ISRAEL TRUTH TIMES

A blog dedicated to investigating events as they occur in Judea and Samaria, in Israel and in the world, and as they relate to global powers and/or to the Israeli government, public figures, etc. It is dedicated to uncovering the truth behind the headlines; and in so doing, it strives to do its part in saving Judea and Samaria, and by extension, Israel and the Jewish People, from utter destruction at the hands of its many external and internal enemies.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Sometimes 'accidents' are a good thing


Report: Top Russian Nuke Scientists Killed

Sivan 21, 5771, 23 June 11 01:17
(Israelnationalnews.com) A report in Ha'aretz Thursday said that five top Russian nuclear scientists who were helping Iran were among the victims of a plane crash in Russia on Monday. The plane crash in northern Russia claimed 44 lives. The scientists had been working at the Bushehr nuclear facility, helping with the transition of management of the plant to a Russian group.

The report, quoting Russian security officials, said that the deaths of the scientists was a "great blow" to Russia's nuclear industry.

No kidding! "Some would argue that this situation applies to other countries as well"? Hello, Israel of judicial tyranny!!!

Wilders Acquittal May Signal the Turn of the Tide

Sivan 21, 5771, 23 June 11 02:28
by Amiel Ungar
(Israelnationalnews.com) The acquittal of the embattled Dutch politician Geert Wilders may mark the turn of the tide in terms of European permissiveness towards Islamist immigrants who would destroy Dutch culture from within.
One can say that the trial was a win-win situation for Wilders, as the prosecution itself believed that he should be acquitted and stated so. Obviously Wilders is correct in saying "an enormous burden has fallen from my shoulders." Even when one believes in one's innocence and is certain of vindication, the postion of defendant is an unpleasant one.
Wilders, however, received a good deal of compensation. First of all the trial was nationally televised, including Wilders' summation speech in which he compared himself to the Dutch martyrs and to Martin Luther's defiance of papal supremacy:
Every day the armoured cars [Wilders faces death threats from Moslems - ed.] drive me past the statue of Johan de Witt at the Hofvijver in The Hague. De Witt wrote the “Manifesto of True Freedom” and he paid for freedom with his life. Every day I go to my office through the Binnenhof where Johan van Oldenbarneveldt was beheaded after a political trial. Leaning on his stick the elderly Oldenbarneveldt addressed his last words to his people. He said: “I have acted honourably and piously as a good patriot.” Those words are also mine.
A major loser was the Dutch judiciary that overruled the prosecution and insisted that the trial proceed. The first panel of judges had to be replaced when they appeared to be tampering with witnesses in an attempt to secure a guilty verdict.
In his summation, Wilders took a devastating potshot at the political orientation of the judiciary. "Those on the Left like to tamper with the separation of powers. When they cannot win politically because the Dutch people have discerned their sinister agenda, they try to win through the courts." Some would argue that this situation applies to other countries as well.
In the verdict, the court claimed that some of Wilder's anti-immigrant remarks were crude, but they were part of a legitimate debate within Dutch society and mitigated by the fact that Wilders had no problems with immigrants who sought to integrate.
Dutch embassies and businesses in the Moslem world will probably take precautionary measures. Left-wing attorneys who first brought the charges against Wilders have pledged to bring the case to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.
As Syria and other countries with "stellar" human rights credentials are members of the commission, they will undoubtedly receive a sympathetic hearing.
Even before the announcement of the verdict, the Dutch government was already taking steps to compel newcomers to integrate to the point of revoking residence permits for those who fail the integration courses.
In justifying the action the government explained that without integration and an insistence on Dutch values for "the society gradually grows apart and eventually no one feels at home anymore in the Netherlands."
The Netherlands will also be emulating France in banning the Muslim Burqa and outlawing forced marriages.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The video the 'palestinians' don't want you to see....

Desperation...with good reason; the system is broken beyond repair. As there, so here: I was just told today that in Israel, 200 men a year commit suicide because of divorce proceedings. Who is responsible?

New Hampshire man lights himself on fire to protest America’s decline

 

by Simon Black
http://www.sovereignman.com/expat/new-hampshire-man-lights-himself-on-fire?a_aid=CRX
June 20, 2011
Oxford, England
Late last week, Thomas James Ball reached his breaking point. Driven to desperation by a system that bankrupted him and destroyed his family, Ball walked up to the main door of the Keene County, New Hampshire courthouse, doused himself with gasoline, and lit himself ablaze.
Hardly anyone seems to have noticed.
Conversely, when a 26-year old Tunisian man lit himself on fire a few months ago after police confiscated the fruits and vegetables he had been selling without a proper permit, it launched a wave of revolution across the Middle East.
People were shocked into taking action… protests and riots swept the region and one regime after another crumbled.
Rather than sparking an “American spring” and shocking US citizens into taking their country back, though, Mr. Ball’s act of self-immolation seems to have been largely ignored. There has been scant coverage (and scant is being extremely generous) of Mr. Ball in the mainstream media, and what little coverage there is generally discredits the man as a troublemaker.
This is how the system’s gatekeepers have been so adroit at maintaining the status quo– by suppressing dissent, marginalizing the detractors, and distracting the populace with meaningless, irrelevant drivel.
Mr. Ball left behind a lengthy missive prior to his suicide, which covers a range of topics from political corruption to why the family court system in America is utterly disgraceful. He was, to put it mildly, a staunch advocate of violent change, and it’s clear he hoped a great deal of others would follow in his footsteps to literally burn the system down.
(Ball even left instructions for how to make a proper Molotov cocktail along with specific vulnerabilities of police stations in his area…)
Perhaps the most interesting part of his final post, however, was the observation that the United States is no longer a nation of laws; Ball described what he calls the ‘second set of books,’ which is essentially the collection of policies, procedures, and protocols that courts and executive agencies rely upon.
This includes police departments and other ‘enforcers’ across the country that come up with standardized responses to take judgment out of the equation. TSA agents, for instance, are only following procedure when they fondle children at airport checkpoints. Even the guys who drove the trains to the concentration camps were just following procedures.
Ball argued that the nation is now ruled by such procedures, even in such institutions as family court where judges (by policy) pass the buck down the line to mental health case workers.
His anger and desperation for this system, which tore apart his family and bankrupted his finances, led Ball to light himself ablaze at the local courthouse in a state whose motto is “Live Free or Die.” Ball chose the latter.
The next day, life went on in America. There was no shocking front-page cover story or award-winning photograph to spark a national debate… let alone propel droves of fed-up citizens to flood the streets demanding change.
Rather, the New Hampshire courthouse cleaned up his charred remains and meticulously scrubbed the floors to eliminate all trace of the event. 24-hour news networks ran a quick blurb in their scrolling tickers amid more important coverage of the Miss USA beauty pageant and President Obama’s Father’s Day plans.
In other words, business as usual… suggesting that if there is, in fact, going to be a fight for the soul of the country, it’s a long way off, and many more degrees for the boiling frogs who are stuck in the pot.
My assessment of this situation, however controversial it may be, remains very clear: the great faceless enemy that opposes us, irrespective of our country of origin, is the institution of government.
Over time, this institution has inserted itself into nearly all aspects of life, such that a man cannot so much as enjoy a pint of beer, discipline his children, ride on the train, go to the doctor, open a bank account, apply for a job, go fishing, or watch a sporting event without the heavy hand of government being involved.
This is a beast that feeds on citizens; the more it feeds, the larger it becomes and the hungrier it gets. Of all the solutions out there, including armed conflict, civil disobedience, self-immolation, active democracy, etc., the only one that truly destroys the beast is starving it– take away the feast of productive citizens and accelerate its collapse.


Disclaimer: I am only posting his letter for its explanations, which make sense to me: I am in no way endorsing his recommendations!

Last statement sent to Sentinel from self-immolation victim

Copyright Keene Publishing Corporation © 2011 | Posted: Thursday, June 16, 2011 12:49 pm
Editor's note: On Thursday morning, June 16, The Sentinel received a "last statement" via mail from a man who insinuated that he planned to set himself on fire in front of the Cheshire County Court House, and an explanation of why he intended to do so. Through further reporting, The Sentinel is confident this is from the victim of Wednesday afternoon's fire, although police have not yet received confirmation of his identity. The 15-page statement is printed in full, except for two redacted items: The names of the man's mother and his three children.  Details will be posted as they become available.
Last Statement
by Tom Ball

