... the greedy, killer Zionists ...

Keep it up. You sound ever more shrill every time you post.

... allowing an avowed Israel/Jew-hater ...

The only way to combat the distorted and mindless propaganda against us is to expose the hypocrisy, denial, and lies of the messengers.

Consider the hate for their government these children and family members must be feeling that because their government tortured people into false confessions and then illegally invaded a sovereign nation, their lives have now forever been impacted in a very negative way.

And people have the gull to insinuate "Torturing saved lives"?

... I'd like to hear critics give an unqualified acceptance that the terrorist agenda is wrong ...

When we go around supporting terrorist behavior ... which we do

... and also unilaterally invade sovereign nations (also terrorist behavior) ... Maybe we should be more careful about going around illegally invading sovereign nations?

Me: Let's just agree murder and terrorism in the advancement of "any" religion is morally wrong and shouldn't be tolerated.

You: No problem agreeing with that.

How? Show me where we have a national policy of supporting terrorist organizations?

The ejection of Western oil companies from their Iranian refineries triggered the Abadan Crisis and nearly caused a war. Britain accused Mosaddeq of violating the legal rights of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and mobilized a worldwide boycott of Iran's oil that plunged Iran into financial crisis. The British government tried to enlist the United States in planning a coup, but President Harry S. Truman refused. However, his successor Dwight D. Eisenhower allowed the CIA to embark on its first covert operation against a foreign government.The British and U.S. spy agencies replaced the government of the popular Prime Minister Mosaddeq with an all-powerful monarch, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi who ruled for the next 26 years until he was overthrown in 1979.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

The School of the Americas (SOA), in 2001 renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation,” is a combat training school for Latin American soldiers, located at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Initially established in Panama in 1946, it was kicked out of that country in 1984 under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty. Former Panamanian President, Jorge Illueca, stated that the School of the Americas was the “biggest base for destabilization in Latin America.” The SOA, frequently dubbed the “School of Assassins,” has left a trail of blood and suffering in every country where its graduates have returned.

Over its 59 years, the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. These graduates have consistently used their skills to wage a war against their own people. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, “disappeared,” massacred, and forced into refugee by those trained at the School of Assassins.

http://www.soaw.org/type.php?type=8

The worst of the military's violent purging from society of thousands of Chilean Leftists and suspected Leftists — by killing or forced disappearance — occurred in the first months after the U.S.-sponsored coup d’état. The military imprisoned 40,000 of their political enemies in the National Stadium of Chile; among the tortured and killed desaparecidos were U.S. citizens Charles Horman , and Frank Teruggi. Chilean song-writer Víctor Jara, and other 70 political killings were perpetrated by the death squad, Caravan of Death (Caravana de la Muerte) in October 1973.

Some 130,000 people were arrested in a three-year period; the dead and disappeared numbered thousands in the first months of the military government. Those include the British physician Sheila Cassidy, who later brought awareness to the UK public of human rights violations in Chile. Among those detained was Alberto Bachelet (father of incumbent Chilean President Michelle Bachelet), an air force official; he was tortured and died on 12 March 1974, . The right-wing newspaper, El Mercurio (The Mercury), reported that Mr Bachelet died after a basketball game, citing his poor cardiac health. Michelle Bachelet and her mother were imprisoned and tortured in the Villa Grimaldi detention and torture centre on 10 January 1975.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

"The declassified record shows that Secretary Kissinger was briefed on Condor and its 'murder operations' on August 5, 1976, in a 14-page report from Shlaudeman. 'Internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys,' Shlaudeman cautioned. 'We are especially identified with Chile. It cannot do us any good.' Shlaudeman and his two deputies, William Luers and Hewson Ryan, recommended action. Over the course of three weeks, they drafted a cautiously worded demarche, approved by Kissinger, in which he instructed the U.S. ambassadors in the Southern Cone countries to meet with the respective heads of state about Condor. He instructed them to express 'our deep concern' about 'rumors' of 'plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad.'"

Kornbluh and Dinges conclude that "The paper trail is clear: the State Department and the CIA had enough intelligence to take concrete steps to thwart Condor assassination planning. Those steps were initiated but never implemented." Shlaudeman's deputy Hewson Ryan later acknowledged in an oral history interview that the State Department was "remiss" in its handling of the case. "We knew fairly early on that the governments of the Southern Cone countries were planning, or at least talking about, some assassinations abroad in the summer of 1976. ... Whether if we had gone in, we might have prevented this, I don't know," he stated in reference to the Letelier-Moffitt bombing. "But we didn't."

Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations, was closely involved diplomatically with the Southern Cone governments at the time and well aware of the Condor plan. According to the French newspaper L'Humanité, the first cooperation agreements were signed between the CIA and anti-Castro groups, fascist movements such as the Triple A set up in Argentina by Juan Perón and Isabel Martínez de Perón's "personal secretary" José López Rega, and Rodolfo Almirón (arrested in Spain in 2006)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor#U.S._involvement

STEVE COLL: It’s interesting to go back and look at the public discourse about this. During the Reagan years in particular, it was a very superficial, certainly, Reagan often used the terminology of his, you know of freedom. These were freedom fighters. These were noble freedom fighters. I don’t want to overstate this, but the Afghans were regarded with some distance almost as noble savages in some sort of a state of purity fighting for an abstract idea of freedom. The idea that Afghanistan was a messy place filled with complexity and ethnicity and tribal structures and all of the rest of what we now understand about Afghanistan was it was generally not part of American public discourse.

http://www.democracynow.org/2004/6/10/ghost_wars_how_reagan_armed_the

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The New York Times reported in 2007 that Mr. Mohammed had been barraged more than 100 times with harsh interrogation methods, causing C.I.A. officers to worry that they might have crossed legal limits and to halt his questioning. But the precise number and the exact nature of the interrogation method was not previously known.


