From:
Hillary’s Enemies List
(AntiWar.com) -- by Philip Giraldi --
Some might recall the enemies list that President Richard Nixon kept in his desk. The list was appended to a memo that asked "how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies?" Named were a number of journalists who had criticized Nixon’s administration as well as celebrities like actors Gregory Peck and Paul Newman and athletes like Joe Namath. Nixon was clearly on to something because in today’s America we have a new enemies list, one that is updated annually to make sure that nary a single malefactor is overlooked. It is the US State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism, which was unveiled last week in its 2009 version at a briefing conducted by Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, Foggy Bottom’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism.
There is, of course, an American fixation with compiling lists and making numeric assessments of things that are not amenable to such analysis. Recently those featured on such lists have also been on the receiving end of one or another of the endless wars that the United States engages in to rid itself of elements that it finds objectionable. The terrorism report claims to be an objective analysis of world terrorism, describing how it ebbs and flows globally. Its stated purpose is to "to help understand the current trends in global terrorism." It also includes its infamous state sponsors of terrorism section, which purports to be an examination of all those countries that support terrorist groups. Conveniently for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who signed off on the report, the list is very light on introspection. The United States is certainly the world’s leading supporter of terrorists that actually kill people, mostly in places like Iran, under direction from the CIA and military special ops but its actions are not described in the report. Israel too, engages in terrorism through its intelligence service Mossad, most recently assassinating a Hamas official in Dubai in January, and its armed forces and police regularly engage in terrorism directed against the Palestinian people in an attempt to demoralize and intimidate them into submission. But, according to the State Department, soldiers and other government employees cannot be considered terrorists.
The State Department report sometimes seems like a press release for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Regarding the horrific Israeli invasion of Gaza and its aftermath, it reads: "Israeli forces conducted Operation Cast Lead from December 2008 to January 2009 to root out terrorist organizations’ stockpiles of rockets and mortars in Gaza. The IAF launched airstrikes on HAMAS security installations, personnel, and other facilities, as well as rocket and mortar launch teams. On January 3, Israeli forces launched a ground invasion. Hostilities between Israeli forces and HAMAS militants continued through January 18, and the Israeli withdrawal of troops was completed on January 21. Israeli officials believed Operation Cast Lead helped achieve a level of deterrence, as rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza dropped precipitously following the conflict." They were only rooting out terrorists. Nothing about Israeli provocations and no mention of the deliberate destruction of schools and infrastructure and the targeting of UN relief operations or the high level of civilian casualties.
Hamas and Hezbollah, which do not threaten the United States, are unambiguously described in the report as terrorists, almost certainly because they do threaten Israel, ignoring their roles as national resistance movements to an aggressive and expansionistic Tel Aviv...MORE...LINK
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