A man walks up to the main door of the Keene N.H. County Courthouse, douses himself with gasoline and lights a match. And everyone wants to know why.
Apparently the old general was right. Death is not the worst of evil.
I am due in court the end of the month. The ex-wife lawyer wants me jailed for back child support. The amount ranges from $2,200. to $3,000. depending on who you ask. Not big money after being separated over ten years and unemployed for the last two. But I do owe it. If I show up for court without the money and the lawyer say jail, then the judge will have the bailiff take me into custody. There really are no surprises on how the system works once you know how it actually works. And it does not work anything like they taught you in high school history or civics class.
I could have made a phone call or two and borrowed the money. But I am done being bullied for being a man. I cannot believe these people in Washington are so stupid to think they can govern Americans with an iron fist. Twenty-five years ago, the federal government declared war on men. It is time now to see how committed they are to their cause. It is time, boys, to give them a taste of war.
There are two kinds of bureaucrats you need to know; the ones that say and the ones that do. The bridge between them is something I call The Second Set of Books. I have some figures of the success of their labors. You and I are in these numbers, as well as our spouses and children. But first let me tell you how I ended up in this rabbit hole.
My story starts with the infamous slapping incident of April 2001. While putting my four year old daughter to bed, she began licking my hand. After giving her three verbal warnings I slapped her. She got a cut lip. My wife asked me to leave to calm things down.
When I returned hours later, my wife said the police were by and said I could not stay there that night. The next day the police came by my work and arrested me, booked me, and then returned me to work. Later on Peter, the parts manager, asked me if I and the old lady would be able to work this out. I told him no. I could not figure out why she had called the police. And bail condition prevented me from asking her. So I no longer trusted her judgment.
After six months of me not lifting a finger to save this marriage, she filed for divorce. Almost two years after the incident, I was talking with her on the phone. She told me that night she had called a mental health provider we had for one of the kids. Wendy, the counselor told my then wife that if she did not call the police on me, then she too would be arrested.
Suddenly, everything made sense. She is the type that believes that people in authority actually know what they are talking about. If both she and I were arrested, what would happen to our three children, ages 7,4 and 1? They would end up in State custody. So my wife called the police on her husband to protect the children. And who was she protecting the kids from? Not her husband, the father of these children. She was protecting them from the State of New Hampshire.
This country is run by idiots.
The police sergeant Freyer screwed this up from the get go. When I got the Court Complaint form the box was checked that said Domestic Violence Related. I could not believe that slapping your child was domestic violence. So I looked up the law. Minor custodial children are exempted. Apparently, 93% of American parents still spank, slap or pinch their children. To this day I still wonder if Freyer would have made this arrest if it had been the mother that had slapped the child.
Labeling someone's action as domestic violence in American in the 21st century is akin to labeling someone a Jew in Germany in the 1930's. The entire legal weight of the state is coming down on him. But I consider myself lucky. My family was destroyed. But that poor bastard in Germany had his family literally annihilated.
Arrests are mandatory for the police in New Hampshire for domestic violence. That is not law. That is police department policy. Laws come from the Legislature and the Governor's office together. God only knows where these policies come from. The State's Attorney General also has a mandatory arrest protocol for domestic violence. I call these policies, procedures and protocols The Second Set of Books. You never cover the Second Set of Books your junior year in high school. That because we are not suppose to have a Second Set of Books. This is America-we have the rule of law.
I am a regular guy, a coffee and cheeseburger type of fellow. As remarkable as my life has been, I figure that what happens to me must be happening to others as well. I was 48 years old when I got arrested here for my first time. So I went looking for the arrest numbers for domestic violence, this new group that I had unwilling joined. I could not find anything. So I wrote the U.S. Dept. of Justice in Washington. They wrote back that they did not keep track of domestic violence arrests. The FBI keeps track of all other crimes. How come not domestic violence? I thought some low level clerk was blowing me off.
At the time, I had mailing addresses in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. So I wrote to all six Congressional offices, the two Senators from each state and the two Congressman. They like doing favors for constituents hoping you will favorably remember their name in the voting booth. All six offices reported back the same thing. They do not know how many arrests for domestic violence have been made. I immediately knew something was wrong. And I also knew this was not going to be good.
Improvise, adapt and overcome. The Army teaches that to every soldier it trains. They say that no battle plan survives the first five minutes of combat. So your people on the ground had better be able to think for themselves. Taking casualties in war is just an occupational hazard. Taking casualties and not accomplishing your mission is a disaster. After 21 years of Army service, I am pretty good at improvising.
The first thing I found was a study not of domestic violence arrests but of domestic violence injuries for 18 unnamed states and the D.C. in the year 2000. In the study 51% of the injuries were 'no injuries'. So I knew I had a study of police reports. Who else but a police officer would record no injuries? I populated that out to the 50 states and came up with 874,000 arrest in the year 2000.
I had originally populated the number back to 1994 when the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was enacted into law. I would later find out these arrests stated with the U.S. Attorney General's Task Force of Domestic Violence ten years earlier in 1984. As individual states data became available for various years and states, I would incorporated in to my informal study. The number I have now in 2011 is 36 million adults have been arrested for domestic violence. I have a gut feeling this number could be as high as 55 million. But I only have data to 36 million. So 36 million it stays. And there is a really cool trick you can do once you have this number. You can find out how many American men. women and children ended up homeless because of these arrests.
Most of the domestic violence statistics I have seen break down with 75% male and 25% female being arrested. So I am going to used the male pronoun for the one arrested spouse and the female pronoun for the victim spouse. That should make the domestic violence feminists ecstatic-man bad, woman good. But that is okay because that is probably the last nice thing I am going to do for them today.
When then a man is arrested for domestic violence, one of two things can happen. If they are only dating and have separate apartments, then he can head home. But if they are living together, then this fellow has a real problem. Bail conditions and then a possible protective or restraining order prevent him from being with her. So he needs to find a new place to live, at least until the charges are resolved. The King of his Castle is no longer allowed into his castle. A feminist name Pence who wrote that was absolutely giddy at that outcome. So he can get his own place if he has enough money. Or he can move in with his mother, his sister or another relative. He might have a girl friend who would let him stay with her. And if none of this is possible, well then I guess he is sleeping in his car down by the river.
If he has minor children, money will soon turn into an issue. Most men I know do not mind paying child support. They want their kids to have food on their plates, clothes on their backs, and a roof over their heads. But it does stress that man's finances. Child support is usually 33% of the man's gross income. Withholding for taxes, social security and health insurance can range up to 28% of his gross paycheck. So a man making $500 a week gross has only $825 monthly left over after withholding and child support. That is not enough money for an apartment here in Central Massachusetts. That does not include other expenses like heating, electric, gas, groceries, telephone, cable, car payment and car insurance. So he is in a financial hole. Estimates of homeless men run 82% to 94%. I am going to round that down to 80%.
After the King has left his castle, his wife runs into a problem. She was use to getting his whole paycheck for the household. Now she get a third for child support. Figure they both work and made the same money, her budget went from 100% down to 66%. If she was running the house on $3,045. a month when the King was home, now without him she only has $2,220. Most households in America cannot withstand a 27% hit on the household account. She'll juggle the bills but eventually most wives figure out that they can pay all the smaller bills if they just does not pay the big bill. That would be the rent or the mortgage. So six to nine months after the King is out of the castle, the Queen, the Princes and the Princesses are also on the street. Domestic violence feminists state that 50% of victim spouses of domestic violence end up homeless at some time in their lives.
The last group of homeless from these arrests are children. The domestic violence feminists state that 70% of domestic violence couple have children. So 50% female times 70% children equals 35%. But children is plural. So we will double to 70%.
(Odd isn't it? They know that 50% of victim spouses end up homeless and that 70% of them have children. How can they know the percentages when they do not know how many total arrests were made? Those people at the U.S. Justice Dept. cannot even pull off a credible cover-up. )
Men are 0.8, women are 0.5, and children are 0.7 for a grand total of 2.0 homeless Americans for every domestic violence arrest. Multiply that by 36 million and you get 72 million men, women and children ending up homeless at some point in their lives over the last 25 years because of these domestic violence arrests.
