European News Digest
Swiss Newspaper Exposes Israelis' Nazi Treatment of Palestinian Males
Is the Israeli military copying Nazi "Yellow Stars" practice? In their invasions of Palestinian refugee camps, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) arrest hundreds of Palestinian boys and men, put them out in the sun for hours without shirts, and mark them with colored caps.
"The Israeli Army arrested some 600 men in the refugee camp Deheishe near Bethlehem," reported Neue Zuercher Zeitung on March 12. NZZ continued: "In the early morning, the camp was surrounded by tanks; missiles and tank grenades hit several houses. Then, the Army leadership imposed a curfew, through loudspeakers, and ordered all male inhabitants between 15 and 45 years to go to one of the two schools of Deheishe. While the soldiers searched the narrow streets of the camp, the boys and men were ordered to line up in long queues, and to raise their hands over their heads. Witnesses were enraged about this shabby treatment of their fellow inhabitants. They had to pull off their jackets and shirts and to empty their pockets, then they were blindfolded and their hands cuffed. In this way, for hours, they stood in the unusually hot sun which burns down on the eastern part of the Mediterranean. Finally, one after another, they were led to an empty warehouse to be interrogated and photographed.... Another group of some 100 Palestinians in the neighboring village of Artas was treated similarly. One man, who had been released by noon, claimed that the soldiers had put caps in different colours over the men's headsblack caps for those suspected to be members of the al-Aksa brigades, red caps for alleged activists of the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)...."
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Israeli Spy Networks Found in Post-Sept. 11 Arrests in U.S.: The Story Too Big To Bury
A new Israeli spy scandal, first revealed in EIR's Executive Alert Service on Dec. 4, 2001, grabbed international headlines as of March 6, when two French publications, the online newsletter Intelligence Online, and the establishment daily Le Monde, reported that, in the 18 months prior to the attacks of Sept. 11, more than 120 Israelis were detained by U.S. authorities for spying on Federal law enforcement facilities, the private homes of senior intelligence officials, and military bases. The U.S. media coverage of the newest revelations, which included news of a 60-page DEA report on the spy scandal, was relatively extensive, prompting Attorney General John Ashcroft, according to Washington sources, to order FBI Director Mueller and DEA Director Hutchinson to "get this story off the front pages." More news on the U.S. investigation appears in the U.S. Digest. Digests of the French stories appear below.
*Intelligence Online Exclusive, Feb., 28, 2002:
The following are excerpts from "Proof of a New Israeli Spy Ring in The U.S."
"Intelligence Online has managed to establish that a huge Israeli spy ring operating in the United States was rolled up by the Justice Department's counter-espionage service. Up to now the U.S. authorities have caught and expelled nearly 120 Israeli nationals involved in the case ... Intelligence Online has obtained the copy of a classified, 61-page report drafted by a task force specifically set up for the affair...
"The Israelis involved in the case are between 22 and 30 and had recently carried out their national service in Israeli Army intelligence units. In the U.S. they claimed to be graphic arts students and made contact with officials from several government departments by selling artworks....
"A few of the operatives are well known in the Israeli intelligence community. The report cited the names of Peer Segalovitz (military registration number 5087989) and Aran Ofek, son of a renowned two-star general in the Israeli Army. The network targetted some of the most sensitive sites in the U.S., such as Tanker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City. Indeed, the U.S. Air Force's Office of Special Investigation sent a letter to the Justice Department on May 16 of last year to ask for assistance in a case against four Israelis suspected of spying: Yaron Ohana, Ronen Kalfon, Zeev Cohen and Naor Topaz.
"The network counted around 20 units composed of between four and eight members apiece. Each was under the orders of a local chief who planned and dovetailed operations. The team in Irving, Texas, answered to Michael Calmanovic, who was arrested last April 4 ... while that at Hollywood, Florida was run by Hanan Serfaty....
"For six months some officials had hoped the case would end up in court but the Bush Administration appeared intent on hushing it up. Out of frustration some officials quietly conveyed information to the media. In December, reporter Carl Cameron filmed a four-part series for Fox News on former Israeli spy operations against the U.S. and on a number of cases involving high-tech equipment. He even raised the possibility that the secret Israeli networks were last year spying on the Arab terrorists who eventually carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Indeed, the addresses of Israeli agents mentioned in the report we obtained are very close to former, known residences of the terrorists. For the moment, however, there's nothing to say that wasn't a pure coincidence...."
