Last spring Condoleezza Rice had to intervene when Israel refused to allow seven Fulbright scholars to leave Gaza. Israel relented. Well now three of the seven have been denied visas to the U.S., by the U.S. One, Fidaa Abed, was turned away when he arrived in the States to pursue his studies at UC San Diego. Back in Gaza, he relates his experience in an op-ed in The San Diego Union-Tribune, and says the denial was arbitrary:
secret charges. All sorts of outrageous claims can be leveled based on
information that Israeli officials garner coercively. Could the secret
evidence against me have been extracted through the torture of some
young Palestinian? Was I even the one denounced, or someone with a
similar name? Was my “crime” sharing a classroom or a lunchtime
conversation with someone Israel believes poses a danger? I have no way
of knowing, and thus no way of defending myself.
David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, agrees that the claims against Abed surely originated in Israel. Then he justifies the refusal, and smears Abed with innuendo:
communicated all its intelligence about the three earlier in the
process, the visas would never have been issued. An official in the
Prime Minister's Office told me that "Israel gave information" to the
Americans "before the visas were issued and after the visas were
issued. There has been an ongoing process. We left no doubt all along
that there were very serious concerns here."…
Given that these were
Fulbright students, he said, Israel might have put aside its concerns
if they weren't acute – "if this had been in the gray area. But it was
black and white, and we told this to the Americans."…it is not the first time that the US has seemed to
underestimate some of the potential dangers associated with the
entirely admirable effort to enable deserving young Gazans to enjoy the
benefits of the Fulbright program.
Dangers? What dangers? Intelligence? Serious concerns? This adds up to nothing. Since when do Americans conduct star chambers on behalf of foreign countries that practice apartheid? Let him in.
This is the same brilliant thinking that brought us 9/11. I think that the FBI and ICE are perfectly capable of evaluating information they are given. And the decision was made. Now I know the response. The JEWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! control the security apparatus in this country. And the CIA and FBI answer to aipac but give it a rest once.
Yes there is a connection to 9/11; unfortunately our security people allowed those art students and moving company folk to escape.
So, the 19 Moslem hijackers, 15 of them Saudi, were really dupes of Israel. And Osama Bin Laden is really a Mossad agent. Good to know
Well, perhaps we could have found out to what extent that might be true as to the Moslem hijackers if we had given the art students and moving company folk some of our new cherished enhanced interrogation instead of a free pass out of the country.
Water-boarding on, Osama Bin Laden is a Muslim zealot and arch-patriot of Saudi Arabia, i.e., a Saudi populist.
The beauty of enchanced interrogation techniques is that you can interrogate out of someone virtually anything you want, as they will confess to any script you care to provide them with. You can then put them on a navy rig for several months and the matter becomes neatly sawn up, as there will be not much "them" left in them to contradict the story.
This is a well tested propaganda tool, as per Stalinist show trials, and there are two problems with that:
One, nobody believes anything that is being said in trials anymore, so nobody believes in justice (Justice exists in dictionary under the letter J – as my grandfather was fond of saying), and
Two, there is nowhere to go to try and establish the truth, because those who know it, will be either too petrified or will have brains destroyed by the time spend under the "justice department's care".
So even if we arrested and interrogated, and "enhanced" those art students and moving company folk by some moral and ethical equivalent of Gordon Kromberg, would we actually believe the prosecutor's case? Would we really know more of 9/11 than we are allowed to know now?
I argue in Israel Advocacy Organizations Change Tactics that the treatment of the Gaza students shows evidence of a change of tactics by both the Israeli government and Israel advocacy organizations in their ongoing effort to control American discourse about the Middle East.
Well, there is something in between water-boarding and allowing said art students and moving company folk to get away scot free where they couldn't be questioned as to their conduct even by a meter maid. Of course, the Gaza students needed our special attention much more. The difference between doing and being couldn't be more clear.
Charles, responding to the adolescent SoG has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
Isn't there a movie about that? The Night Of The Jewish Long Knives?