That is a really large number even by Washington standards. That is almost 25% of the entire population of the U.S. using 2010 census figures. Which begs the question did these homeless people contribute to this latest economic meltdown, or did they cause it? Because if they did cause it then the recovery will not be measure in months or years but in decades.
Some of the boys in the Father's Movement think Congress might have shot themselves in the foot over this one. Personally, I think they shot themselves some place anatomically higher. No wonder the Speaker of the House is always crying. The Dummies on the Potomac.
Twenty-five years ago the federal government start pushing these arrests on state's legal systems. Now, we have an economy on the rope. They have thrown a huge amount of money at banks, big business and local and states government. And we are still in the mud. But no economist either at the Treasury Dept., Federal Reserve, universities or think tanks are even looking at the impact of all these broken families. If that 36 million arrest is correct, then 72 million men and women, have been throw out of the middle class into subsistence living. Or is the number 55 million and 110 million? No one knows and no one is even looking. But why should look? According to the Attorney General, we do not know how many arrests we have made.
And if the Tea Party is any indication, insurrection is brewing in the land. Just a coincident? Not likely. This is what happens when the government wipes out the middle class.
The idea for these arrests came from something called the Minneapolis Police Experiment (MPE) of 1981-82. In the experiment police offices were given pads with one of three words written on them; counsel, send or arrest. Counsel meant the officer was to try to mediate the couple's spat. Send was to send one of the spouses out of the house for eight hours as a cooling off period. Arrest was arrest one of the two spouses. The officer was to do as the top paper on the pad said to do. The experiment was set up by the Police Foundation and Lawrence W. Sherman was the lead researcher. The results show counseling resulted in a future assault in 24% cases, send was 19%, and the arrest option resulted in a future assault in only 10% of the cases. Perhaps a cheap way of cutting down future domestic violence.
In 1984 The U. S. Attorney General's Task Force of Domestic Violence recommended arrest as the primary weapon in domestic violence assault. Lawrence W. Sherman recommend not using the arrests because the MPE was just one study and it could be wrong. They ignored him. And by 1992, 93% of the police departments in the nation had adopted some form of mandatory arrest in domestic violence cases.
But by 1992 five more addition studies similar to the MPE became available. Lawrence W. Sherman reviewed all five studies. Then once again he wrote that the police should not use arrest. In two of the five studies, they found the same result as they did in the MPE, that an arrest cut down the odds of a future assault. But in the other three studies an arrest actually increase the odds of a future assault. So arresting someone in a domestic violence situation to cut down on future assaults did not work any better than just flipping a coin. I do not know if Lawrence W. Sherman is still alive. But fortunately he wrote a book call Policing Domestic Violence that was published in 1992.
So we have 800,000 American police officers arresting one in every six adults in the country and throwing 25% of the men, women and children out on the streets in an effort to enforce a policy that they knew did not work back in1992. And I had always assumed that you needed a man to really screw something up. Oh well, there goes another glass ceiling.
Why would they push an arrest policy that does not work? There are two schools of thought on the reason why. The first comes from Lawrence W. Sherman. He calls it the Law of Just Desserts. Revenge for slights and offenses, real or imagined. I am sure there are some that would argue that women are not vengeful. But what is that old saying? Hell hath no fury.....
The second idea comes from the mother of the second wave of feminism. I do speak of the brilliant Betty Friedan. In the Epilogue Chapter of the 20th Anniversary Edition of her book The Feminine Mystique, Betty relayed why she resigned as the first president of the National Organization of Women in 1970. Betty wrote that she, "was unable to openly fight the man haters and unwilling to front for them any more..." So man hating bigots no only existed 40 years ago, they were also grabbing power. Now Washington is funding them. Makes you wonder what bigots they will fund next. Maybe the Klan?
Feminists had always claimed that when women took over, we would have a kinder, gentler, more nurturing world. After 36 million arrests and 72 million evictions what we got was Joe Stalin.
The third wave of feminists do not like to call themselves feminists. The word feminist could be perceived as gender oppression. These third wave of whatever-we-call-you got that right The treachery of our legal system over the last 25 years may end up giving all feminists a bad name. Which would make us as bigoted as the man-hating feminists who got us into this mess to begin with.
So let us talk about those bureaucrats that do. These are the ones that actually carry out the evil deeds. I like call them the do-bies.
Any one swept up into legal mess is usually astonished at what they see. They cannot believe what the police, prosecutors and judges are doing. It is so blatantly wrong. Well, I can assure you that everything they do is logical and by the book. The confusion you have with them is you both are using different sets of books. You are using the old First Set of Books- the Constitution, the general laws or statutes and the court ruling sometime call Common Law. They are using the newer Second Set of Books. That is the collection of the policy, procedures and protocols. Once you know what set of books everyone is using, then everything they do looks logical and upright. And do not bother trying to argue with me that there is no Second Set of Books. I have my own copies at home. Or at least a good hunk of the important part of it.
I got my Second Set of Books when I sued the Jaffrey NH police department. Under the discovery rule, I write them with the material I wanted and it would arrive in the mail a few weeks later. I got the Police Academy Training Manual. I got the Department's Policy and Procedure Manual. I got the no-drop protocol that the attorney general sent to all his or her prosecutors. I even got the domestic violence protocols for the court system, one hundred pages worth. Once you read it the material, then you will know what the police, prosecutors and judges will do. They are completely predictable once you know what set of books they are using.
The police academy training manual states that an arrest in a domestic violence call is the preferred response. They cite the Minneapolis Police Experiment (MPE) as its justification. But the author of the MPE, Lawrence Sherman, said do not use arrest because five follow up studies show that it did not work. The would be a violation of the 4th Amendment in the First Set of Books against unreasonable search and seizure. Then there is that whole issue of whether the police have the right to arrest for any reason other than they believe a crime was committed.
The Jaffrey Police Department Policy and Procedures Manual states that if a wife says she does not want her husband arrested, the police are to ignore her, arrest the husband, and get with the prosecutor to see what they can work out. In other words, make the arrest and then see if you can Mickey Mouse it. The wife is eligible for spousal immunity. If she invokes it, then no statement she mades, written or oral, are admissible because she cannot be cross examined about it under oath. ( Did you say that? What did you mean when you said that?) With no statements the police have no probable cause in most cases to make an arrest. Also a violation of the 4th amendment in the First Set of Books.
The actor Nickolas Cage was drunk in New Orleans with his wife. Everyone else is drunk in New Orleans, so why should Nick be any different. He and his wife were arguing over which house the rented for their stay. Nick grab his wife's arm and started to lead her to his house. The police arrested Nick for domestic violence. His wife was stunned. That was not domestic violence. "Nothing we can do," the police explained to her. "Just following orders."
That is an accurate explanation for victims, even if they do not think of themselves as victims. The police have a zero tolerance towards any physical contact. Things might get worse in the future is the feminist logical for this present iron fist approach to domestic relations. I would have to agree with them. After all the arrests, poverty, homelessness and misery, I can assure you-things are going to get worse.
But that nothing we can do, just following orders the officers explain always sounds so timid and lame. The police need to punch their explanation up a bit, make it more authoritarian. And there is a quick, low cost way of doing it. The police officers only need to say it in its original German.
The state Constitution in NH said the prosecutors job is to promote justice. The Attorney Generals protocols said that domestic violence case are no-drop cases. (Unless, of course, they take the Deal. Continue the case for a year, go to counseling, and everything falls off the books after the year. They did after all find some way of getting rid of all these cases.)
The Attorney General can hire, fire, layoff, promote, demote, commend or award bonuses. The constitution is some old, quaint, dusty document up in the Statehouse some where. So which one do you think is going to get obeyed?
Prosecutors are funny. Some, maybe most, have egos the size of Cape Cod. But of the three, police, prosecutor and judges, prosecutors have the least protection. Micheal Nifong, the prosecutor in the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, was fired, disbarred, convicted of a crime, and actually jailed for trying to enforce the no-drop prosecution protocol for sexual assault in the Duke case.
The prosecutor in my criminal case fared a little better. I filed a complaint with his boss for summoning my two daughters, ages 7 and 4, to court. I had already conceded that the facts were not in dispute. The trial would be about the law. No witness were need much less a couple of toddlers. He still summoned them. (The Second Set of Books tells the prosecutors to get a sympathetic face in front of the judge or jury. What's more sympathetic than toddlers.) The prosecutor could not refute my allegation because I enclosed a copy of the trial transcript. I had to pay for the transcript. When the prosecutor read it, he gave his two weeks notice and then blew town. That transcript was the best $46 I had ever spent in this life.
