom were tied to the Republican Party.

Gen. Sherman, note the Masonic pose also used by Napoleon and others.

Four years after the Civil War, Sherman became commanding general of the Army and incorporated the Indian pacification strategies ~ as well as his own tactics ~ into U.S. military doctrine. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, who had led Indian wars in the Missouri territory, succeeded Sherman in 1883 and further entrenched those strategies as policy. [See Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide.]

 From Harper's Weekly, a sketch entitled "General Sherman's Grand March Through Central Georgia". We see a long column of soldiers marching through a plantation in Georgia. Homes are burning in the distance. The foreground shows soldiers around a campground.

By the end of the 19th Century, the Native American warriors had been vanquished, but the Army's winning strategies lived on.

Geronimo, possibly the last Warrior Chief

Imperial America

When the United States claimed the Philippines as a prize in the Spanish-American War, Filipino insurgents resisted. In 1900, the U.S. commander, Gen. J. Franklin Bell, consciously modeled his brutal counterinsurgency campaign after the Indian wars and Sherman's "march to the sea."

Bell believed that by punishing the wealthier Filipinos through destruction of their homes ~ much as Sherman had done in the South ~ they would be coerced into helping convince their countrymen to submit.

Learning from the Indian wars, he also isolated the guerrillas by forcing Filipinos into tightly controlled zones where schools were built and other social amenities were provided.

Wealthy Filipinos were packed like sardines in small rooms, measuring 15-by-30-by-6 feet, into which up to 50 of them were crammed for months. They were pressed into work gangs to burn their own homes, until they agreed to aid American forces.  Bell said, "It is an inevitable consequence of war that the innocent must generally suffer with the guilty".  He reasoned that since all natives were treacherous, it was impossible to recognize "the actively bad from only the passively so."

"The entire population outside of the major cities in Batangas was herded into concentration camps," wrote historian Stuart Creighton Miller. "Bell's main target was the wealthier and better-educated classes. … Adding insult to injury, Bell made these people carry the petrol used to burn their own country homes." [See Miller's "Benevolent Assimilation."]

For those outside the protected areas, there was terror. A supportive news correspondent described one scene in which American soldiers killed "men, women, children … from lads of 10 and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog."

It seems that attitude towards "the enemy" has not changed much over the decades and centuries. The names for the Iraqis and other Arabs include such terms although "raghead" and "sand nigger" are the most common.

"Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to 'make them talk,' have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down as an example to those who found their bullet-riddled corpses."

Defending the tactics, the correspondent noted that 

"it is not civilized warfare, but we are not dealing with a civilized people. The only thing they know and fear is force, violence, and brutality." [Philadelphia Ledger, Nov. 19, 1900]

Do we detect a media compliance there that has not changed much either? Excuses made for the worst of crimes to keep the people happy and the troops free of censure?

In 1901, anti-imperialists in Congress exposed and denounced Bell's brutal tactics. Nevertheless, Bell's strategies won military acclaim as a refined method of pacification.

In a 1973 book, one pro-Bell military historian, John Morgan Gates, termed reports of U.S. atrocities "exaggerated" and hailed Bell's "excellent understanding of the role of benevolence in pacification."

Gates recalled that Bell's campaign in Batanga was regarded by military strategists as "pacification in its most perfected form." [See Gates's Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1898-1902.]

Spreading the Word

At the turn of the century, the methodology of pacification was a hot topic among the European colonial powers, too. From Namibia to Indochina, Europeans struggled to subdue local populations.

Confessions of a British Spy: The Memoirs of Mr. Hempher

Often outright slaughter proved effective, as the Germans demonstrated with massacres of the Herrero tribe in Namibia from 1904-1907. But military strategists often compared notes about more subtle techniques of targeted terror mixed with demonstrations of benevolence.

Counterinsurgency strategies were back in vogue after World War II as many subjugated people demanded independence from colonial rule and Washington worried about the expansion of communism. In the 1950s, the Huk rebellion against U.S. dominance made the Philippines again the laboratory, with Bell's earlier lessons clearly remembered.

"The campaign against the Huk movement in the Philippines … greatly resembled the American campaign of almost 50 years earlier," historian Gates observed. "The American approach to the problem of pacification had been a studied one."

But the war against the Huks had some new wrinkles, particularly the modern concept of psychological warfare or psy-war.

Under the pioneering strategies of the CIA's Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, psy-war was a new spin to the old game of breaking the will of a target population. The idea was to analyze the psychological weaknesses of a people and develop "themes" that could induce actions favorable to those carrying out the operation.

Lansdale's nice smile and open face hide a criminally violent military nature.

While psy-war included propaganda and disinformation, it also relied on terror tactics of a demonstrative nature. An Army psy-war pamphlet, drawing on Lansdale's experience in the Philippines, advocated "exemplary criminal violence ~ the murder and mutilation of captives and the display of their bodies," according to Michael McClintock's Instruments of Statecraft.

In his memoirs, Lansdale boasted of one legendary psy-war trick used against the Huks who were considered superstitious and fearful of a vampire-like creature called an asuang.

"The psy-war squad set up an ambush along a trail used by the Huks," Lansdale wrote. "When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man on the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail.

