Archive
Hamzawy’s letter to George W. Bush
We just found this online letter/petition published by CSID on Sept. 11, 2006, under the name of an “Open Letter to President Bush”.
The letter is an appeal to (then President) George W. Bush, and here is an excerpt:
Open Letter to President Bush re: democracy promotion
“Dear Mr. President:
As Arab and Muslim intellectuals and activists concerned about the promotion of democracy in our region, we urge you to reaffirm‚ words and actions‚ America ‘s commitment to sustained democratic reform in the Arab world. It is our belief that the main problem with U.S. policies in the Middle East (in particular in Iraq , Palestine , and elsewhere) is precisely their failure to live up to America ‘s democratic ideals of liberty and justice for all. We have been heartened by the strong commitment to liberty you had expressed in your November 2003 speech at the National Endowment for Democracy and then your second inaugural address…
… We realize that democracy is not easily attained and must ultimately come from within. But it can receive encouragement and support, both of which it badly needs today in Arab countries….
…To mention but one case where U.S. influence may do much good, Egypt has lately seen a regime crackdown on opposition activists. In February, the government postponed municipal elections and renewed the emergency law. The regime has not even spared Egypt ‘ s venerable judiciary which has steadfastly proclaimed its independence in recent months. And liberal opposition politician Ayman Nour, who was allowed to run in last year’s presidential election and won 7.6% of the popular vote, second behind President Mubarak, was arrested and sentenced in a murky process to five years in jail. The health of Mr. Nour, a dear friend and colleague of many of us, continues to deteriorate. We pray that you will take his case to heart and let the Egyptian regime hear your concerns. Hundreds of other activists (including doctors, university professors, journalists and civil society activists) whose only crime was to express their desire for freedom, continue to languish in jail and suffer torture and police brutality. This brutality often included sexual molestation and public humiliation of women activists and journalists by pro-government thugs…
… We entreat you to do everything you can to ensure that a small number of authoritarian rulers will not control the future of more than 300 million Arabs, more than half of whom are not yet 20 years old. Freedom and democracy are the only way to build a world where violence is replaced by peaceful public debate and political participation, and despair is substituted by hope, tolerance and dignity.
The list of 105 signatories include 44 Egyptian activists, but more importantly number 41 on the short list of the people who signed this letter is no other than Dr. Amr Hamzawy, who signed as:
41- Amr Hamzawy, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, USA/Egypt
That’s Amr Hamzawy, petitioning Bush (Iraq invader & Crusader!), to help spread democracy in Egypt. Yet, Hamzawy now claims that he was against Bush’s policies in the Middle East!
Still don’t believe “The Great Deception 2011″??
Zbigniew Brzezinski: The man standing behind Obama & Osama!
Zbigniew Brzezinski (born March 28, 1928 in Warsaw, Poland) is a Polish American political scientist, geostrategist, and statesman who served as United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981.
Major foreign policy events during his term of office included the normalization of relations with the People’s Republic of China (and the severing of ties with the Republic of China), the signing of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), the brokering of the Camp David Accords, the transition of Iran from an important US client state to an anti-Western Islamic Republic, encouraging dissidents in Eastern Europe and emphasizing certain human rights in order to undermine the influence of the Soviet Union, the financing of the mujahideen in Afghanistan in response to the Soviet deployment of forces there (allegedly either to help deter a Russian invasion, or to deliberately increase the chance of such an intervention occurring—or for both contradictory reasons simultaneously being embraced by separate US officials) and the arming of these rebels to counter the Soviet invasion.
He was chosen by Barack Obama’s as top Foreign Policy Advisor on the Middle East, and is also a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a member of various boards and councils, including the International Crisis Group.
Assassinating Bin Laden
By MARJORIE COHN
Why It Violated International Law
When he announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed by a Navy Seal team in Pakistan, President Barack Obama said, “Justice has been done.” Mr. Obama misused the word “justice” when he made that statement. He should have said, “Retaliation has been accomplished.” A former professor of constitutional law should know the difference between those two concepts. The word “justice” implies an act of applying or upholding the law.