There is a name for what happens when a bureaucrat is destroyed by the First Set of Books for attempting to enforce the Second Set of Books. It is called the Abu Ghraib Syndrome. The people within the law enforcement community no longer seem to know the difference between the law, with its checks and balances, and the policies, procedure and protocols that constitute The Second Set of Books. In some cases you do not even know who wrote the policy, procedure or protocol. It could have been the local high school gym teacher for all anyone knows. Many of these bureaucrats are eventually going to learn the different between the First and the Second Set of Books. And my guess is that many of them are going to learn it the hard way. Because the only checks and balances in The Second Set of Books is The First Set of Books.
Judges routinely use our children as bargaining chips. Get the adult into counseling, continue the case for a year, and then drop it. This will open up the docket for the new arrests coming in next week. These judges that use our children are not honorable. Which is why I never use the term 'Your Honor' any more. I just call them judge.
Alex Baldwin, the actor, wrote that you have never seen a coward until you have seen a Los Angeles County judge. I call my judges-Sullivan, Arnold and even Runyon-cowards, too. When I first started observing them, nothing made sense. Arnold was completely infuriated when he was maneuvered into ruling not guilty. He verbally went up and down me so many times I lost count. What was the big deal? If I was not guilty just say and then we could all go home. But that was back in the days before I knew about The Second Set of Books.
I lost visitation with my two daughters when I got arrested. One was the victim-the other was the witness. After a not guilty, I expected to get visitation with my girls. But the divorce judge, Sullivan, decreed that counseling was in order and they would decide when we would reunite. I told the judge that the decision on whether these two girls had a father or a fatherless childhood was not leaving this courthouse. There would be a couple of reason for that decision.
First, by then I knew of the Second Set of Books. As much as I had prayed for the return of my children, I knew that this counseling might get thrown in the way. Judges are addicted to counseling like a meth-head is addict to crystal meth. Sullivan wrote in the divorce decree that he envision only one or two meetings with the counselor. There is no counseling done in the first meeting or two. It is intake-who's the players and what are the issues. But Sullivan was not interested in counseling. He merely wanted to unload the decision out of habit. And if we do not shut them down now, they will be doing it to our kids in twenty years from now when they have little ones running around the house.
Second, just exactly where does the buck stop with our legal system? Police have to make an arrest. The prosecutor has to pursue the case. Judges now also walk a away without rendering a verdict, and passing the buck does not constitute a decision. Can those mental health counselors slide the decision over to someone else? Just where does this end? Who is responsible? Who is accountable?
The mental health crowd is the third reason I said no. Some people think they are geniuses with their Masters and PH D's. Others think they are so wacky that they call them fruit loops. Well, I have a third name for them. Suckers. They did not get hired for their medical ability. They got these because they were willing to take these cases off the judge's hands. Which has done nothing for the credibility for their profession. We are not here to help-we are here to unload. And they created a liability that did not previously existed. If a judge releases a defendant and he goes kills someone, that judge or the judiciary cannot be sued. But a mental health worker, and their employer certainly can be held liable. Our judiciary is now using the mental health field like a ten dollar whore.
I sued Monadnock Family Services to make them go away. I told their lawyer Byron that they were a legitimate target for men. We settled for no money. They would have nothing to do with this reconciliation. The counselor was released. And they would no longer get involved in any domestic violence cases.
Every time we ended back in court over whatever squabbles, I would ask Judge Sullivan for my children back. The decision belong to the counselors he would tell me. But he knew he had screwed up. I could see it in his face. But he would not fix it. He would not step out of that box those domestic violence/sexual assault advocates had built for him. After five years, he retired to a part time position at the Littleton courthouse 120 miles away.
So when guys like Alex Baldwin and I call judges cowards, we have legitimate reasons for doing so. It is not good for judges to be called coward. It is unlikely that it is good for the rest of us.
I do not claim to have all The Second Set of Book. I know of one book that I do not have. And I would have love to read that one. That would be the seminar that the domestic violence and sexual assault advocates put on periodically for legal personnel including judges. These advocates are camped outside every state, not federal, courthouse in America. The U.S. Dept of Justice provides 50-100% of their funding depending on the program. They have three day seminars at resorts where everything is paid for except the liquor. Judges in NH are ordered to attend. Neither Sullivan or Arnold would confirm or deny they had attended. They actually said nothing. It must be like the Masons where they will not say anything about the organization until you show them the secret hand sign.
Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis once wrote that the best description of a judge is the impartial guardian of the rule of law. How does three days of wine, women and song contribute to impartiality? It does not. So it should not have been any surprise that they would not answer me. After all, they were not on trial. I was. But they are going to be. They were suppose to protect to rule of law not collaborate in its demise. They have failed miserably.
A guardian ad litem is an attorney appointed for a child. The attorney solely represents the child. I got one when I was first separated to get a neutral pair of eyes and ears on the family. I was disappointed in his findings.
A few years later, another guardian was appointed for one of the kids. A regular report filed with the Court painted me as some sort violent psychopath. I thought that was uncalled for seeing as we had never met. It start a flurry of nasty letters between until we both came to the conclusion that this was not about us. We ended on a friendly note.
At a Court hearing later on I approached him. I asked him if he had had any domestic violence training. He said yes, that it was required to become certified as a guardian ad litem. Another chapter for The Second Set of Books that I never managed to acquire.. So men, if you were thinking about getting a guardian ad litem for an unbiased assessment, then you should ask for the domestic violence material that certified the guardian. And do not worry that you are not sure what you are looking for. It will stand right out.
There are more sections of The Second Set of Books. Medical personnel are supposed to report suspected domestic violence. The college professor Angela Davis has a story of a Latino couple in California getting in trouble feeding the dog his liver for dinner. Mental health employees are also required. Think of Wendy threatening our kids with foster care. Teachers, day care providers, the list just goes on and on. The East German secret police, the Stazi, had 25% of the population on record as informers. The United States is not that high yet, but we are still growing.
These people-police, prosecutors and judges-are suppose to protect us. They are checks and balances to prevent injustice. That is why we spend so much money of police training. But if the police screw it up, the prosecutor can catch it. If the prosecutor misses it then the judge can step in to fix it. But if all three have been compromised, then what does one need to do to get justice? Go to the appeals court or the Supreme Court? That seem a little ridiculous particularly when the zero tolerance has arrests for something as trivial as touching.
On one hand we have the law. On the other hand we have what we are really going to do-the policies, procedures and protocols. The rule of law is dead. Now we have 50 states with legal systems as good as any third world banana republic. Men are demonized and the women and children end up as suffering as well.
So boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses. The Second Set of Books originated in Washington. But the dirty deeds are being carried out by our local police, prosecutors and judges. These are the people we pay good money to protect us and our families. And what do we get for our tax money? Collaborators who are no different than the Vichy of France or the Quislings of Norway during the Second World War. All because they go along to get along. They are an embarrassment, the whole lot of them. And they need to be held accountable. So burn them out.
In the last 25 years they have arrested one in six adults in this country and forced 25% of the men, women and children into homelessness. In 50 years it will be one in three adults arrested and 50% of the men, women and children ending up homeless. Most of our kids will live to the age of 68 years old. As bad as it was for you, your children will have twice the odds of it happening to them.
Some of you will say that 50% homelessness sounds absurd. But 25% is absurd and that is already here. There is no evidence that the police, courts, or government is planning to do anything different in the immediate future. And they will not do anything different until we make it so uncomfortable that they must change. Bureaucracy at its worst. So burn them out. This is too important to be using that touchy-feeling coaching that is so popular with business these days. You need to flatten them, like Wile E. Coyote. They need to be taught never to replace the rule of law. BURN-THEM-OUT!
Most of the police stations built in New England over the last 20 years are stone or brick. Fortunately, the roofs are still wood. The advantage of fire on the roof is that it is above the sprinklers. But even the sprinklers going off work to our advantage. There is no way they can work in a building with six inches of water. And I am certain we will disrupt their momentum once they start working out of a FEMA trailers. If they still do not get the message, then burn down the trailers.