"When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed the asuang had got him." [See Lansdale's In the Midst of Wars.]

The Huk rebellion also saw the refinement of free-fire zones, a technique used effectively by Bell's forces a half-century earlier. In the 1950s, special squadrons were assigned to do the dirty work.

"The special tactic of these squadrons was to cordon off areas; anyone they caught inside the cordon was considered an enemy," explained one pro-U.S. Filipino colonel. "Almost daily you could find bodies floating in the river, many of them victims of [Major Napoleon] Valeriano's Nenita Unit. [See Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines.]

On to Vietnam

The successful suppression of the Huks led the war's architects to share their lessons elsewhere in Asia and beyond. Valeriano went on to co-author an important American textbook on counterinsurgency and to serve as part of the American pacification effort in Vietnam with Lansdale.

Following the Philippine model, Vietnamese were crowded into "strategic hamlets"; "free-fire zones" were declared with homes and crops destroyed; and the Phoenix program eliminated thousands of suspected Viet Cong cadre.

The ruthless strategies were absorbed and accepted even by widely respected military figures, such as Gen. Colin Powell who served two tours in Vietnam and endorsed the routine practice of murdering Vietnamese males as a necessary part of the counterinsurgency effort.

"I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male," Powell wrote in his much-lauded memoir, My American Journey. "If a helo [a U.S. helicopter] spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him.

"Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen [West Germany], Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong."

In 1965, the U.S. intelligence community formalized its hard-learned counterinsurgency lessons by commissioning a top-secret program called Project X. Based at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School at Fort Holabird, Maryland, the project drew from field experience and developed teaching plans to "provide intelligence training to friendly foreign countries," according to a Pentagon history prepared in 1991 and released in 1997.

Called "a guide for the conduct of clandestine operations," Project X "was first used by the U.S. Intelligence School on Okinawa to train Vietnamese and, presumably, other foreign nationals," the history stated.

Linda Matthews of the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Division recalled that in 1967-68, some of the Project X training material was prepared by officers connected to the Phoenix program. "She suggested the possibility that some offending material from the Phoenix program may have found its way into the Project X materials at that time," the Pentagon report said.

In the 1970s, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School moved to Fort Huachuca in Arizona and began exporting Project X material to U.S. military assistance groups working with "friendly foreign countries." By the mid-1970s, the Project X material was going to armies all over the world.

Lost History: 'Project X' & School of Assassins

A song about the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. I post this because of the imagery much more than the music.


In its 1992 review, the Pentagon acknowledged that Project X was the source for some of the "objectionable" lessons at the School of the Americas where Latin American officers were trained in blackmail, kidnapping, murder and spying on non-violent political opponents.

But disclosure of the full story was blocked near the end of the first Bush administration when senior Pentagon officials working for then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered the destruction of most Project X records. 

[See Lost History: 'Project X' and School of Assassins]

Living Dangerously

By the mid-1960s, some of the U.S. counterinsurgency lessons had reached Indonesia, too. The U.S. military training was surreptitious because Washington viewed the country's neutralist leader Sukarno as politically suspect. The training was permitted only to give the United States influence within the Indonesian military which was considered more reliable.

The covert U.S. aid and training was mostly innocuous-sounding "civic action," which is generally thought to mean building roads, staffing health clinics and performing other "hearts-and-minds" activities with civilians. But "civic action" also provided cover in Indonesia, as in the Philippines and Vietnam, for psy-war.

The secret U.S.-Indonesian military connections paid off for Washington when a political crisis erupted, threatening Sukarno's government.

To counter Indonesia's powerful Communist Party, known as the PKI, the army's Red Berets organized the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children. So many bodies were dumped into the rivers of East Java that they ran red with blood.

In a classic psy-war tactic, the bloated carcasses also served as a political warning to villages down river.

"To make sure they didn't sink, the carcasses were deliberately tied to, or impaled on, bamboo stakes," wrote eyewitness Pipit Rochijat. "And the departure of corpses from the Kediri region down the Brantas achieved its golden age when bodies were stacked on rafts over which the PKI banner proudly flew." [See Rochijat's "Am I PKI or Non-PKI?" Indonesia, Oct. 1985.]

Some historians have attributed the grotesque violence to a crazed army which engaged in "unplanned brutality" or "mass hysteria" leading ultimately to the slaughter of some half million Indonesians, many of Chinese descent.

But the recurring tactic of putting bodies on gruesome display fits as well with the military doctrines of psy-war, a word that one of the leading military killers used in un-translated form in one order demanding elimination of the PKI.

Sarwo Edhie, chief of the political para-commando battalion known as the Red Berets, warned that the communist opposition "should be given no opportunity to concentrate/consolidate. It should be pushed back systematically by all means, including psy-war." [See The Revolt of the G30S/PKI and Its Suppression, translated by Robert Cribb in The Indonesian Killings.]

Sarwo Edhie had been identified as a CIA contact when he served at the Indonesian Embassy in Australia. [See Pacific, May-June 1968.]

US Media Sympathy

Elite U.S. reaction to the horrific slaughter was muted and has remained ambivalent ever since. The Johnson administration denied any responsibility for the massacres, but New York Times columnist James Reston spoke for many opinion leaders when he approvingly termed the bloody developments in Indonesia "a gleam of light in Asia."

