NOVEMBER 2005

Palestine: le refus de disparaître
Dear friends,
The launching of my book (in French) "Palestine: le refus de disparaître" will be at:
Place: Centre St-Pierre Apôtre, 1212  Panet Street in  Montréal, hall 100 (Marcel Pépin),
Date: Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005
Time: 18h30 to 21h00

This is an invitation to the launching of my book: Palestine: The refusal to disappear. It will be my pleasure to see you then. Those among you who sent me your mailing address will also receive an invitation from the editor. Till then,
In solidarity
Rezeq Faraj

George Packer on Iraq
www.xymphora.blogspot.com

From a very positive review by Gary Kamiya, Salon's executive editor, of a new book by George Packer, "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq", on the debacle of the attack on Iraq and its aftermath, referring to Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, and Abrams

"Almost all these figures, starting with Scoop Jackson, shared a key obsession: Israel. 'In 1996, some of the people in Perle's circle had begun to think about what it would mean for Saddam Hussein to be removed from the Middle East scene. 'They concluded it would be very good for Israel,' Packer writes. 'Perle chaired a study group of eight pro-Likud Americans, including Douglas Feith, who had worked under Perle in the Reagan administration, and David Wurmser, who was the author of the paper produced under the group's auspices . . . Afterwards the group was pleased enough with its work to send the paper to the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.' The paper, 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,' advocated smashing the Palestinians militarily, removing Saddam from power, and installing a Hashemite king on the Iraq throne.

The dangerous absurdity of this scheme (elements of which appeared in a later book by Perle and Bush speechwriter David Frum, modestly titled 'An End to Evil') did not prevent it from being accepted by high officials of the Bush administration. 'A few weeks before the start of the Iraq War, a State Department official described for me what he called the 'everybody move over one theory': Israel would annex the occupied territories, the Palestinians would get Jordan, and the Jordanian Hashemites would be restored to the throne of Iraq,' Packer writes. The neocons were out-Likuding the Likud: Even Ariel Sharon had long abandoned his beloved 'Jordan is Palestine' idea. That Douglas Feith, one of the ideologues who subscribed to such lunatic plans (the departing Colin Powell denounced Feith to President Bush as 'a card-carrying member of the Likud') was in charge of planning for Iraq is almost beyond belief.

'Does this mean that a pro-Likud cabal insinuated its way into the high councils of the U.S. government and took hold of the apparatus of American foreign policy to serve Israeli interests (as some critics of the war have charged, rather than addressing its merits head on?)' Packer asks. 'Is neoconservative another word for Jewish (as some advocates of the war have complained, rather than addressing their critics head on)?' Packer does not answer the first question directly, but he makes it clear that the intellectual origins of the war were inseparably tied to neocon concerns about Israel. 'For Feith and Wurmser, the security of Israel was probably the prime mover . . . The idea of realigning the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam Hussein was first proposed by a group of Jewish policy makers and intellectuals who were close to the Likud. And when the second President Bush looked around for a way to think about the uncharted era that began on September 11, 2001, there was one already available.'"

and, on the Office of Special Plans:

"As plans for war raced ahead, a secret new unit was being set up in the Pentagon, overseen by Douglas Feith and his deputy, William Luti, who was such a maniacal hawk that his colleagues called him 'Uber-Luti.' (At a staff meeting, Luti once called retired Gen. Anthony Zinni a traitor for questioning the Iraq war.) The secret unit was called the Office of Special Plans, and it was charged with planning for Iraq. Packer's account of this office is chilling. Its main purpose was to cook up intelligence to justify the war, which was then 'stovepiped' directly to Dick Cheney's neocon chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby (who has now been linked to the Valerie Plame scandal). Its cryptic name as well as its opposition to the traditional intelligence agencies, which had failed to deliver the goods on Saddam, reflected the views of its director, Abram Shulsky, a former Perle aide, housemate of Wolfowitz's at Cornell, and student of the Chicago classics professor Leo Strauss. Strauss, around whom a virtual cult had gathered, had famously discussed esoteric and hidden meanings in great works, and Shulsky wrapped himself in the lofty mantle of his former professor to justify the secret and 'innovative' approach of the OSP.

In fact, besides feeding bogus intelligence from Iraqi exile sources into the rapacious craw of the White House, the OSP was nothing but a spin machine to prepare the way to war: No actual 'planning' was done."

and, fitting closely to my general theory about long-term Israeli plans:

"'Shiite power was the key to the whole neoconservative vision for Iraq,' Packer notes. 'The convergence of ideas, interests, and affections between certain American Jews and Iraqi Shia was one of the more curious subplots of the Iraq War . . . the Shia and the Jews, oppressed minorities in the region, could do business, and . . . traditional Iraqi Shiism (as opposed to the theocratic, totalitarian kind that had taken Iran captive) could lead the way to reorienting the Arab world toward America and Israel.'"