Targeted assassinations violate well-established principles of international law. Also called political assassinations, they are extrajudicial executions. These are unlawful and deliberate killings carried out by order of, or with the acquiescence of, a government, outside any judicial framework.
Extrajudicial executions are unlawful, even in armed conflict. In a 1998 report, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions noted that “extrajudicial executions can never be justified under any circumstances, not even in time of war.” The U.N. General Assembly and Human Rights Commission, as well as Amnesty International, have all condemned extrajudicial executions.
Bush’s New Middle East
By MIKE WHITNEY, May 29, 2007
” … under the sky
without hope
the self inside me dies …I will always be from nowhere
Without a face, without a history
from nowhere.”“Traveler without Luggage” by Abdul-Wahab Al-Bayyati
It’s hard to know what Bush hopes to accomplish by backing the bloody siege of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, but one thing is certain; things are never as they seem. In an interview on Democracy Now last week, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh stated that, Fatah al-Islam—the group of Sunni extremists inside the camp–were getting material support from the Saudis, the Bush administration and members of the Lebanese political establishment.
So, the Bush administration is supporting terrorism???
That’s right. Sy Hersh put it like this:
“The idea was to provide them (Fatah al-Islam) with some arms and some money and some basic equipment so — these are small units, a couple hundred people. There were three or four around the country given the same help covertly, the goal being they would be potential enemies of Hezbollah in case of warfare”.
But if Fatah-al-Islam is an American-Saudi creation than why is the Bush administration shipping weapons to Lebanon to help kill them? Is this is another example of “blowback”—the unintended consequences of a misguided foreign policy?
Yes and no.
Israel’s New Middle East
By TANYA REINHART, July 27, 2006
Burning Lebanon
Beirut is burning, hundreds of Lebanese die, hundreds of thousands lose all they ever owned and become refugees, and all the world is doing is rescuing the “foreign passport” residents of what was just two weeks ago “the Paris of the Middle East”. Lebanon must die now, because “Israel has the right to defend itself”, so goes the U.S. mantra, used to block any international attempt to impose a cease fire.
Israel, backed by the U.S., portrays its war on Lebanon as a war of self defense. It is easy to sell this message to mainstream media, because the residents of the North of Israel are also in shelters, bombarded and endangered. Israel’s claim that no country would let such an attack on its residents unanswered, finds many sympathetic ears. But let us reconstruct exactly how it all started.
On Wednesday, July 12, a Hezbollah uni! t attacked two armored Jeeps of the Israeli army, patrolling along Israel’s border with Lebanon. Three Israeli soldiers were killed in the attack and two were taken hostage. In a news conference held in Beirut a couple of hours later, Hezbollah’s leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah explained that their aim was to reach a prisoner exchange, where in return for the two captured Israeli soldiers, Israel would return three Lebanese prisoners it had refused to release in a previous prisoner exchange. Nasrallah declared that “he did not want to drag the region into war”, but added that “our current restraint is not due to weakness … if they [Israel] choose to confront us, they must be prepared for surprises.” [1]
Soros: Philanthropist? Spook? or Philanthropist spook?
by Heather Cottin, December 9, 2003
The tactic of creating political hysteria was necessary for the United States to carry out its Balkan policy. It was repeated in 1999 when HRW functioned as the shock troops of indoctrination for the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. The institutions of George Soros stood behind it.
This is not a case of narcissistic personality disorder; this is how George Soros exercises the authority of United States hegemony in the world today. Soros foundations and financial machinations are partly responsible for the destruction of socialism in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. He has set his sights on China. He was part of the full court press that dismantled Yugoslavia. Calling himself a philanthropist, billionaire George Soros’ role is to tighten the ideological stranglehold of globalization and the New World Order while promoting his own financial gain. Soros’ commercial and “philanthropic” operations are clandestine, contradictory and coactive. And as far as his economic activities are concerned, by his own admission, he is without conscience; a capitalist who functions with absolute amorality.