The American denials of involvement held until 1990 when U.S. diplomats admitted to a reporter that they had aided the Indonesian army by supplying lists of suspected communists.

In 1965, the CIA provided lists to the Indonesian military of people to be tortured and murdered. Between 500,000 and a million people perished after the abortive coup d’état.

"...in four months, five times as many people died in Indonesia as in Vietnam in twelve years" ~  Bertrand Russell

"It really was a big help to the army," embassy officer Robert Martens told Kathy Kadane of States News Service. "I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment." Martens had headed the U.S. team that compiled the death lists.

Kadane's story provoked a telling response from Washington Post senior editorial writer Stephen S. Rosenfeld. He accepted the fact that American officials had assisted "this fearsome slaughter," but then justified the killings.

Rosenfeld argued that the massacre "was and still is widely regarded as the grim but earned fate of a conspiratorial revolutionary party that represented the same communist juggernaut that was on the march in Vietnam."

In a column entitled, "Indonesia 1965: The Year of Living Cynically?" Rosenfeld reasoned that "either the army would get the communists or the communists would get the army, it was thought: Indonesia was a domino, and the PKI's demise kept it [Indonesia] standing in the free world. …

"Though the means were grievously tainted, we ~ the fastidious among us as well as the hard-headed and cynical ~ can be said to have enjoyed the fruits in the geopolitical stability of that important part of Asia, in the revolution that never happened." [Washington Post, July 13, 1990]

The fruit tasted far more bitter to the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago, however. In 1975, the army of Indonesia's new dictator, Gen. Suharto, invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor. When the East Timorese resisted, the Indonesian army returned to its gruesome bag of tricks, engaging in virtual genocide against the population.

A Catholic missionary provided an eyewitness account of one search-and-destroy mission in East Timor in 1981.

"We saw with our own eyes the massacre of the people who were surrendering: all dead, even women and children, even the littlest ones. … Not even pregnant women were spared: they were cut open. …. They did what they had done to small children the previous year, grabbing them by the legs and smashing their heads against rocks. …

"The comments of Indonesian officers reveal the moral character of this army: 'We did the same thing [in 1965] in Java, in Borneo, in the Celebes, in Irian Jaya, and it worked." [See A. Barbedo de Magalhaes, East Timor: Land of Hope.]

The references to the success of the 1965 slaughter were not unusual. In Timor: A People Betrayed, author James Dunn noted that "on the Indonesian side, there have been many reports that many soldiers viewed their operation as a further phase in the ongoing campaign to suppress communism that had followed the events of September 1965."

Classic psy-war and pacification strategies were followed to the hilt in East Timor. The Indonesians put on display corpses and the heads of their victims. Timorese also were herded into government-controlled camps before permanent relocation in "resettlement villages" far from their original homes.

"The problem is that people are forced to live in the settlements and are not allowed to travel outside," said Msgr. Costa Lopes, apostolic administrator of Dili. "This is the main reason why people cannot grow enough food." [See John G. Taylor, Indonesia's Forgotten War: The Hidden History of East Timor.]

Public Revulsion

Through television in the 1960-70s, the Vietnam War finally brought the horrors of counterinsurgency home to millions of Americans. They watched as U.S. troops torched villages and forced distraught old women to leave ancestral homes.

Camera crews caught on film brutal interrogation of Viet Cong suspects, the execution of one young VC officer, and the bombing of children with napalm.

In effect, the Vietnam War was the first time Americans got to witness the pacification strategies that had evolved secretly as national security policy since the 19th Century. As a result, millions of Americans protested the war's conduct and Congress belatedly compelled an end to U.S. participation in 1974.

With the Vietnam War people finally saw what their troops were doing in other countries and most civilians were appalled.  Feelings were so aroused that thousands of young men fled the country rather than participate in such slaughter.

But the psy-war doctrinal debates were not resolved by the Vietnam War. Counterinsurgency advocates regrouped in the 1980s behind President Ronald Reagan, who mounted a spirited defense of the Vietnamese intervention and reaffirmed U.S. resolve to employ similar tactics against leftist forces especially in Central America. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Guatemala: A Test Tube for Repression."]

Four American nuns are killed by a death squad in El Salvador. The country was financed and armed by the USA. Three members of the death squad were trained by the USA run School of the Americas.

Reagan also added an important new component to the mix. Recognizing how graphic images and honest reporting from the war zone had undercut public support for the counterinsurgency in Vietnam, Reagan authorized an aggressive domestic "public diplomacy" operation which practiced what was called "perception management" ~ in effect, intimidating journalists to ensure that only sanitized information would reach the American people.

EL SALVADOR. Santiago Nonualco. 1980. Unearthing three assassinated American nuns and a layworker from unmarked grave. Such events being publicized cost many a reporter his or her career under Reagan.

Reporters who disclosed atrocities by U.S.-trained forces, such as the El Mozote massacre by El Salvador's Atlacatl battalion in 1981, came under harsh criticism and saw their careers damaged.

Some Reagan operatives were not shy about their defense of political terror as a necessity of the Cold War. 