[The following few paragraphs deleted for security reasons. They can be found at the original website of the newspaper that published the letter, Keene Publishing Corporation.]

[....]

There will be some casualties in this war. Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.
Now, nobody wants to get killed. But let us look at your life. You are broke after paying child support. She and the kids are not doing any better. None of you are middle class any more. You have no say in the kids education, their health treatment, you may not even have visitation with your sons and daughters. And everything you thought you knew to be true-the rule of law, the sanctity of the of the family, the belief that government was there to nurture your brood-all turned out to be a lie. Face it boys, we are no longer fathers. We are just piggy banks.
So you are not losing anything by [....]. It may be too late for us. But without something changing, your kids will have double the odds of it happening to them. That will knock them out of the middle class again, providing they ever get back in. And their kids, your grandchildren, will end up damaged goods before it is over. So it is okay to run. You just need to turn around and run at them. They are no way as imposing as they seem. They only do what they do for a paycheck.
Television would make us believe that people get arrested because of fingerprints, DNA, facial recognition, and instruments that can tell where a substance was made and here is the local distributors. It is Hollywood crap. Most of the people in prison are there for one key reason. They could not keep their mouths shut. They told someone. That someone told others. The cops hear it and start looking at them for a suspect. That how it works in real life.
This need to confess seems to be primeval. Just human nature. But if you cannot keep a secret, do not expect the one you tell to keep their mouth shut. There is only three people I know for certain they will keep their mouths shut. That would be Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
I only managed to get the main door of the Cheshire County Courthouse in Keene, NH. I would appreciate it if some of you boys would finish the job for me. They harmed my children. The place is evil. So take it out
Some where along the line I picked up the crazy notion that it is better to be dead as a free man than to live as a serf. The government needs to be a little more careful about what they teach in our schools.
And bring a can of spray paint to these fires. Paint the word COLLABORATORS ( two L's with an S on the end) on the building before you burn it. Maybe we can shame them back to the rule of law. And we do want the police to know exactly who burned the building. Then the police can start interviewing the usually suspects, all 36 million of us.
We have covered the do-bies. Now let us look at the bureaucrats that say-ers.
The Second Set of Books originated in Office of Violence Against Women (OVW) which is part of the United States Department of Justice. Some of these policies, procedures and protocol were developed locally. But the local results would be sent up to OVW and, if approved, would disperse it out to all 50 states. They are smart, clever, bigoted and able to lie as well as any politician that ever called Washington home. In other words, they have now become Washington insiders.
But what makes them so uniques is their anger towards men, any man. They are so twisted in their hatred of men that they are positively scary. And it is not what they are doing to men that makes them frightening. You would expect that. No, it is what they are doing to the women and children that makes them so twisted.
When the Pentagon drops a bomb on innocent civilians the military calls it Collateral Damage. It sounds better than, "Yeah, we killed a bunch of women and children." Those poor, innocent, stupid civilians have always been caught in the middle since the time we were fighting with rocks.. Your wife and kids are Collateral Damage in the war against you, the man in the family. For 25 years these feminists at OVAW have been willing to sacrifice the women and children to get you. And they cannot claim ignorance about what they are doing. Under the VAWA the federal government is funding at least 1,800 homeless shelters. As long as the Office for Violence Against Women exists in the U.S. Department Justice , no American man, women or child will be safe in their own home.
If you ask these feminists why are the shelters all full, they will not say because of all the arrests. The shelters are full because of men. But they knew from the beginning that this was not man bad-woman good thing. The year was 1976. Two things would happen that year.
First, someone at the U.S. Dept of Justice decided to count the dead bodies. In 1975 there were 1522 women killed in domestic violence. And for men killed in 1975? The dead for men was 1506. Statistically equal a friend tells me so.
If you had asked me before the study, I would have assumed that women were getting the worst of it. But I would be looking at it by genders. What I should have been looking at was species, homo-sapiens, human beings. Men are human-women are human. Being the same species you would expect the same results from both genders. And that is exactly what the dead bodies told us.
The second thing that happened in 1976 was the first domestic violence survey was released. It was so new the time that they called it family violence. Murray Straus of UNH and Richard Gellars from a school in RI were the researchers. They did not find two perpetrators of domestic violence, but three. Men initiated violence 25.7% of the time: women 25.2%, and the other 49.1% was the two going after each at the same time. These two people going after each other at the same time is well recognized in law. The law in NH calls that mutual combat. Men are human. Women are human. And once again we found both genders acting the same manner.
So how did we end up with the theory of man bad-woman good that the government at all levels is using? The feminist writer Susan Brownmiller wrote In Our Time that," the way you get funding and church donations is to talk about the pure victims. If you talk about the impurity of the victim, the sympathy vanishes." If women get to be good then men get what is left-bad. Man bad-woman good was originally a funding raising technique. After 35 years, it has turned into official government dogma at all levels, from the local cop on the beat to the White House. Men need to be punished, restrained and retrained. Your wives and children are, unfortunately, just collateral damage in this effort to punish men. So you were not dreaming it. There really is a government pogrom against men.
When a man batters or kills, there is no excuse. When a woman commits the same act, there is nothing but excuses. Simple though inaccurate. But there is one redeeming aspect to men being demonized. Now we men can act like devils. And we do not even need to apologize for it. Men are going to start acting just like they made us out to be. As an old high school semi-punk I can assure you boys of one thing. This is going to be fun. You guys are going to end up laughing like hyenas.
The money funded under the VAWA is split in two when it leaves the Treasury. Part goes the Health and Human Services for fund these domestic violence homeless shelters. If that 36 million number is correct, and it is all that we have, then the 1.44 million arrests a year will be made producing 2.88 million homeless Americans each year. Women and children constitute 60% of these homeless people, 1.7 million Americans a year. Shutting down these shelters would be cruel. What would these women and children do then? Go live under a bridge. No, we are stuck with these shelters for a while. But there is one thing that Congress needs to fix when they fund them again.
These shelters do not allow men on the property let alone inside the residences. Why is it against the law to use federal money on organizations that discriminate against black, Jews, gays or even women but it is okay to do so against men? Men contributed half that tax money. Eight years ago a man in California fled with his children after the police warned him to get out after they had arrested the wife and mother. None of the shelters would take him and the kids in because he was a man. I wonder if this would survive a legal gender discrimination challenge in a federal court?
A society without men is freakier than a world without blacks or Jews. That is not to say blacks or Jews are any less worthy. It just that there are more men in the world than blacks or Jews even if you combined them. If these feminist had to deal with men on a regular basis, then maybe the country would not be in the pickle we are in now.
There is a third reason to end this discrimination, something of a more practical nature. Apparently, some women like to have sex with men. But men are barred from the property. Suddenly, that 15 year boy two doors down starts looking real good. It might even be fun breaking in this new meat. So this woman driven into insolvency by the push for domestic violence arrests now finds herself charged as a pedophile because someone barred men from her world. With domestic violence advocates as friends, who needs enemies.
This shelters came up with a novel approach to fixing the pedophile problem. Male children over the age of thirteen are barred from staying there. Too troublesome. The family broke up when the father was thrown out of the house. Now a second break up is happening with the teenage boys. Perhaps a relative has one bed available. Maybe the family of a high school friend would take him in their home. If neither option works then that is okay. He can move in with his father. Then they will both be sleeping in the car down by the river.
Children of these parents also suffer. They used to have their own bedroom in a safe town with good schools. First they have a shelter, then Section 8 public housing. An urban school. Maybe good-maybe not. Kids learn how to be tough in an urban environment. The kids might go bad or they could come out just fine. But there will be no clunky car as a teenager. There will be no saving fund for college. There will be no monetary gift to use as a down payment for a starter home. This tradition of the older generation giving the younger generation a financial leg up has been ruin due to the older generation's lack of money. Financially, the older generation is merely treading water. It will take generations after these present two generations to repair the economic damage to these families.
So we are stuck with funding these shelters for a while. These women and children have no place left to go. Some of you guys may think that these feminist caused the problem and then created the solution. But homeless shelters are not a solution. They are just barely a band aid.
The remaining money under VAWA goes to the United States Department of Justice for the Office of Violence Against Women (OVW). As long as OVW exists then the government is at war with men. As long as there is a pogrom against men, then women and children are going to end up as collateral damage. So there is no need for discussion about OVW going. The only thing we need to figure out is which of the two ways we can use to get rid of them-the easy way or the hard way.
And boys, do not try to burn down Washington's Dept. of Justice Building in an effort to get rid of the Office of Violence Against Women. Their offices are over at N Street.
The easy way is using Congress. The VAWA comes up for funding every five to seven years. Next time it comes up, Congress votes no and everyone at the OVW gets a pink slip in late September. Nice and simple except nothing is simple in Washington. We, the people out here in the sticks, do not always know what the dynamics are in Washington. There might be one method of getting Congress on course. Have Congress demand that the Attorney General get, and release the arrests figures. Or have the President order it. He is usually fearless after he makes up his mind. And this is too large and too well known to continue the Washington plausible deniable routine. Then they will know how much trouble they are in because of these arrests.
There are 220 million adults 18 or older in this country of both sexes. If my figure of 36 million is correct, then that is 16.4% of the adults have been arrested. It could be as high as 55 million or 25%. It might be as low as 22 million or 10%. Whatever the number there are two things that Congress should know. First, is the fellow who discovered the arrests in Minneapolis back in 1992 said do not use it because it does not work. And second, the people arrested now constitute a Fifth Column here in the United States. Our loyalty to Washington is gone. But what did these genuises on the Potomac expect? They have harmed our children. If they think Al Qaeda is a pain in the ass, wait to they see what Americans can do once their fuse is lit.
I am certain the Attorney General will sit for months on the request for the number of domestic violence arrests. Then he will explain that they do not readily have the number and that some sort of Manhattan Project effort will be needed in time and money. Nonsense. When Washington started these arrests in 1984 over 6.3 personal computers were sold here in the U.S. That figure does not include all the mini's, midi's and mainframe computers sold that year. There is no way they can pretend that this data does not exist in electronic storage. A request to Ohio for the arrests 1984-2010 would tie up a state clerk for an hour, including their 15 minute coffee break. Time for the truth boys and girls. Because this is not going away.
The hard way is more time consuming, cost more money and is full of headaches. Because the only way of removing a department from the federal government without the consent of Congress is to take out the entire federal government.
The first time I heard that, I said that is ridiculous. We cannot run this country without a federal government. But we will replace the old government with something new and improved. The new government would honor the debts incurred by the old government. There are a lot of useful reasons for starting with a clean slate.
The bipartisan debt commission released their recommendation for cleaning up the $14 trillion we have borrowed over the years. Convention wisdom has it that Congress has no stomach for any of the recommendations.
But a new government could install those recommendation on day one. Three years later, most Americans will not remember that anything is different. The old government laid off its employees when it closed. The new government is hiring. But instead of 65,000 employees at the Dept. of Education, the new government is only hiring 45,000. Instead of an average federal wage of $70,000 a year, the new average will be $52,000. The new government will have to write a tax code. Everyone pays 15% with no deductions. How many IRS employees could you get rid of if there were no more deductions? Any thing is possible with a new government.
Normally over-throwing a elected government is considered treason. Treason is punishable by death here in the United States. But there is one way of over throwing the government. That is through the ballot box. Then it is not treason but democracy. Allegedly, Washington is in favor of democracy, particularly if their candidate wins.
There is no legal mechanism in the Constitution or the Federal code of the United States for dissolving the government of the United States. So that is what we need first. Congress would need to write it. We get them to do it through the ballot initiative.
A ballot initiative is when enough registered voters sign a petition to get a question on the ballot for the next election. The following would be a sample of what the question would look like in New Hampshire.