Amazing stuff. Even more amazing are revelations that the complete lack of planning for the aftermath of the war was intentional, based on neo-con fears that allowing real experts to explain the difficulties might actually prevent the war from occurring. In fact, the real experts were systematically purged from the system by the neocons, an act which should in itself result in all the neocons being jailed for treason (hobbling the American military thinking process in order to benefit a foreign country is clearly treason).

Only a short while ago, you would be the vilest of vile anti-Semites for even thinking this way, but the idea that the disastrous American attack on Iraq was the product of treasonous Israeli agents in the American government working directly for the Likud is becoming mainstream thinking. What would be nice is if we could stop realizing the truth only two or three years late (read the 'conspiracy theorists' if you want to be ahead of the curve!), and put a stop now to the fact that these same traitors are still working to cause a civil war in Iraq, good for the Likudniks but extremely bad for the United States, the Middle East, and the world.
www.xymphora.blogspot.com

Quote from Lou Reed:

"Giving Robert Lowell any kind of poetry prize is obscene. Ditto worrying about Ezra Pound. And the Yale Poetry series. The colleges are meant to kill. Four years in which to kill you. And if you don't extend your stay, the draft, by and for old people, waits to kill you. Kill your instincts, your love, the music. The music is the only live, living thing. Draft only those over forty. It's their war, let them kill each other."

Robert Whitaker's Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, And The Enduring
Mistreatment Of The Mentally Ill
The fundamentally flawed basis of drug company influences within it have now been exposed by Robert Whitaker's masterful Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring
Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill.

Neuroleptic drugs are the basis of this multi-billion dollar enterprise. Do they help schizophrenic patients - as has been claimed since their introduction in the 1950's - or harm them? Whitaker answers this key question by proving that the drugs are harmful, and that psychiatry, paid off by the drug companies, refuses to face its consequently worsening treatment results.

The first half of the book catalogs the often-shameful history of psychiatric treatment: surgical removal of organs, multiple dental extractions, insulin-induced comas, and the widely-acclaimed, Nobel-prize-winning lobotomy - the ice-pick operation. He maintains that psychiatrists' search for physiological causes of mental illness underlies both these various horrors and what he sees as their continuation - the neuroleptic drugs originally called "chemical lobotomies."

The book's second half, which has evoked intense psychiatric fury, examines the drugs and their effects: how their original acceptance, as aids to psychotherapy by helping patients talk more easily, resulted from skillful but dubious drug company public relations ploys; how their gradual subsequent authentication as the heart of treatment, rather than as ancillaries, transformed psychiatry into an increasingly mechanical, de-humanized profession which treats patients more and more according to "diagnostic label" - prescribing drugs supposedly specific for the numbered "disorder" in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM); how the organization and provision of patient care have been eclipsed by drug and brain research as the path to psychiatric success and power; how the drugs themselves harm patients' brains; and how, despite media hoopla about brave new substances, today's treatment results are far worse than in times past.

The centrality of drugs in treatment has led to the almost complete disappearance of individualized care by psychiatrists - psychotherapy or counseling. Whatever close personal relationships still exist in treatment situations - formerly (and still properly) seen as the essence of good psychiatric care - are now supplied by lower-paid, non-medical professionals: psychologists, social workers and nurses.

Wagging the dog of psychiatric treatment by the tail of drug research has been another result of today's psychopharmaceutical primacy. The chairs of medical school psychiatry departments, who shape psychiatric training, are selected increasingly for their fund-finding abilities - drug company grants are plentiful - rather than for knowing how to provide and organize effective care. Medical schools' bottom lines have thus superseded the needs of the patients they train doctors to treat; one result has been the virtual disappearance of psychotherapy/counseling training from psychiatric residency program.

Whitaker points out how the psychiatric literature itself shows that the drugs "do not fix any known brain abnormality nor do they put brain chemistry back into balance. What they do is alter brain functions in a manner that diminishes certain characteristic symptoms." They blunt and distort patients' emotionality, thus reducing both their explosiveness and their ability to think. The drugs also cause severe brain changes "associated both with tardive dyskinesia and an increased biological vulnerabilty to psychosis.

The best way to evaluate any treatment is to examine its effect on patients. Patients and non-patient research subjects (some of them physicians) describe the same horrendous subjective effects from neuroleptics. One woman told a 1975 United States Senate hearing that they led her "to the most fatalistic and despairing moments I've had on this planet. The only way I can describe the despair is that my consciousness was being beaten back.