Neil Livingstone, a counter-terrorism consultant to the National Security Council, called death squads:

"an extremely effective tool, 

 however odious, 

in combatting terrorism 

and revolutionary challenges." 

[See McClintock's Instruments of Statecraft.]

Terrorism, scherrorism, good LORD!
 

When Democrats in Congress objected to excesses of Reagan's interventions in Central America, the administration responded with more public relations and political pressure, questioning the patriotism of the critics. For instance, Reagan's United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick accused anyone who took note of U.S.-backed war crimes of "blaming America first."

Many Democrats in Congress and journalists in the Washington press corps buckled under the attacks, giving the Reagan administration much freer rein to carry out brutal "death squad" strategies in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

What is clear from these experiences in Indonesia, Vietnam, Central America and elsewhere is that the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality embraced by counterinsurgency specialists.

Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. But sometimes the two competing visions ~ of a just America and a ruthless one ~ clash in the open, as they did in Vietnam.

Or the dark side of U.S. security policy is thrown into the light by unauthorized leaks, such as the photos of abused detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or by revelations about waterboarding and other torture authorized by George W. Bush's White House as part of the "war on terror."

What every terrorist American behind these horrific acts needs to experience, and then some!

Only then does the public get a glimpse of the grim reality, the bloody and brutal tactics that have been deemed "necessary" for more than two centuries in the defense of the purported "national interests."

Peter Dale Scott is an author and poet whose books have focused on “deep politics,” the intersection of economics, criminality and national security. (For more, go to http://www.peterdalescott.net/) Robert Parry is a veteran Washington investigative journalist. (For his books, go to http://www.neckdeepbook.com)

The whole world is watching to see what Americans will do now that most Americans know their government deliberately lied to start the war in Iraq.

So, what will Americans do? 

Will they walk their talk, and fire the liars? 

Will they stand up like free human beings and refuse the dictates of an illegal government, or will they cower and send their children off to die, watching them walk up the chutes to the slaughterhouse without complaint, shrugging their shoulders that this is how life is supposed to be and there is no point in making a fuss about it? 

Will Americans go on paying more money for government than they do for anything else, yet refusing to hold that government to the same standards of truth-in-selling that they demand from a used-car salesman? 

Will they go on making do with less so that the government and its friends can have that much more? 

Will they continue to bow down saying, "Take our money, take our neighbors' children, and tell us what to think, oh lord! We know you really are just and moral because you threw innocent people in jail!" 

Or will Americans decide enough is enough? 

WHEN will Americans decide enough is enough?

Or will Americans EVER decide enough is enough? 

Will they decide that they cannot support a government that is criminal without being criminals themselves? 

Will they finally realize that they cannot claim to be a moral people if they do not have moral government? 

No magazine puff-piece, no comic book, no movie can make America look great if, when the time calls for it, Americans fail to be a great people. 

Great people are willing to stand up to a government gone wrong, to force their government to be truthful and honest and moral. 

Great people know that freedom is impossible under a government that lies because lies are tools of enslavement, and that chains built of false beliefs hold slaves tighter than chains made of steel. 

Slaves will cower before a government they know lies to them, bless the face that lies to them, and ask for more. 

And now the world watches to see if Americans are a great people, or just slaves living under the delusion they are a free people. 

Free men or slaves.

Time to choose. 

The whole world is watching.

DUBAI ASSASSINATION #11: TWO DUBAI MURDER SUSPECTS TRAVELED TO US

Dubai's Police Chief Lt. Gen. Dhahi Khalfan Tamim
identified eleven suspects on Feb. 15.

March 1, 2010

WALL STREET JOURNAL

By CHIP CUMMINS

DUBAI

At least two of the 26 suspects sought by Dubai police for the alleged killing of a top Hamas leader appear to have entered the U.S. shortly after his death, according to people familiar with the situation.

Records shared between international investigators show that one of the suspects entered the U.S. on Feb. 14, carrying a British passport, according to a person familiar with the situation. The other suspect, carrying an Irish passport, entered the U.S. on Jan. 21, according to this person. Senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh's body was found in a Dubai hotel room on Jan. 20
There aren't records of either man leaving the U.S., though investigators can't be sure the two are still in the country, according to this person. Since the two were traveling with what investigators believe to be fraudulently issued passports, they may have traveled back out of the U.S. with different, bogus travel documents.

The suspected U.S. travel broadens to American shores the international manhunt triggered by Dubai's investigation into the death of Mr. Mabhouh. Dubai police have already identified two U.S. financial companies they believe issued and distributed several credit cards used by 14 of the suspects in the alleged killing.

A U.S. State Department spokesman declined to comment.

A spokesman for Interpol, which is also investigating the murder, declined to comment.

Separately, Dubai police said Sunday that forensic results showed the drug succinylcholine in Mr. Mabhouh's bloodstream at the time of his death, suggesting he had been incapacitated by the muscle relaxant before being suffocated.

United Arab Emirates authorities have sought international arrest warrants for the 26 suspects, whom they caught on closed-circuit TV arriving at Dubai's airport and checking into their hotels. Some used disguises, and two of them shared an elevator ride with their alleged victim, according to footage released by police.