That all elected representatives from the state of New Hampshire to both houses of the United States Congress are to propose and advance a bill that would set up a legal mechanism to dissolve the United States government should the people decide to do so in a general election by a simple majority.
If this initiative passes in all 50 states then Congress will be stuck. They will have to write the law to dissolve. If they do not I suspect within ten years they will be standing in a stairwell at the British or French embassy with a suitcase in hand waiting to get to a rooftop helicopter. I doubt if they will be thinking about the humiliation of being thrown out of the country. They will be far too busy worrying about what will happen if the mob gets their hands on them.
Washington has not got a friend in the world. Even the British and Israelis loath them now. Kind of a bad time to be losing domestic support. And what they done over the last 25 years? They have wiped out the middle class pandering to a special interest group of bigots. And in typical Washington fashion, they did not even know they did it.
This Ivy League inbreeding in Washington has produced an elite that knows what best. Everyone else-husbands, wives, police officers, prosecutors, judges, attorney generals and guardian ad litems-are to shut up and do what they are told. The rule of law is gone, replaced by the policies, procedures and protocols of The Second Set of Books. Which means the federal government will be going shortly. For the government being unable to deliver the rule of law is like an auto mechanic who claims he does not know how to change the engine oil. A certain minimum competency is required. So it looks like the parents of the Washington elite were right. One can be too smart for their own good.
Betty Friedan wrote that the feminist revolution, like any revolution, would have its excesses. Losing the rule of law is too great to call it a mere excess. It is a catastrophe. It is the heart, mind and soul between the people and their government. These feelings of betrayal by losing it may be permanent. I have 21 years of Army service going back to the Vietnam War. My loyalty to the government should be a given. It is gone. I am certain it will never return regardless of how long I might have lived.
It was another woman that lead us in to this decision to clean house inside the beltway. Something she taught us fifty years ago. You simply look at those folks in Washington and then ask yourself the old Ann Landers question, "Am I better off with them, or without them? Are my children better off with them, or without them?" They are sinking like stones.
Washington, DC was chose as the capital because it was the geographical center or the old Colonies. Today, the geographical center of the country is just west of St. Louis Missouri. The new government can set the capital anywhere in the United States it wants. Imagine how many rodents, insects and parasites they could lose by moving 1500 miles west.
Whether you replace the federal government or not, men are still going to need a legal defense center for men. Something like the NAACP used to get black people their rights. The only checks and balances in the Second Set of Books is the First Set of Books. Which means lawsuits. Now I know you guys are broke. Some of you have had your wives and kids thrown into homelessness. So I completely understand when you tell me that you are broke. But if everyone who has been arrested throws in $10.00 a year then the legal defense center will have a war chest of $360 million. You can buy a whole bunch of lawsuit with that kind of money.
The Ball family has been supplying sergeants to the Army since at least the Revolutionary War. Elijah served as a sergeant in Cushing's Regiment at the Battle of Bennington. His commanding officer was a general from NH with a name of John Stark. General Start was a clever warrior. He was responsible for the bulk of the heavy casualties the British suffer at their victory at Bunker Hill. His orderly, fighting withdrawal allowed the other units on the hill to not only retreat but collect their wounded on the way out.
General Stark would repeat this performance on three hill tops outside the village of Bennington VT one hot August day in 1777. At the end of the battle, the British lost over 900 men killed or captured. The Colonists suffered 30 dead. Two months later, the depleted British army would surrender at Saratoga. That victory at Saratoga would bring the French into the war. John Stark was the most competent general this country ever produced. For that reason alone his men loved him.
But as brilliant as he was on the battlefield, General Stark would become even more famous for something he said. In 1809 the veterans of Bennington decided to have one last reunion. A delegation called on the General with his invitation. But the General was old and frail. He could not attend. But he did send a message, "You tell the boys I said live free or die. That death is not the worst of evil." Since 1945 the State of New Hampshire has stamped Live Free or Die on every pen, coffee mug, license plate and highway sign that they have gotten their hands on.
I think the General and his sergeant would be please that his words have elevated from the novelties and bric-a-brac to something more dignified like a courthouse door. Neither of them would give a second thought to the mess left over after the fire was extinguished. War has always been a grim business. Civil wars are usually worse.
But they would be trouble by the new enemy. Oh, they understood when a government betrays it people. They took up arms against the super power of their day to get relief for their grievances. But the enemy we face now is the government that these men birthed at places like Bennington, Saratoga and Bunker Hill. Government is no different than the food in a refrigerator. Given enough time both will go bad.
The smartest person I knew in this life was my mother. Perhaps that is true of all of us. Maybe I just got lucky. She was a nurse by trade. She worked in a time when Western medicine made that final transition from butchery to science. But it would not be her nursing skills that made her extraordinary. No, it would be this one incredible knack she had that I had only modest success at mimicking in my life. If she had something important to say to you, she would say and then never mention it again. She would talk about it if you raised the issue. But she never mentioned it twice on her own. And, oddly, you always heard her.
But she did have one favorite saying. I must have heard in a thousand times in the eighteen years I lived under her roof. It always came at the end of the conversation as she peeled away to see if it was time for Perry Mason or Lawrence Welk. She would turn her head to the side, and over her shoulder she would say, "And the only thing you really have in this world is your family." Now, thanks to the United States Government, neither we nor our children have that.
. I have three things to say to my children. First, Daddy loves you. Second, you are my three most favorite people in the world. And last, that you are to stick together no matter how old you get or how far apart you live. Because it is like Grandma always said. The only thing you really have in this world is your family.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Confronting Our Subversive Institutions « Daily News

By Caroline Glick

http://www.israelunitycoalition.org/news/?p=6808
June 16, 2011
Just as Israelis are denied their right to an open, objective public discourse due to the radical Left’s predominance in the media, so American Jews are denied their right to disown J Street due to the radical leftist American Jews’ takeover of key US Jewish umbrella groups.
Shimon Schiffer and Nahum Barnea are both senior political commentators for Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest circulation newspaper. They are both also leftist extremists. In their articles in last Friday’s weekend edition of Yediot they demonstrated how their politics dictate their reporting – to the detriment of their readers and to Israeli democracy. They also demonstrated the disastrous consequences of the Left’s takeover of predominant institutions in democratic societies.
Schiffer’s column centered on the subversive behavior of President Shimon Peres and ran under the headline, “Subversive for Peace.”
Schiffer published top secret documents chronicling Peres’s long history of abusing his office to subvert Israel’s lawful governments and obstruct their policies.
Schiffer’s article opened with an account of Peres’s current moves to undermine Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s foreign policy. According to Obama administration officials, during his recent meeting with US President Barack Obama, which preceded Netanyahu’s stormy visit last month, Peres and Obama agreed that a future deal between Israel and the Palestinians must be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps involving Israeli withdrawals from areas that have been under its sovereignty since 1949. While he acknowledged that Netanyahu completely opposes these parameters and would openly oppose them if Obama adopted them publically, Peres embraced them.
His message to the US leader was clear: Work with me and we’ll get Israeli withdrawals.
Work with the elected leader of Israel and you’ll get nowhere.
Schiffer then showed that Peres’s behavior is nothing new. Using classified documents from 1987 and 1988 when Peres served as foreign minister under then prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, Schiffer reported that during that time, Peres conspired with then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to defeat Likud in the 1988 elections. Peres also tried to convince the Reagan administration to disassociate with Shamir and deal only with him. His efforts were honorably rebuffed by then secretary of state George Schultz who reportedly told Peres that he could not ignore the elected leader of Israel.
Schiffer reported that Peres successfully collaborated with Mubarak to undermine Shamir’s policy goal of retaining Israel’s control over Taba in the post-Camp David implementation talks.
Finally, Schiffer reported that in the summer of 1987, unbeknownst to Shamir, Peres dispatched Avraham Tamir, then Foreign Ministry director general, to Mozambique to meet secretly with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. At the time Israelis were prohibited by law from maintaining any contact whatsoever with PLO members. So not only was Tamir’s meeting an act of gross insubordination and subversion. It was a crime.
Peres’s arguably treasonous behavior was not the only scandal Schiffer exposed in his article. From the perspective of Israeli democracy – equally scandalous was Schiffer’s admitted collusion with Peres’s subversive operations.
Specifically, in his discussion of Tamir’s illegal meeting with Arafat, Schiffer admitted that Tamir “told me at the time,” about the meeting.
What this means is that one of Israel’s most powerful reporters knew 24 years ago that the director general of the Foreign Ministry was sent by the foreign minister to conduct an illegal meeting with Israel’s sworn enemy behind the back of the prime minister. And he opted not to report the story. He decided that Peres’s moves to empower Israel’s sworn enemies against the expressed wishes of the prime minister and of the general public were more important than the public’s right to know what he was doing. And so he hid the information from the public. For 24 years.
Imagine how different subsequent events might have turned out if Schiffer had fulfilled his professional duty and informed the public in 1987 that Peres was engaged in illegal activities whose expressed aim was the overthrow of the elected leader of the country and the empowerment of Israel’s worst enemy.
IN COMPARISON to Schiffer’s double whammy, Barnea’s article on Friday was nothing special. But it was a representative sample of Israel’s most esteemed political commentator’s consistent moves to distort current events in a manner that adheres to his radical politics.
Barnea opened his essay with a sympathetic depiction of a delegation of five anti-Israel US Congressmen organized by the anti-Israel lobby J Street. Barnea then attacked Netanyahu and his ministers for refusing to meet with the delegation.
From reading his column, you’d never guess that the members of the delegation were among Israel’s most outspoken opponents on Capitol Hill. And from reading Barnea, you wouldn’t know that J Street is an anti-Israel lobby, which among other things, has urged Obama not to veto a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for allowing Jews to build on their property in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria; lobbied Congress not to pass a resolution condemning Palestinian anti-Jewish incitement following the massacre of the Fogel family; and lobbied Congress not to pass sanctions against Iran.
What you would learn from reading Barnea’s article is that Israelis shouldn’t take heart from the overwhelming support we receive from Congress because the thirty-odd standing ovations Netanyahu received were nothing more than political theater.
The underlying message of Barnea’s piece was clear. Israel’s supporters in Congress are not really supporters, they’re just afraid of angering the all-powerful AIPAC. And obviously, if we have no real friends, then anyone telling us to stand strong is a liar and an enemy and what we really need to do is learn to love J Street and its anti-Israel Congressmen who share Barnea’s agenda.
It doesn’t matter to Schiffer and Barnea that the majority of the public opposes their views. It doesn’t matter that the government’s policies more or less loyally represent the positions of the public that democratically elected it. As Schiffer demonstrated by failing for 24 years to report Peres’s behavior and as Barnea showed by failing to inform the public about the nature of J Street and its anti-Israel Congressional delegation, radical leftist writers exploit their power to dictate the contours of the public discourse to advance their political agenda. And it doesn’t bother them at all that advancing their personal politics involves actively undermining the very mission of a free press – to enable the free flow of information to the public.
THE BEHAVIOR of the likes of Peres, Schiffer and Barnea is not unique to the Israeli Left. It characterizes the behavior of much of the American Jewish Left as well. There, as here, radical activists and ideologues have taken over mainstream institutions and transformed them into mouthpieces for their extremist policies.
Take the local Jewish Community Relations Councils in the US for example.
The JCRC’s are supposed to be local umbrella organizations that conduct community events and other activities aimed at advancing the interests, concerns and values of the members of their local Jewish communities. But like the Israeli media, many of the local chapters of the JCRC have been taken over by radical leftists who do not share and indeed seek to undermine the interests, concerns and values of their local Jewish communities.
Last week, Andrea Levin, the executive director and president of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle Eastern Reporting in America (CAMERA), published an article in Boston’s Jewish Advocate exposing how Boston’s JCRC’s leadership unlawfully and secretly brought J Street into the umbrella organization and then, when it was caught, used unethical means to gain approval after the fact for their actions. As a comprehensive survey of American Jewish views on Israel carried out last month by CAMERA demonstrated conclusively, the vast majority of American Jews oppose all of J Street’s positions on Israel and the Middle East.
But just as Israelis are denied their right to an open and objective public discourse due to the radical Left’s predominance in the media, so American Jews are denied their right to disown J Street due to the radical leftist American Jews’ takeover of key US Jewish umbrella groups and institutions.
Another depressing instance of this pattern just occurred at the Union of Reform Judaism with the nomination and election of Rabbi Richard Jacobs to serve as its president. Whereas outgoing president Eric Yoffie referred to J Street’s anti- Israel positions on Operation Cast Lead as “morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve,” Jacobs serves on J Street’s Rabbinic Cabinet. He also serves on the New Israel Fund’s board.
When a group of Reform activists called Jews Against Divisive Leadership (JADL) published ads in Jewish papers signed by a hundred Reform rabbis, their actions met with condemnation by URJ’s leadership and even with calls to blacklist the signatories.
The younger generation of radical American Jewish activists on college campuses is following the same course.
Following Yale’s decision last week to close its institute for the study of anti- Semitism, recent Yale alumni Matthew Knee wrote a post at the Legal Insurrection blog claiming that Yale’s Students for Israel group is dominated by anti- Israel activists.
So too, at Berkeley, Hillel has been penetrated by anti-Israel organizations, which like J Street pretend to be pro- Israel when in fact they promote anti- Israel activities including economic warfare against Israel. The situation at Berkeley is so bad that members of the Hillel-affiliated Kesher Enoshi were key activists in the campaign to divest Berkeley’s holdings from Israeli companies.
As the URJ’s threat to blacklist JADL members indicates, there is only one effective response to the radicalization of mainstream institutions: the creation of new, actually representative institutions that will compete with and eventually replace those that have been subverted.
In Israel this means creating alternative media organs through the Internet and other outlets to end the radical Left’s monopoly on information dissemination and engage in a discourse that reflects reality, engages the majority and upholds the rule of law.
In the US it means establishing new umbrella groups that represent the majority and deny membership to marginal groups that represent next to no one.
In Israel, independent Internet journalist Yoav Yitzhak just announced an initiative to form a new journalists union that will represent reporters and writers who have no voice in the leftist dominated Press Council. Initiatives like Latma, the satirical media criticism website I founded two years ago, have rapidly become major voices in the national discourse. Like people everywhere, when given the opportunity, Israelis seek out information sources that inform rather than indoctrinate and empower rather than demoralize them.
In the US, last October frustrated activists in the Indianapolis Jewish community disenfranchised by the farleft agenda of the local JCRC founded JAACI, the Jewish American Affairs Committee of Indiana to serve as a new umbrella organization for the community.
Dedicated mainly to giving voice to the Jewish community’s deep concern and support for Israel, JAACI’s formation fomented an exodus of local Jewish groups and synagogues from the JCRC. When given an option to participate in a more representative organization, the local Jews grabbed it.
The ability of institutional leaders – whether Jewish professionals or journalists – to ignore their responsibility to serve those they claim to represent is not due primarily to their formidable resources. It is due to our willingness to put up with their behavior. If we want to have institutions that represent and serve us, we have to take the initiative and build them ourselves.