Master-builder of the new bribe sector systematically bilking the world He thrusts himself upon world statesmen and they respond. He has been close to Henry Kissinger, Vaclav Havel and Poland’s General Wojciech Jaruzelski. 4
He supports the Dalai Lama, whose institute is housed in the Presidio in San Francisco, also home to the foundation run by Soros’ friend, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. 5
Soros is a leading figure on the Council of Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum, and Human Rights Watch (HRW). In 1994, after a meeting with his philosophical guru, Sir Karl Popper, Soros ordered his companies to start investing in Central and Eastern European communications.
The Federal Radio Television Administration of the Czech Republic accepted his offer to take over and fund the archives of Radio Free Europe. Soros moved the archives to Prague and spent over $15 million on their maintenance. 2 A Soros foundation now runs CIA-created Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty jointly with the U.S. and RFE/RL, which has expanded into the Caucasus and Asia. 3
Soros is the founder and funder of the Open Society Institute. He created and maintains the International Crisis Group (ICG) which, among other things, has been active in the Balkans since the destruction of Yugoslavia. Soros works openly with the United States Institute of Peace-an overt arm of the CIA…
“Yes, I do have a foreign policy…my goal is to become the conscience of the world.”
George Soros
He thrusts himself upon world statesmen and they respond. He has been close to Henry Kissinger, Vaclav Havel and Poland’s General Wojciech Jaruzelski. 4 He supports the Dalai Lama, whose institute is housed in the Presidio in San Francisco, also home to the foundation run by Soros’ friend, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. 5
When anti-globalization forces were freezing in the streets outside New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel in February 2002, George Soros was inside addressing the World Economic Forum. As the police forced protesters into metal cages on Park Avenue, Soros was extolling the virtues of the “Open Society” and joined Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, Francis ***uyama and others.
WHO IS THIS GUY?
George Soros was born in Hungary in 1930 to Jewish parents so removed from their roots that they once vacationed in Nazi Germany. 6
Soros lived under the Nazis, but with the triumph of the Communists moved to England in 1947. There, Soros came under the sway of the philosopher Karl Popper, at the London School of Economics. Popper was a lionized anti-communist ideologue and his teachings formed the basis for Soros’ political tendencies. There is hardly a speech, book or article that Soros writes that does not pay obeisance to Popper’s influence.
Knighted in 1965, Popper coined the slogan “Open Society,” which eventually manifested in Soros’ Open Society Fund and Institute. Followers of Popper repeat his words like true believers. Popperian philosophy epitomizes Western individual ism. Soros left England in 1956, and found work on Wall Street where, in the 1960s, he invented the “hedge fund.”
“…hedge funds catered to very wealthy individuals… The largely secretive funds, usually trading in offshore locations. . produced astronomically superior results. The size of the “bets” often became self fulfilling prophecies: ‘rumors of a position taken by the big hedge funds prompted other investors to follow suit,’ which would in turn force up the price the hedgers were betting on to begin with.” 7
Divide and Conquer Implied in Proposed Map of the New Middle East
By Genevieve Cora Fraser
Al-Jazeerah, November 8, 2006
It was meant to be a joke and it got a big laugh from TV host Tavis Smiley when his guest, political pundit Andy Borowitz quipped, “George Bush plans to withdraw all his troops from Iraq – to Iran. That’s the plan – the exit strategy.”
Note: The following map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006). Although the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training program at NATO's Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, has most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles.
But no one was laughing, least of all Turkish military officers, on September 15th when a map was presented at the NATO’s Defense College in Rome that included a reduced Turkish landmass. The new Middle East map prepared by retired US Col. Ralph Peters and published in the Armed Forces Journal in June featured a “Free Kurdistan” that included additional territory taken from Syria and Iraq. Indeed, Iraq was a fragment of its former self and had been carved up to also include Sunnis Iraq and the Arab Shia State.
Within the proposed new Middle East, Iran was also reduced, not only by Free Kurdistan, but by “Free Balochistan” which had also borrowed heavily from territory currently claimed by Afghanistan and Pakistan. Balochistan, which lies in the southwest corner of Pakistan, is the largest but least populated of the Pakistani regions. Lately the Chinese have invested heavily in the area by expanding the port city of Gwader. Natural gas, coal, copper and gold offer vast wealth and pipelines will be stretched from Iran to India through the province. Balochistan is also rich in opportunities for drug smugglers with its massive border alongside Afghanistan’s most frequented heroin routes. Some political pundits have labeled heroin as the new American Gold Standard – the only thing propping up the bankrupt American economy and the real reason we occupy Afghanistan. Yes, endless war is very expensive for taxpayers but the fat cat international banking and corporate interests in armaments and energy grow wealthier by the minute.
Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a “New Middle East”
The term “New Middle East” was introduced to the world in June 2006 in Tel Aviv by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who was credited by the Western media for coining the term) in replacement of the older and more imposing term, the “Greater Middle East.”
This shift in foreign policy phraseology coincided with the inauguration of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Oil Terminal in the Eastern Mediterranean. The term and conceptualization of the “New Middle East,” was subsequently heralded by the U.S. Secretary of State and the Israeli Prime Minister at the height of the Anglo-American sponsored Israeli siege of Lebanon. Prime Minister Olmert and Secretary Rice had informed the international media that a project for a “New Middle East” was being launched from Lebanon.
This announcement was a confirmation of an Anglo-American-Israeli “military roadmap” in the Middle East. This project, which has been in the planning stages for several years, consists in creating an arc of instability, chaos, and violence extending from Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria to Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and the borders of NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan.
The “New Middle East” project was introduced publicly by Washington and Tel Aviv with the expectation that Lebanon would be the pressure point for realigning the whole Middle East and thereby unleashing the forces of “constructive chaos.” This “constructive chaos” –which generates conditions of violence and warfare throughout the region– would in turn be used so that the United States, Britain, and Israel could redraw the map of the Middle East in accordance with their geo-strategic needs and objectives.
New Middle East Map
Secretary Condoleezza Rice stated during a press conference that “[w]hat we’re seeing here [in regards to the destruction of Lebanon and the Israeli attacks on Lebanon], in a sense, is the growing—the ‘birth pangs’—of a ‘New Middle East’ and whatever we do we [meaning the United States] have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the New Middle East [and] not going back to the old one.”1 Secretary Rice was immediately criticized for her statements both within Lebanon and internationally for expressing indifference to the suffering of an entire nation, which was being bombed indiscriminately by the Israeli Air Force.
Mohamed ElBaradei
Mohamed Mustafa ElBaradei, born June 17, 1942, is an Egyptian law scholar and diplomat. He was the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an inter-governmental organisation under the auspices of the United Nations, from December 1997 to November 2009. ElBaradei and the IAEA were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. ElBaradei was also an important figure in the 2011 Egyptian protests which culminated in the resignation of Hosni Mubarak.
Family and personal life
ElBaradei was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt. He was one of five children of Mostafa ElBaradei, an attorney who headed the Egyptian Bar Association and often found himself at odds with the regime of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. ElBaradei’s father was also a supporter of democratic rights in Egypt, supporting a free press and an independent judiciary.
ElBaradei is married to Aida El-Kachef, an early-childhood teacher. They have two children: a daughter, Laila, who is a lawyer living in London. They also have one granddaughter, Maya.
Ayman Nour
Ayman Abd El Aziz Nour, born 5 December 1964 is an Egyptian politician, a former member of the Egyptian Parliament and chairman of the El Ghad party.
He was imprisoned in January 2005 by the government of President Hosni Mubarak. Nour was released on health grounds on February 18, 2009. Following the fall of Mubarak in the 2011 Revolution, Nour stated his intention to run for the vacant presidency.
Background
Nour was born in the city of Mansoura in 1964. His father was a lawyer and a former Member of Parliament and his mother established and supervised a number of charity projects in Mansoura. He had been married to Gamila Ismail who also served as the vice president to the El-Ghad Party.
Formation of El GhadThe El Ghad party was formally recognized by the Egyptian government on October 27, 2004. Following its creation, Nour was elected president of the party at its first convention a few days later. His prominence as an independent MP made him the star of the party and one of the driving forces behind its organization. Nour fought hard to get the party recognized; its application was rejected three times before official status was finally granted.
The party was created to represent a liberal democratic perspective, with a strong interest in human rights issues. Nour used the party as a platform to call for constitutional reform, limiting the president’s powers and opening presidential elections to multiple candidates.