Dubai released photos, passports and travel details of the 26, all of whom had landed in Dubai with European or Australian passports. Many of the individuals identified by Dubai police surfaced within days. However, they looked nothing like the photos on the passports used in Dubai; the passport holders appeared instead to be victims of identity fraud. Britain, France, Ireland, Germany and Australia have all said they believe their passports were issued and used fraudulently in the case.

Dubai's police chief has said he is 99% certain that Israel's Mossad intelligence agency is behind the killing. But he hasn't provided any evidence. Other officials here appear more circumspect, and say Dubai and U.A.E. officials are concentrating on identifying and apprehending the suspects before blaming anyone.

Israeli officials have neither confirmed nor denied any involvement, a longstanding practice. Last week, Israel's foreign minister said there was no proof implicating Israel.

The investigation could prove an irritant to U.S.-Israeli ties if Mossad is implicated. European and Australian governments have called in their Israeli ambassadors demanding answers to how their passports were misused, though officials have stopped short of accusing Israel of involvement.

The U.A.E. government would seek the extradition of any suspects found in the U.S., said an Emirati official. If Israel was implicated, the Obama administration's relationship with that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could come under further strain. Washington and Israel have publicly sparred in recent months on issues related to the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. The Obama administration says it is continuing to work with Israel on the possible resumption of peace talks, and U.S. officials say they are "hopeful" that negotiations can resume shortly.

According to the person familiar with the matter, one of the suspects, traveling with a British passport identifying him as Roy Allan Cannon, entered the U.S. on Feb. 14. Another suspect, traveling as Irishman Evan Dennings, entered the country on Jan. 21, a day after Mr. Mabhouh's body was discovered.

It wasn't clear from where either man was traveling. Dubai authorities have previously said the suspect traveling as Mr. Dennings left Dubai on Jan. 20 on his way to Zurich.

Last week, the Associated Press identified a British citizen named Roy Allan Cannon as having emigrated to Israel from Britain in 1979. His son told the AP his father was a victim of identity theft, and that "it's clear that illegal use was made of personal information." The Irish government said last week it believed Mr. Dennings was also the victim of identity fraud; he couldn't be reached for comment.

~ Jay Solomon in Washington contributed to this article.

DUBAI ASSASSINATION #14: HAMAS OPERATIVE DRUGGED, SUFFOCATED

ARBARA SURK
February 28, 2010
The Huffington Post

BAI, United Arab Emirates ~

The assassins of a senior Hamas operative used a powerful muscle relaxant to incapacitate him before suffocating him with a pillow in his hotel room, Dubai police said Sunday, in the latest revelations from the slaying local authorities have blamed on Israel.

Police said forensic tests turned up traces of the drug succinylcholine ~ part of a chemical cocktail used in lethal injections in the U.S. ~ in the bloodstream of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, whose body was found in his room at a luxury hotel in Dubai on Jan. 20.

Dubai authorities have blamed Israel's Mossad intelligence agency for the slaying in a case that has spread far beyond the Gulf city-state's shores. The investigation's international web now stretches from a bank in the U.S. heartland to European capitals and as far as Australia.

In a statement released Sunday, Dubai's deputy police chief, Maj. Gen. Khamis Mattar al-Mazeina, said al-Mabhouh's killers sedated the Hamas commander before suffocating him to mask their crime.

"The assassins used this method so that it would seem that his death was natural as there were no signs of resistance shown by the victim," al-Mazeina said in the statement.

Local media quoted al-Mazeina as saying Sunday's forensic report confirms al-Mabhouh died of suffocation "using a pillow."

The drug found in al-Mabhouh's bloodstream ~ succinylcholine ~ is frequently used by doctors to administer a breathing tube or anesthesia.

Investigators sometimes refer to the drug as an ideal murder weapon because it can often be difficult to trace. It is normally injected into the body, usually directly into a muscle.

In the case of al-Mabhouh, Dubai police said the assassins stuck a syringe into his thigh to administer the drug, Emirates' state-run news agency WAM reported Dubai police also said a third Palestinian suspect was in custody. The authorities have identified at least 26 other suspects to the alleged hit squad that traveled to Dubai on fake identities and forged European and Australian passports to kill al-Mabhouh.

Dubai authorities have described the assassination as a mix of clockwork precision with spy novel flare. Some of the suspects donned fake beards or wigs, while others disguised themselves as tourists in tennis outfits with rackets in hand.

Earlier this month, police released footage pulled from closed circuit cameras in Dubai's hotels, shopping malls and airport. The video shows members of the alleged hit team shadowing al-Mabhouh from his arrival at the airport all the way to his hotel room.

The police also released a detailed flow chart-style diagram on the suspects' alleged roles in the slaying, and distributed a map showing the numbers of 17 credit cards allegedly obtained by the suspects from financial institutions in Germany, Britain and the U.S.

At least 15 of the suspected killers share names with Israeli citizens, further fueling suspicions the Mossad was behind the hit.

Israel, however, has maintained a policy of ambiguity on the killing, neither confirming or denying involvement.

On Sunday, the country's trade minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, told Army Radio that while he had no idea who killed al-Mabhouh, the slaying shows Hamas that "none of their people are untouchable, they can all be reached."

The comments from Ben-Eliezer, a former defense minister, were the most direct yet on the by an Israeli official.