Friday, June 10, 2011

An important reminder!

Why History Matters: The 1967 Six-Day War

Posted: 06/ 8/11 04:56 PM ET

Mention the word "history" and it can trigger a roll of the eyes.
Add "Middle East" to the equation and folks might start running for the hills, unwilling to get caught up in the seemingly bottomless pit of details and disputes.
But without an understanding of what happened, it's impossible to grasp where we are -- and where we are has profound relevance for the region and the world.
Forty-four years ago this week, the Six-Day War broke out.
While some wars fade into obscurity, this one remains as relevant today as in 1967. Many of its core issues remain unresolved and in the news.
Politicians, diplomats, and journalists continue to grapple with the consequences of that war, but rarely provide context. Yet without context, some critically important things may not make sense.
First, in June 1967, there was no state of Palestine. It didn't exist and never had. Its creation, proposed by the UN in 1947, was rejected by the Arab world because it also meant the establishment of a Jewish state alongside.
Second, the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem were in Jordanian hands. Violating solemn agreements, Jordan denied Jews access to their holiest places in eastern Jerusalem. To make matters still worse, they destroyed many of those sites.
Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control, with harsh military rule imposed on local residents.
And the Golan Heights, which were regularly used to shell Israeli communities far below, belonged to Syria.
Third, the Arab world could have created a Palestinian state in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip any day of the week. They didn't. There wasn't even discussion about it. And Arab leaders, who today profess such attachment to eastern Jerusalem, rarely, if ever, visited. It was viewed as an Arab backwater.
Fourth, the 1967 boundary at the time of the war, so much in the news these days, was nothing more than an armistice line dating back to 1949 -- familiarly known as the Green Line. That's after five Arab armies attacked Israel in 1948 with the aim of destroying the embryonic Jewish state. They failed. Armistice lines were drawn, but they weren't formal borders. They couldn't be. The Arab world, even in defeat, refused to recognize Israel's very right to exist.
Fifth, the PLO, which supported the war effort, was established in 1964, three years before the conflict erupted. That's important because it was created with the goal of obliterating Israel. Remember that in 1964 the only "settlements" were Israel itself.
Sixth, in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War, Egyptian and Syrian leaders repeatedly declared that war was coming and their objective was to wipe Israel off the map. There was no ambiguity. Twenty-two years after the Holocaust, another enemy spoke about the extermination of Jews. The record is well-documented.
The record is equally well-documented that Israel, in the days leading up to the war, passed word to Jordan, via the UN and United States, urging Amman to stay out of any pending conflict. Jordan's King Hussein ignored the Israeli plea and tied his fate to Egypt and Syria. His forces were defeated by Israel, and he lost control of the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.
Seventh, Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser demanded that UN peacekeeping forces in the area, in place for the previous decade to prevent conflict, be removed. Shamefully, the UN complied. That left no buffer between Arab armies being mobilized and deployed and Israeli forces in a country one-fiftieth the size of Egypt -- and just nine miles wide at its narrowest point.
Eighth, Egypt blocked Israeli shipping lanes in the Red Sea, Israel's only maritime access to trading routes with Asia and Africa. This step was regarded as an act of war by Jerusalem. The United States spoke about joining with other countries to break the blockade, but did not act.
Ninth, France, which had been Israel's principal arms supplier, announced a ban on the sale of weapons on the eve of the June war. That left Israel in potentially grave danger if a war were to drag on and require the resupply of arms. It was not until the next year that the U.S. stepped into the breach and sold vital weapons systems to Israel.
And finally, after winning the war of self-defense, Israel hoped that its newly-acquired territories, seized from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, would be the basis of a land-for-peace accord. Feelers were sent out. The formal response came on September 1, 1967, when the Arab Summit Conference famously declared in Khartoum "No peace, no recognition, no negotiations" with Israel.
Today, there are those who wish to rewrite history.
They want the world to believe there was once a Palestinian state. There was not.
They want the world to believe there were fixed borders between that state and Israel. There was only an armistice line between Israel and the Jordanian-controlled West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.
They want the world to believe the 1967 war was a bellicose act by Israel. It was an act of self-defense in the face of blood-curdling threats to vanquish the Jewish state, not to mention the maritime blockade of the Straits of Tiran, the abrupt withdrawal of UN peacekeeping forces, and the redeployment of Egyptian and Syrian troops. All wars have consequences; this one was no exception. But the Arab aggressors have failed to take responsibility for the actions they instigated.
They want the world to believe post-1967 Israeli settlement-building is the key to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Six-Day War is proof positive that the core issue is, and always has been, whether the Arab world accepts the Jewish people's right to a state of their own. If so, all other contentious issues, however difficult, have possible solutions.
And they want the world to believe the Arab world had nothing against Jews per se, only Israel, yet trampled with abandon on sites of sacred meaning to the Jewish people.
In other words, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, dismissing the past as if it were a minor irritant at best, irrelevant at worst, won't work.
Can history move forward? Absolutely. Israel's peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994 prove the point. At the same time, though, the lessons of the Six-Day War illustrate just how tough and tortuous the path can be.

David Harris

Friday, June 3, 2011

... Just in case you were wondering who is running Israel... hmmm, let's think: old guard Haganah member, the Knesset stops its deliberations on a secret note, then he dies..... any questions, folks??




    Israeli Businessman Sammy Ofer dies at 89


    by Maayana Miskin, June 3, 2011
    (Israelnationalnews.com) Sammy Ofer, one of Israel's most successful businessmen, was found dead in his home on Friday morning at the age of 89. He had been suffering a serious illness.