*Le Monde, Top French Establishment Daily Gives Major Coverage To 'Israeli Spy Network' Exposures
On March 8, Le Monde published a spread of several articles on the network of Israeli spies being investigated in the United States, with a key focus being the likely link of this network, to the atrocities of Sept. 11. In its banner coverage, Le Monde goes through certain aspects that have heretofore only been covered in LaRouche publications, but does not cite EIR.
There were several articles on the theme in Le Monde, led off with the second-lead story on the front page, then filling an entire page on page two, the latter including quotes from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and a box on the 1986 Jonathan Pollard Israeli spy affair. In totality, the coverage goes significantly beyond that in the French Intelligence Online newsletter (although it cites the newsletter as a source), and will obviously have much more impact, given the wide national and international circulation of Le Monde. Already, EIR has monitored several wire-service reports on the Le Monde story, with the one from Reuters playing up the paper's leads, about the evident link of the Israeli spies to Sept. 11.
Noting that all of the more than 100 Israeli agents "were challenged by the authorities, were questioned, and a dozen of them would be still imprisoned," Le Monde writes: "One of their missions would have been to track the al-Qaeda terrorists on American territory, without informing the Federal authorities of them. Elements of this investigation, taken up by the American Fox News television, reinforce the thesis according to which Israel would not have transmitted to the United States all the evidence in its possession, on the preparations of the September 11 attacks."
The article then goes into some detail, on the "Carl Cameron Investigates" Fox TV series of Dec. 11-14 of last year, and reports that there was intensive mobilization against the series by "JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs), AIPAC (America-Israel Political Action Committee), and others." Under this pressure, Fox withdrew all the material on this, from its Internet site, and failed to provide Le Monde a tape of the broadcast, despite three Le Monde requests.
Le Monde also reports that a group of the "students" lived in the small Florida city of Hollywood, near Fort Lauderdale, where four of the five alleged hijackers of American Airlines Flight Number 11 lived, including Mohammed Atta.
Former British Defense Secretary Attacks Blair, U.S. for Iraq War Drive
In the March 13 edition of the Daily Telegraph, Sir John Nott, Britain's former Defence Secretary under Margaret Thatcher, levelled a bitter attack on American pressure on Britainpressure to give unqualified support to all the elements of the "war on terrorism." Sir John breaks with his former boss Thatcher: "I am against the Americans smashing things up with bombing raids, then letting us be the auxiliary policemen to pick up the pieces." His statements indicate a growing revolt against the "utopians," not only in the British Labour Party, but also in the senior levels of the British Conservative Party.
Just weeks ago, Baronness Thatcher, who sits on the Advisory Board of the Hollinger Corporation which owns the Telegraph, wrote a rabid editorial calling for the United States to launch war against Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, the Philippines, and any other country where terrorists might be found. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has self-selected himself to release a "dossier" on the crimes of Saddam Hussein, justifying a war. The dossier has been met with ridicule throughout the international community.
German Debate on Military Rejects 'Mercenary' Army
In what is obviously intended to be an answer to Samuel Huntington's and others' attacks on the German Bundeswehr as being "non-professional," given that it is a draft-based citizens' force, Germany's newspaper of record, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has published a one-page feature headlined, "Draft Duty or Professional Army?," on experiences in Spain, France, and the Netherlands, with the paradigm shift from a draft-based army to a mercenary army. The FAZ also printed a letter from Professor Dietmar Schoessler, of the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich, which harshly criticized the attempts to introduce a "professional" army in Germany.
Schoessler referred to a report prepared by Gen. Loeschel, for the Bundeswehr's General Inspector, which pointed to the fact that without the draft, "the Bundeswehr must rely on those potential [soldiers], who do not have a chance in civilian life," and, as a result,"only the right-wing fringe of the social spectrum will be attracted" to serve in a professional army.
The lengthy FAZ article is part of a debate over the war plans of the "Clash of Civilizations" fanatics like Huntington, whose 1957 book, The Soldier and the State, has done much to morally erode the citizen/soldier ideal embodied in General George Washington.
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