He said the results were "immediately translated," claiming that the leader of the Islamic militant group Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, recently disguised himself in a wig on a trip to Syria.

"He understands that eyes are watching him and that is what is important," Ben-Eliezer said.

The minister's claim could not immediately be verified with Hezbollah, but Nasrallah has largely lived in hiding since his group battled Israel to a stalemate during a month long war in 2006.

In one of Israel's few comments on the matter, opposition leader Tzipi Livni last week praised al-Mabhouh's death as "good news to those fighting terrorism."

Israel says al-Mabhouh was a major player in smuggling weapons to the Hamas militants that control the Gaza Strip. He was also wanted by Israel for the 1989 abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers on leave.

Associated Press writers Ian Deitch contributed to this report from Jerusalem and Adam Schreck in Dubai.

DUBAI ASSASSINATION #13: DUBAI CALLS FOR NETANYAHU PROSECUTION OVER TERROR

Israeli Prime Miniser Benjamin Netanyahu

PRESS TV
February 28, 2010

Dubai police say Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must be prosecuted should it be determined that the regime had been behind the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

The emirates' police Chief Gen. Dhahi Khalfan Tamim said Sunday that the world will "witness significant steps in the prosecution of criminals" who masterminded the assassination of al-Mabhouh in his hotel room last month.

The general said the investigation is internationally underway to identify the criminals who were behind the operation.

Khalfan assured that the Israeli prime minister and Mossad Chief Meir Dagan "will be together at the head of an international wanted list" should it be determined that the regime was behind the terror operation.

He had formerly said that Dubai police were in possession of dozens of items of incriminating evidence against the terror squad which attest to Mossad's involvement in the operation.

The police released photos and information of 26 suspects in the terror, most of them European passport holders, saying they were Mossad agents carrying fake documents.

Israeli and European media last week reported that Netanyahu had authorized the assassination of the Hamas commander in a meeting with Mossad's chief in early January in Tel Aviv.

DUBAI ASSASSINATION #12: HA'ARETZ STORIES

Crying, complaining, whining, pointing fingers,
denying his fingers are in the cookie jar,
Lieverman lies and studies a bit about
how to maybe look innocent at the same time.

Lieberman on Dubai assassination: Arabs always blame Israel

Ha'aretz
FEBRUARY 23, 2010

The Arabs nations blame Israel for anything that happens in the Middle East, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told his Irish counterpart during a meeting in Brussels on Monday, adding that there are many other power struggles in the region which could have resulted in the operation.

"The Arabs have a tendency to blame Israel for anything that happens in the Middle East," the Israeli FM said, adding that the region "has many internal struggles within groups and states which are not as democratic as Israel is."

Truth hurt Lieberman?

Meanwhile on Monday, the U.K.'s Europe Minister Chris Bryant says a total of eight forged U.K. passports were used in the Dubai slaying of a top Hamas operative, two more than had been previously disclosed.

During the meeting between Lieberman and Irish Foreign Minister Michael Martin, the Israeli FM was asked about the use of fraudulent Irish passports by the suspected assassins of Hamas strongman Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

Martin also reportedly questioned Lieberman about the fact that the Dubai police chief had stated he was "99 percent" sure that the Israeli Mossad was responsible for the operation.

Lieberman said that there wasn't

"even one story indicating that Israel was implicated in the assassination. If anyone other than the Media would have claimed otherwise we would have addressed the issue, but as that there are no such allegations, there is no need to address it further."

Please can I call him a nasty old arrogant lying turd? Please?

The Israeli FM later met with British FM David Miliband, where he was also reportedly asked about the alleged use of fake U.K. passports in the January assassination in Dubai.

After the meeting, the British foreign secretary said that he told Lieberman that Israel needs to cooperate with the investigation launched by Dubai into the assassination of a Hamas official using forged European passports.

He said he underlined to Lieberman "the importance we attach to Israel cooperating with that investigation. It is very important that people know that we continue to take this issue very seriously indeed."

According to Miliband, the Israeli foreign minister replied saying "he had no information at this stage."

Both Miliband and Martin have made strong statements in recent days condemning the forging of passports and theft of identities.

Words are cheap. If things don't get properly answered, perhaps some actions would do more.

Earlier Monday, European Union foreign ministers condemned the use of forged European passports by assassins who killed a Palestinian militant in Dubai, but made no direct reference to Israel.

Diplomatic sources said that the statement was intended to censure Israel over its alleged involvement in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh last month ~ though other senior European sources said the statement would not formally link Israel with the assassination or the forging of passports.

Israel has declined to confirm or deny any involvement.

"The EU strongly condemns the fact that those involved in this action [assassination] used fraudulent EU member states' passports and credit cards acquired through the theft of EU citizens' identities," a declaration on behalf of EU foreign ministers said.

Another senior diplomat said EU ambassadors had been summoned for consultations by Foreign Ministry officials in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

During the meeting, Abu Dhabi officials requested that EU foreign ministers, who will convene in Brussels on Monday for a conference, issue a communique over the use of European passports in the Mabhouh operation. The UAE is also demanding an explicit EU statement supporting the Emirates' authorities who are investigating the case.

According to the European source, the UAE government did not blame Israel for carrying out the assassination nor did it request that Israel be cited in the EU statement.