    Among the businesses run by the Ofer group are the Tzim shipping company, the Mizrachi Tefachot bank, and various chemical plants. Ofer also owned the Zodiak shipping company and the Tanker Pacific shipping company.

    The latter company was at the center of a political and media storm in the past week due to accusations that ships owned by Tanker Pacific had docked in Iran. The United States slapped sanctions on the Ofer Brothers Group over suspicions that it had violated sanctions against trade with Iran. Allegations surfaced according to which Zodiak ships had docked in Iran as well.


    The Knesset's Finance Committee held a session to discuss the affair on Tuesday, but the meeting was suddenly stopped by chairman MK Carmel Shama (Likud) after Shama received a note, the contents of which he refused to divulge.

    On Wednesday, former Mossad head Meir Dagan stood up for the Ofer Brothers Group, saying, “There is no law saying you cannot dock in Iran.” On Sunday the Ministerial Committee on Legislation will consider a proposal by Shama to penalize companies that have ties with Iran.

    In addition to his life as a businessman, Ofer was a member of the Haganah pre-state defense group and fought in World War II and in the War of Independence. He gave to many causes, and established a foundation for those in need of life-saving medicine.

    Ofer is survived by his wife Aviva, his sons Eyal and Idan, and eight grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

    A family spokesman said Friday, “Sammy loved life. He had a great sense of humor and was full of laughter, despite always taking business seriously... He was truly a remarkable man.”

    Ofer's businesses will continue to be run as usual, the spokesman added.



    Sammy Ofer awarded honorary KBE by Queen Elizabeth
    Nov 17, 2008
    The British Embassy in Israel said in a statement last Wednesday that Israeli shipping magnet Samuel Ofer had been awarded an honorary KBE (Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth, in recognition of his services to UK maritime heritage.

    British Culture Secretary Andy Burnham issued a statement last Wednesday: "Sammy Ofer’s contribution to the preservation and celebration of our maritime heritage has been enormous. Thanks to his incredible generosity this heritage will continue to educate, delight and fire the imaginations of many generations to come.”

    In 2008 Ofer contributed towards projects connected with the UK’s maritime heritage at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Maritime Greenwich.

    Ofer made an additional major contribution towards the extensive conservation work on the iconic sailing ship Cutty Sark, following the fire in 2007.
     
    The KBE awards are conferred by the Queen, on the advice of the foreign and commonwealth secretary, on those who have made an important contribution to British interests.
     

    Queen Elizabeth II is also expected to bestow an unusual honor on President Shimon Peres and name him a knight in her order.

    President Peres is to be awarded the title, regarded as the United Kingdom's highest honor, for his contribution to world peace and the relationship between Israel and the UK. Peres is expected to leave for an official presidential visit in Britain on November 18.
    "...This prompted speculation that the Ofer brothers might have been helping the Israeli security services spy on Iran.

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has meanwhile asserted: "Israel's policy on Iran is very clear - any and all contact with it is forbidden."


    Comment:

    Anonymous said: " How convenient!"

    Folks, let's try to understand this together. The official line, the 'permitted' speculation, as presented by BBC, above, is as follows:

    "This prompted speculation that the Ofer brothers might have been helping the Israeli security services spy on Iran."


    OK, it is possible that this is the explanation; however, I can see a few other reasons for the sudden hush-hush of the Knesset. For instance:

    A. A note that the old man Sammy Ofer is dying, to please drop the issue for the sake of this important and extremely wealthy family - unlikely.

    B. An order from ' above', i.e. the Supreme Court or the Shabak, to leave this important honcho, this elite family, alone - a possibility; after all in Israel there is justice, and then there is "justice". Such people, the plutocracy, are above the law, particularly when they belong to the old left.

    C. An order from the royal family of England to keep Israeli hands and mouths off their precious Knight of the British Empire - a possibility.

    D. ... And see who else is a Knight of the British Empire: who else but good old Shimon Peres; after all, buddies of the Knighthood have to protect each other, wouldn't you think? So, how about a hand-written note by none other than our treasonous president, Shimon Peres, (who habitually passes hand-written notes), ordering the Knesset to lay their dirty fingers off his precious comrade-in-arms, literally? I vote for that one. Meanwhile, I add the 'speculation' ( of course, it is only speculation)  that Shimon makes sure his old buddy and contemporary is dead and buried before he gets a chance to tell his own version of the Iran saga, spilling ALL the beans, including WHO ELSE could be a partner in the business - of course, Shimon Peres would have no financial interest whatsoever in the Iran dealings, of course, of course....

    E. A note from the Shabak to the effect that the issue would be dealt with promptly in their now habitual manner, and the embarrassment to the state of Israel would be buried very soon - after all, remember all the 'accidented' people -  Possible? Who knows? Would they do it to one of their own? Would they openly announce their evil plan to the Knesset? I would doubt it, but then you never know, after all murder is addictive, or so they say....

    F. Or, how about a combination of D and E? First we hush-hush the affair for the sake of the family's good name, and then the old man conveniently dies, sparing the president, the state, and last, the family, some very, very embarrassing questions to answer...?

    So, which one is it? What do you think? 

    Either way, it is clear that the famous so-called ruling body of Israel, the Israeli Knesset, is not ruling at all: the people who pull the strings are manipulating behind the scenes, things are done in secret, and nobody knows who or what does what. So much for Israeli ' democracy'.

    Therefore, I ask you, for what on earth are we voting them in at all?

    Shabbat Shalom

    Update:

    Here is another, totally different outlook on the saga. Carolyn Glick is smart. Hopefully one of these days I'll be able to make sense of it all. 


    June 6, 2011


    By Caroline Glick

    One of the dirty secrets about Western trade with enemy states like Iran is that the Western companies trading with them may also wittingly or unwittingly serve as espionage assets for their home country or for other Western countries.

    Consider the Stuxnet computer virus which reportedly caused great harm to at least one and perhaps multiple nuclear installations in Iran. The virus penetrated the Iranian systems through Siemens industrial control systems. In recent years, Siemens was subject to widespread criticism from US policy makers for its massive trade with Iran. And this criticism was justified. But it is important to admit that if Siemens hadn't been trading with Iran, whomever developed the Stuxnet virus would have had to find another, probably less accessible platform to penetrate Iran's computer systems.

    The Stuxnet story shows the problematic flipside of trade embargos against rogue states like Iran. The less access you have to enemy markets, the less ability you have to gather information about enemy targets and the less capacity you have to sabotage enemy targets. The more access you have, the more capacity you can build to infiltrate, gather information and sabotage enemy targets.

    The boycott drive against states like Iran uses a legalistic framework to deal with complex military challenges. And since the nail doesn't exactly fit the hole, it stands to reason that the damage sanctions can do to military or intelligence operations may in certain circumstances outweigh the benefit they bring to diplomatic operations.

    Since last week's announcement by the State Department that it was sanctioning the Israeli firm Ofer Brothers' Shipping for reportedly violating US law by trading with Iran, there has been a deluge of news reports alleging that the Ofer Brother's ships were used by the Mossad and perhaps the IDF to infiltrate and exfiltrate agents into and out of Iran.

    There are number of troubling aspects to the story. First, it strikes me as odd that the announcement about the sanctions was made by the State Department. If I am not mistaken, these decisions and announcements are usually made by the Treasury Department. Why would the State Department have taken the unusual step of announcing the sanctions and take the step against an Israeli shipping company? 

    Second, it strikes me as odd that former Mossad chief Meir Dagan felt compelled to issue an impassioned defense of the Ofer Brothers Shipping company. Dagan is in the midst of an unprecedented, arguably illegal and certainly unseemly campaign to delegitimize Prime Minister Binyamin Netayahu. It seems strage that in the midst of this offensive Dagan would divert his attention to the Ofer Brothers Shipping woes. He must have been deeply shocked by the US move to do so.

    (And yes, eventually I will probably address Dagan's unacceptable abuse of his position to weaken Israel's political leadership and limit its policy options against Iran.)

    The third reason this is so shocking is that the timing of the annoucement cannot be viewed as coincidental. The rare State Department announcement came just after Netanyahu wiped the floor with Obama in the Congress and as the Republicans are wisely using Obama's hatred of Israel and his love for anti-American political forces in the region as a campaign issue for 2012.  It is hard not to reach the conclusion that the announcement was deliberately released at this juncture to weaken US public support for Israel.

    If my hunch is right, and the Obama administration decided to use the sanctions as a means to humilitate Israel, then this represents a stunning blow to the US's credibility as an ally. It is impossible to believe that if the Ofer Brothers subsidiary ships were used for intelligence operations in Iran that the US did not know about it. So if the ships were used by Israeli security agencies then the US knew that exposing the Israeli identity of the ships would make it impossible for Israel to continue using them. And if this is the case, then the US also knew that by exposing the information, it was liable to leave  Israeli agents currently in Iran stranded there.

    Since Obama came into office, both he and his advisors and Israeli politicians and security service commanders have repeatedly mentioned that intelligence and military cooperation between the two countries has grown steadily. If my sense of what happened with the Ofer Brothers Shipping firm is even partially correct, then Israel should immediately reconsider its willingness to maintain that cooperation. If Obama may use information shared in joint intelligence meetings to harm Israel for political purposes or, for that matter for any purpose, then Israel can no longer share information with the US.



    DS