A footnote to another 2005 Justice Department memo released Thursday said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than the C.I.A. rules permitted.

The new information on the number of waterboarding episodes came out over the weekend when a number of bloggers, including Marcy Wheeler of the blog emptywheel, discovered it in the May 30, 2005, memo.

The sentences in the memo containing that information appear to have been redacted from some copies but are visible in others. Initial news reports about the memos in The New York Times and other publications did not include the numbers.

Michael V. Hayden, director of the C.I.A. for the last two years of the Bush administration, would not comment when asked on the program “Fox News Sunday” if Mr. Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times. He said he believed that that information was still classified.

A C.I.A. spokesman, reached Sunday night, also would not comment on the new information.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.html

The US founded al Queda

While presenting the list of attacks on the US may gain some justification for the invasions of sovereign countries it must be noted that the attacks were in retaliation for US supported oppression in the Islamic world, Palestine most notable. Being paid in your own coin can cause bitterness .

btw. we did have it coming.

I happen to think finally ridding the region of Hussein and his Baathists, giving Iraqis free elections, and providing the country a chance at even a seminal form of democracy isn’t all bad? (I’d ask the leaders of Iraq’s neighbors, like Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, in a moment of complete candor and honesty, if they concur with the first point, and ask ordinary Iraqis if they concur with the following two.)

They were paid indirectly by the CIA through the ISI.

Al-Quida is not a monolithic organization bent on a world-wide Caliphate but, rather, more like a mass movement; people who resist the corrupting influence of the West whos' only goal is to steal their natural resources.

At the start of the century, the Arab world has 60 million illiterate adults (the majority are women) and a declining education system, which is failing to properly prepare regional youth for the challenges of a globalized economy. Educational quality is also being eroded by the growing pervasiveness of religion at all levels of the system. In Saudi Arabia over a quarter of all university degrees are in Islamic studies. In many other nations primary education is accomplished through Saudi-financed madrassas, which have filled the void left by government's abdication of its duty to educate the young.

In economic terms the combined weight of the Arab states is less than that of Spain. Strip oil out of Mideast exports and the entire region exports less than Finland. According to the transnational Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), regional economic growth is burdened by declining rates of investment in fixed capital structure, an inability to attract substantial foreign direct investment, and declining productivity — the economic trinity of disaster.

Economic stagnation coupled with rapid population growth is reducing living standards throughout the region, both comparatively and in real terms. In the heady days of the late 1970s oil boom, annual per-capita GDP growth of over 5% fueled high levels of expectations. GDP per-capita grew from $1,845 to $2,300. Today, after adjusting for inflation, it stands at $1,500, reflecting an overall decline in living standards over 30 years. Only sub-Saharan Africa has done worse. If oil wealth is subtracted from the calculations the economic picture for the mass of Arab citizens becomes dire.

Things are indeed bad in the Arab world and will get much worse.

This statement should not be read as mere opinion. While predictions of the future are usually fraught with peril, those based on demographics are, barring some unforeseen plague or truly catastrophic war, uncannily accurate. Using even the most optimistic assumption—that fertility rates drop by fifty percent in a generation—the respected Population Resource Center, based in Princeton, New Jersey, expects Arab populations to grow from 280 million to almost 460 million by 2020 and to over 600 million a generation later. On the face of it the Arab world is staring political and economic disaster in the face. Arab governments and institutions are already failing to meet basic human needs in many Arab countries. It is hard to imagine how they will cope with the stress of such a massive population increase.

The oil wealth is matched by social backwardness, and the only other region of the world with an income level lower than ours is sub-Saharan Africa. Productivity is decreasing, scientific research is virtually nonexistent, the region is suffering a brain drain, and illiteracy afflicts half of Arab women. The report was only diplomatic concerning implicit criticisms of extremist Islamist movements as a cause of the culture of backwardness and absence of fertile ground for democracy. Interestingly, the report found that the total number of books translated into Arabic yearly is no more than 330, or one-fifth of those translated in a small country like Greece.

Indeed, the total number of books translated into Arabic during the 1,000 years since the age of Caliph Al-Ma’moun [a ninth-century Arab ruler who was a patron of cultural interaction between Arab, Persian, and Greek scholars—WPR] to this day is less than those translated in Spain in one year. The report noted that Arab rulers stay in office all their lives and create dynasties that inherit power, and the peoples are unable to institute change.

The Arab development report hangs out the Arabs’ dirty washing before the world and offers a wealth of information that mars the image of the Arabs in the world...

This last post on how evil and backward the ..............

This article by Moyers is self-serving and seems to have been dictated by the neocons out of the "lie factory".