The source added that senior officials from Germany, France, Britain, Ireland and the EU met Sunday to agree on the language of the statement. Ireland is advocating the hardest line among all EU members by demanding that the statement explicitly refer to Israel.

According to the European source, the communique will include three key elements: the EU's condemnation of the use of European passports by members of the assassination team, an expression of support for the UAE government and investigators in Dubai, and a commitment to investigate the passport forgeries and theft identities as quickly as possible.

Discussions over the wording of the statement are expected to continue until Monday evening, by when it is likely to be released.

Meanwhile, the commander of the Dubai police revealed additional details about the January 20 assassination.

The police official, Dahi Khalfan, said the police had information that would not be disclosed currently but which related to the use by some of the assassins of diplomatic passports to enter Dubai.

The Dubai police chief added that some of the hit squad had been in the emirate for at least a year before the killing and used the same passports. He made the remarks to Al-Bayan, a newspaper published in the UAE.

Khalfan said the information that led to the killing of Mabhouh came from an associate of a senior Hamas official, according to a statement published in another UAE newspaper, Al-Khaleej. Khalfan has been reported as saying the associate gave information about Mabhouh's arrival in Dubai.

Over the weekend, Hamas officials criticized Mabhouh's conduct. Hamas legislator Salah Bardawil said Mabhouh endangered himself by ordering airline tickets over the Internet and said the senior Hamas official even notified Mabhouh's family about where in Dubai Mabhouh was staying. Mabhouh's brother, however, denied that the family had received such information. For their part, Hamas spokesmen denied the Dubai police chief's account.

One spokesman, Sami Abu Zahari, denied there was an informant in Hamas. Another senior Hamas official criticized the Dubai authorities for failing to sufficiently involve the group in their investigation.

Moreover, Arab media reported yesterday that the UAE has asked Egypt to officially lodge a protest with Israel over the assassination as well as the alleged participation of two Palestinians who were arrested in connection with the hit.

Abu Dhabi's national security adviser met over the weekend with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. UAE officials said the arrested Palestinians were former members of the Palestinian Authority security apparatus

I believe that the international community needs to get tougher with Israel. The main reason why solutions cannot be reached is the preferential treatment that Israel gets. When other countries violate international law, they get punished, except for Israel. If war crimes are committed, other countries get punished, except Israel.

Israel behaves in the international community like a spoiled child, doing what it wants without being questioned or punished and fussing like a brat if spoken to over anything negative in relation to it. Pure bully behaviour!

I also see it as being very possible that these Israeli assassins have been dealt with by now. Maybe they were assassinated themselves for creating such a mess or perhaps are lying in a hospital awaiting a new face. Stranger things have happened.

Top EU official:
Dubai hit may harm ties with Israel

Ha'aretz News
February 21, 2010

A senior EU diplomat said on Sunday that Israel's suspected role in the slaying of a Hamas militant in Dubai and the killers' alleged use of forged EU passports will harm Israel's relations with the European bloc.

The official said the passport controversy will be harmful for the way Israel is treated by the EU since it comes on top of strong criticism over Israel's 2008 attack on Gaza.

The EU diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive topic on Sunday, a day before the EU's 27 foreign ministers are due to meet in Brussels. Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman will also be in Brussels to see EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, among others.

Dubai police say at least 11 suspects in the Jan. 19 killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh used altered British, Irish, French and German passports

Dubai police chief Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim said that the assassins in Dubai made use of diplomatic passports, the Emirati newspaper Al-Bayan reported on Sunday.

Tamim also added that some of the assassins were already in Dubai for at least a year before the assassination, and used the passports in question.

Earlier on Sunday, a top Emirati official urged European investigators to launch full-scale probes into how fraudulent passports were used by a hit squad accused of killing Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

The U.A.E.'s minister of state for foreign affairs, Anwar Gargash, said the Gulf country is deeply concerned that the suspected assassins used expertly doctored passports from nations that don't require advance U.A.E. visas.

"The U.A.E. is deeply concerned by the fact that passports of close allies, whose nationals currently enjoy preferential visa waivers, were illegally used to commit this crime," Gargash said in a statement, carried by the Emirates' state-run news agency WAM on Sunday.

Dubai's police chief Tamim has blamed Israel's Mossad secret service.

"The abuse of passports poses a global threat, affecting both countries' national security as well as the personal security of travelers," the Emirates' Foreign Minister Sheik Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan was quoted saying in the same statement.

The statement gave no updates on the investigation, but said the Emirates' and Dubai authorities continue to scrutinize events that led to Mabhouh's killing and its aftermath.

The authorities also remain in close contact with the concerned European governments, the statement added and listed the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and Germany and Austria.

Emirati officials also said on Sunday that at least two more fraudulent Irish passports have been linked to the alleged hit squad accused of killing Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

Earlier this week, Tamim told reporters in Dubai that the alleged assassins used foreign cell phone cards to avoid being traced while calling a command center in Austria.

British ministers believe the forged U.K. passports used by the team accused of assassinating Mabhouh were secretly copied at Ben-Gurion airport, the British daily telegraph reported earlier Sunday.