The long-term effects of neuroleptics on patients had already been recognized by the mid-1980's. "A fairly clear profile of the long-term course of 'medicated schizophrenia' had emerged in the medical literature," Whitaker writes. "The drugs made people chronically ill, more prone to violence and criminal behavior, and more socially withdrawn. Permanent brain damage and early death were two other consequences of neuroleptic use."

Other data also demonstrate neuroleptics' harm. A 1994 Harvard study showed that treatment results in schizophrenia had worsened over the previous twenty years, during which time the treatment focus had shifted almost entirely to drugs. Treatment results in Third World countries, which use neuroleptics much less than we, are far better than ours. Of the 2,941 schizophrenic patients admitted in 1943 - before the drug era - to all of New York State's mental hospitals, 44%
had been discharged five years later without ever being readmitted. But in 2002, 15.000 (!) former mental patients, almost all on medication, were the subject of a New York Times series about the horrendous adult homes into which they had been sent, and often kept prisoner after discharge from hospital.

Whitaker's startling book has evoked strong reactions. Loren R. Mosher, M.D., former chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia at the National Institute of Mental Health, called it "investigative journalism at its scholarly, perceptive, and explanatory best; an insightful, courageous expose of how madness went from 'out of mind, out of sight' to a source of massive corporate profits." Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (who left that position after a dispute over the handling of possible conflicts of interest among Journal reviewers) lauded it as "fascinating and provocative." Many lay publications praised it.

But three psychiatrists who reviewed the book all attacked it - by impugning Whitaker personally rather than by refuting any of his important points. One called the book "propaganda masquerading as fact." In Medscape, Larry S. Goldman, M.D. of Chicago, author of an "educational drug-interaction CD program," called it an example of "when good journalists go bad," and suggested that the book "looks as if it were commissioned by Scientologists." E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., one of psychiatric drugging's strongest supporters, wrote that although Whitaker has heretofore been "known as a serious medical writer for the Boston Globe, Mad in America rarely ascends to the level of that newspaper; vrather, it mostly descends to the level of the tabloid Globe, available at supermarket check-out counters."

The heart of Whitaker's book is the drug companies' unholy influence on all of psychiatry. It is ironic that while Dr. Goldman acknowledges the importance of Whitaker's demonstration of "the unhealthy symbiosis between the U.S. pharmaceutical industry and much of the psychiatric research community" (but he says Whitaker's "overheated style" undermines his book's effectiveness), Dr.
Torrey belittles any alleged "excess influence and profits of the pharmaceutical industry," and calls it "unfortunate that Whitaker did not turn his attention to [this] real problem in American psychiatry," the brain damage he insists causes mental illness.

MEDIA LENS APPEAL: THE FIRST MEDIA LENS BOOK - GUARDIANS OF POWER - AND A REQUEST FOR SUPPORT
October 4, 2005

We are very pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of the first Media Lens book: Guardians Of Power - The Myth Of The Liberal Media. (Pluto Press, December 2005;
http://www.plutobooks.com/cgi-local/nplutobrows.pl?chkisbn=0745324827&main=&second=&third=)

In his foreword to our book, John Pilger writes:

"The creators and editors of Medialens, David Edwards and David Cromwell, have had such influence in a short time that, by holding to account those who, it is said, write history's draft, they may well have changed the course of modern historiography. They have certainly torn up the 'ethical blank cheque', which Richard Drayton referred to [in the Guardian], and have exposed as morally corrupt 'the right to bomb, to maim, to imprison without trial...'. Without Medialens during the attack on and occupation of Iraq, the full gravity of that debacle might have been consigned to oblivion, and to bad history.

"They have not bothered with soft targets, such as Rupert Murdoch's Sun, but have concentrated on that sector of the media which prides itself on its 'objectivity', 'impartiality' and 'balance' (such as  the BBC) and its liberalism and fairness (such as the Guardian). Not since Noam Chomsky's and Edward Herman's Manufacturing Consent have we had such an incisive and erudite guide through the media's thicket of agendas and vested interests. Indeed, they have done the job of true journalists: they have set the record straight.

"For this reason, Guardians of Power ought to be required reading in every media college. It is the most important book about journalism I can remember."
 
In his endorsement of the book, Noam Chomsky writes:

"Regular critical analysis of the media, filling crucial gaps and correcting the distortions of ideological prisms, has never been more important. Media Lens has performed a major public service by carrying out this task with energy, insight, and care."