British diplomatic sources said ministers were told in a briefing that the passport fraud was committed by Israeli immigration officials who stopped the British nationals, now living in Israel, as they went through the airport on recent trips.

According to the Telegraph report, officials believe the passport numbers were photocopied and then used to create new documents used by the hit squad.

The suspects used the fake passports bearing their own pictures, but with the names and numbers of innocent Europeans.

All six British passports were not biometric, which means they did not have a computer chip embedded in them. Experts told the newspaper the fraud would have been relatively simple to carry out.

The identities of French, German and Irish citizens were also used.

Germany probing identity of passport-holder tied to hit

German officials on Saturday said they are examining the identity of Michael Bodenheimer, the name that appeared on a genuine German passport allegedly used in Mabhouh's.

The authorities in the city of Cologne, where the passport was issued, began a probe, and federal authorities are now considering a move of their own.

According to German weekly Der Spiegel, Bodenheimer, an Israeli, applied for a German passport from the Cologne authorities. Bodenheimer presented documents that proved German lineage, including his grandparents' marriage certificate. He also showed his Israeli passport that was issued to him a year earlier in Tel Aviv.

The German passport was issued on June 18, 2009. That document was used by one of the assassination suspects in Dubai on January 19, a day before the killing.

According to Der Spiegel, Bodenheimer does not live in Cologne, as he had claimed in his application, and no other person by that name lives there. The magazine claims a man by that name lived in Herzliya until June last year.

Haaretz has learned that a Michael Bodenheimer lives in Bnei Brak. His wife told Haaretz in a telephone interview that "he has no German passport and he never asked for such a passport. He never visited Germany, except perhaps in transit on the way to the United States."

His wife added that the ultra-Orthodox family does not have any family in Herzliya and that even though Bodenheimer's grandparents were born in Germany, they emigrated to the United States, from where he immigrated to Israel 30 years ago.

"We are quiet people and are not used to so much attention," she told Haaretz on Saturday. "The past week since the news of this story broke has been difficult for us. The fact that someone is using his name does not make him involved in this story."

Bodenheimer studies at a kollel, a yeshiva for married men. He has said he was astounded to see his name on the list of suspects, supposedly belonging to a German citizen.

"At first we didn't understand what everyone was talking about," Bodenheimer's daughter said. "The picture that was published doesn't look like him at all. He is always busy with Torah study," she said, adding that he holds no citizenship other than Israeli and American.

German media have reported that the intelligence services of the country are certain that the Mossad was involved in the killing and that the foreign minister demanded that Israel explain why it used a German passport.

Israel's ambassador to Berlin, Yoram Ben-Ze'ev, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry, where he was asked about information that can shed light on the killing of Mabhouh.

Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said Saturday that he does not expect relations between Israel and European countries whose passports were used in the assassination to deteriorate as a result of the incident.

"I do not expect a crisis in relations because there is nothing linking Israel to the assassination. Britain, France and Germany are countries with shared interests with Israel in countering terrorism," Ayalon said, naming three of the four countries whose passports were used. At least three of the suspects used Irish passports.

DO THEY PLAN ON WHITE WASHING THIS? WHY THEN ALL THE FUSS ~ JUST TO APPEASE THE NAIVE POPULACE? TO GIVE THE IMPRESSION OF DOING SOMETHING? YOUR "FRIEND" STEALS FROM YOU, ABUSES YOUR TRUST, TAKES A LIFE, AND IT IS NOTHING?

LIVNI ON DUBAI HIT :
A DEAD TERRORIST IS GOOD NEWS

Ha'aretz News

February 23, 02, 2010

Opposition leader and Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni on Tuesday praised the assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai last month, marking the first such comment from a top Israeli official.

Tzipi Livni, speaking at the closing panel of the board of trustees of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, said the death of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was good news, but did not say who was behind the killing.

Authorities in Dubai have said they were nearly certain Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad, was behind the death of Hamas chief Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a luxury hotel room in Dubai on January 20.

"The entire world must support those fighting terrorism: an American, British or Israeli soldier regardless if he is in Gaza or Dubai. The fact that a terrorist was killed, and it doesn't matter if it was in Dubai or Gaza, is good news to those fighting terrorism," said Livni.

I love how she throws the word "terrorrist" around when she was a Mossad assassin in her past and the country she loves so much is a rogue terrorist nation, and her parents were high level assassins for Irgun. Does she not see the contradiction here? No, of course not, she is on the good side and all others suspect. I think the worst thing I could wish upon her is that at least one of her sons becomes a shministim! She would be so embarrassed I am sure to have a child who puts peace before war. Look good on ya Tzip.

Also on Tuesday, Former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said that the attribution of the Mabhouh assassination to Israel increases the country's power of deterrence, Army Radio reported.

"These actions deter terrorist organizations, as well as states, who understand the capabilities of Israel's intelligence," said Halutz at a conference in Tel Aviv.

Halutz also referred to the assassination of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, which has also been blamed on Israel, saying, "When Mughniyeh was killed, it caused immediate damage to Hezbollah. Beyond the direct result of removing a significant man from the game, it sowed fear in the next in line [to replace him.]"

"Nasrallah has been sitting in a bunker for three years for fear that 'his soul would be returned to its creator,'" said Halutz referring to the Hezbollah leader