Edward Herman comments:

"Media Lens is doing an outstanding job of pressing the mainstream media to at least follow their own stated principles and meet their public service obligations. It is fun as well as enlightening to watch their representatives, while sometimes giving straightforward answers to queries, often getting flustered, angry, evasive, and sometimes mis-stating the facts."

We are delighted with the book and with this positive reaction from people we admire so much - media analysts who have been major inspirations in our work. We are also, of course, looking forward to the reaction of the media to what we have written.

Curiously, we both found the process of writing the book a real eye-opener. Concentrating the most outrageous examples of media bias on the most important issues in such a small space seemed to generate a kind of critical mass in the mind - the propaganda role of the media became far more obvious than usual, with any lingering doubts removed.

Readers may be surprised to learn that the hundreds of Media Alerts we have written (nearly 1,800 pages of analysis) since 2001 have been produced mostly in our spare time after doing paid work. Over the last two years one of us, David Edwards, has been able to work full-time on the project. David Cromwell, however, has continued to do what he can in his spare time in the mornings, evenings and at weekends.

This is extremely frustrating for us. There is so much more that we want to do, so much that we believe we are able to do, but we are held back simply by limited time and energy. We therefore appeal to readers who value what we are doing and who are financially secure, to consider donating to Media Lens. Also, please let us known of any organisations or donors that might be willing to help with the funds we need to continue and expand our work.

Most of us take for granted that we have to pay for corporate newspapers, magazines and TV services. We are determined that Media Lens should remain free. A big part of our motivation is the hope that our work can provide an example, however flawed, of generosity and compassion as a counterpoint to the greed and brutality of the corporate media system.

But however well-intentioned the motivation, the simple fact is that radical media do not come out of thin air and cannot survive on thin air. They +do+ need the support of large numbers of people. We are three people (two editors and one webmaster, Olly Maw), but our work is rooted in the effort, expertise and financial assistance of countless others.

Thanks for your support.

Best wishes

David Edwards, David Cromwell and Olly Maw
Write to us:
Email: editor@medialens.org

Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies

Jim Marrs, author of Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies (Origin Press: September 2004). Inside Job was originally commissioned by HarperCollins, a major New York publisher for whom Marrs has written two previous bestsellers. Accepted by the editors, and vetted by a Harper attorney, the firm backed out just before printing the book, even allowing the author to keep his six-figure advance. The book is now being brought out by a small press in Northern California, and ships on July 1, 2004.

In this brittle environment, whistleblowers from diverse quarters are also coming forth to provide even more evidence. These men and women go further than mainstream dissenters like Richard Clarke, former counter-terrorism czar, in their accusations of wrongdoing. They include:

• Lieutenant Colonel Steve Butler, former vice chancellor at the Navy's Monterey Defense Language Institute, who was relieved of duty after telling the press that he believed President Bush knew about the impending attacks.

• Bill Manning, editor of the 125-year old Fire Engineering magazine, who in a 2002 editorial called the official investigation into the alleged destruction of the towers by fire a "half-baked farce."

• Sibel Edmonds, an FBI translator, who challenged Condoleezza Rice's 9/11 Commission testimony on every point, only to be gagged by a court order obtained by the White House.

• 9/11 widow Ellen Mariani, a housewife who along with a former attorney general of Pennsylvania is suing key officials under the RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corruption Organizations) Act.

• Catherine Austin Fitts, one-time Republican and former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Bush I, who has gone public with evidence about 9/11 insider profiteering.

Americans who seriously doubt the "incompetence theory" promulgated by the government's 9/11 Commission probably number in the millions. The evidence concentrated in books like Jim Marrs' Inside Job, they believe, leads far beyond the claim of a "chance occurrence" of multiple simultaneous failures of America's homeland defense and intelligence agencies. They suspect that the cumulative evidence points to the likelihood that the Bush White House, at a minimum, permitted 9/11 to occur as a pretext for its political agenda. This is the grim conclusion forced upon many.

Large independent conferences based on this premise have been held in the US and Europe, notably the International Citizens' 9/11 Inquiry, attended by nearly 1000 people in San Francisco in March 2004. Arising from the latter event was a coalition organization named 911Truth.org, which is now leading the movement through its portal website and many public initiatives.

We are fortunate in that the myriad findings of the 9/11 truth movement are now succinctly covered in the acclaimed new book by Jim Marrs. In addition to his original journalistic research, Marrs summarizes the work of scores of other researchers and uses extant mainstream sources. His book also features in its appendices the 23 Questions of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee and an excerpt from Ellen Mariani's RICO Act lawsuit filing.

Hasidim threaten Haifa author over book on forbidden love


By Asaf Carmel, Haaretz, 20 Oct 05
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/636151.html

Ultra-Orthodox extremists have been harassing a Haifa author ever since he wrote a romance novel revolving around an affair between religious and secular protagonists. This is the story of a boiler installer from Haifa who dedicated five years of his life to researching the extremist Toldot Aharon Hasidic sect, and ended up writing a romance novel. The novel revolves around a story of the forbidden love between a young ultra-Orthodox woman and a secular man.

Since the book has been published, its author, Menashe Darash, has known no peace. Ultra-Orthodox extremists, who were Darash's friends until not long ago, have decided to prevent the book from being released. Darash says he has been receiving harassing phone calls since he agreed at the end of last month to stop distributing the book and then retracted what he said was his coerced consent. And on Sunday, someone threw 50 mice into his living room.

Darash, married and a father of three, has been making a living for more than 20 years from a small boiler-installing business. He has difficulty explaining what made him decide five years ago to get inside the Toldot Aharon. "One day I installed a boiler in some building near Kiryat Vishnitz in Haifa, and from the roof of the building the entire neighborhood was spread out before me," said
Darash. "That same day, in the evening, I saw a report on TV about a rally by the Toldot Aharon, and I saw that they're very different from the Haredim [ultra-Orthodox] I knew until then. Apparently it was the combination of these two things that did it."

Darash began reading everything he could find about the Hasidim who wear striped robes, and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim. "I put a black skullcap on my head and I landed right in a study hall," he said. Despite his foreignness, Darash, a secular Jew whose parents immigrated from Iraq, was welcomed by the closed Ashkenazi Hasidic group. "I met a very old man and won him over," said Darash. "Through him I met his whole large family, the children and the grandchildren, and they introduced me to the Hasidic stream. The truth is that in the beginning it was a little strange and they asked if I was a journalist, but I explained to them that all I wanted was to collect material for my son's school project. I went to Mea Shearim at least once a month, I bought books, and each time I returned armed with more knowledge."

A few months after Darash started his journeys to Jerusalem, he decided to write a book. He was influenced by a book called "The Daughter of the Rebbelach," which describes Tami Hindele, a pretty ultra-Orthodox woman who tries and fails to overcome her love for a secular man. Darash said several Hasidim knew the kind of book he was writing. "Some told me that the Hasidism would not let it go quietly," he said. "I thought that at most there would be some complaints and
curses and the story would be over."

The book, which Darash and his wife self-published, was printed in Jerusalem and somehow made its way to Mea Shearim. Asher Barak, an attorney who represents the Hasidim opposed to the book, said Darash misled them. "He received information fraudulently," said Barak. "Their community hosted him, and he presented himself as someone who wanted to become religious. He put in the book all kinds of details that he acquired, such as a document that Toldot Aharon gives to its youths before they get married. This isn't something they tend to talk about in public." Barak said his clients' greatest concern is that "youths from the community could become interested in the book, and its content could corrupt them. The romance at the core of the book is something that would not be considered in this community."

On September 28 Barak and two Hasidim came to Darash's house and asked him not to distribute the book anywhere; Darash refused, and they left. The next day Barak called to offer a compromise, whereby Darash would be compensated for keeping the book under wraps. Darash and his wife got scared, and that evening Barak and two Hasidim came for an hours-long visit. "They told me their rabbi would die if he knew the story, that I damaged thousands of children," said
Darash. "Later they said, `We're the moderate ones, and it's worthwhile for you to deal with us. We're not responsible for what the radical ones will do.'"

The two parties decided that the Hasidim would pay Darash NIS 50,000 in compensation and that he would delete all references to Hasidism. He also said he would give the Hasidim all copies of the book and show them the amended version at a later date in order to get their approval for its publication. At 3:30 A.M., Darash said, he signed the papers they gave him without reading them.
"I just wanted them to leave already," he said. Israeli novelist Sami Michael, a neighbor of Darash's, witnessed part of the scene. "His daughter was crying, his wife had run upstairs, they told him to turn off the TV and he sat on the side chain-smoking," said Michael. "I told the attorney and the rabbis right away, as the president of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and as an experienced author, that any agreement made under these conditions is invalid from the start," Michael stated.

The next day Darash said he discovered that the agreement he had made verbally was not reflected in the document he had signed. When he told the Hasidim that he would send them the copies of the book only after the agreement was altered, he began receiving harassing phone calls, he says. One person called and said, "If you don't kill the book, you'll be killed," Darash said. Barak said there was no evidence that Toldot Aharon was involved in the calls. The case is now at a crossroads, said one of Darash's lawyers: The next step could be legal proceedings or a mutually agreed solution. "Yes, I'm prepared to compromise," said Darash. "But only out of fear."