Who Owns the Future?

Who Owns the Future?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“That speaks about who is going to be leading tomorrow.”

So said Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Every three years, the Paris-based OECD holds its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of the reading, math and science skills of 15-year-olds in developing and developed countries. Gurria was talking of the results of the 2009 tests.

Sixty-five nations competed. The Chinese swept the board.

The schools of Shanghai-China finished first in math, reading and science. Hong Kong-China was third in math and science. Singapore, a city-state dominated by overseas Chinese, was second in math, fourth in science.

Only Korea, Japan and Finland were in the hunt.

And the U.S.A.? America ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math, producing the familiar quack-quack.

“This is an absolute wake-up call for America,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “We have to face the brutal truth. We have to get much more serious about investment in education.”

But the “brutal truth” is that we invest more per pupil than any other country save Luxembourg, and we are broke. And a closer look at the PISA scores reveals some unacknowledged truths.

True, East Asians — Chinese, Koreans, Japanese — are turning in the top scores in all three categories, followed by the Europeans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders.

But, looking down the New York Times list of the top 30 nations, one finds not a single Latin American nation, not a single African nation, not a single Muslim nation, not a single South or Southeast Asian nation (save Singapore), not a single nation of the old Soviet Union except Latvia and Estonia.

And in Europe as in Asia, the northern countries (Finland, Norway, Belgium, Iceland, Austria, Germany) outscore the southern (Greece, Italy, Portugal). Slovenia and Croatia, formerly of the Habsburg Empire, outperformed Albania and Serbia, which spent centuries under Turkish rule.

Among the OECD members, the most developed 34 nations on earth, Mexico, principal feeder nation for U.S. schools, came in dead last in reading.

Steve Sailer of VDARE.com got the full list of 65 nations, broke down U.S. reading scores by race, then measured Americans with the countries and continents whence their families originated. What he found was surprising.

Asian-Americans outperform all Asian students except for Shanghai-Chinese. White Americans outperform students from all 37 predominantly white nations except Finns, and U.S. Hispanics outperformed the students of all eight Latin American countries that participated in the tests.

African-American kids would have outscored the students of any sub-Saharan African country that took the test (none did) and did outperform the only black country to participate, Trinidad and Tobago, by 25 points.

America’s public schools, then, are not abject failures.

They are educating immigrants and their descendants to outperform the kinfolk their parents or ancestors left behind when they came to America. America’s schools are improving the academic performance of all Americans above what it would have been had they not come to America.

What American schools are failing at, despite the trillions poured into schools since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is closing the racial divide.

We do not know how to close the gap in reading, science and math between Anglo and Asian students and black and Hispanic students.

And from the PISA tests, neither does any other country on earth.

The gap between the test scores of East Asian and European nations and those of Latin America and African nations mirrors the gap between Asian and white students in the U.S. and black and Hispanic students in the U.S.

Which brings us to “Bad Students, Not Bad Schools,” a new book in which Dr. Robert Weissberg contends that U.S. educational experts deliberately “refuse to confront the obvious truth.”

“America’s educational woes reflect our demographic mix of students. Today’s schools are filled with millions of youngsters, many of whom are Hispanic immigrants struggling with English plus millions of others of mediocre intellectual ability disdaining academic achievement.”

In the public and parochial schools of the 1940s and 1950s, kids were pushed to the limits of their ability, then pushed harder. And when they stopped learning, they were pushed out the door.

Writes Weissberg: “To be grossly politically incorrect, most of America’s educational woes vanish if these indifferent, troublesome students left when they had absorbed as much as they were going to learn and were replaced by learning-hungry students from Korea, Japan, India, Russia, Africa and the Caribbean.”

Weissberg contends that 80 percent of a school’s success depends on two factors: the cognitive ability of the child and the disposition he brings to class — not on texts, teachers or classroom size.

If the brains and the will to learn are absent, no amount of spending on schools, teacher salaries, educational consultants or new texts will matter.

A nation weary of wasting billions on unctuous educators who never deliver what they promise may be ready to hear some hard truths.

http://buchanan.org/blog/who-owns-the-future-4587

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union on March 29, 1951.

ADB-ZB Mittelstaedt, 04.19.1976 Berlin: Robert Meeropol, Rosenberg's visit to East Germany arrived Robert Meeropol (2nd from right), son of the murdered couple's U.S. imperialism Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, arrived in Berlin on 19.04.1976. Robert Meeropol, who is staying at the invitation of the Peace Council of the GDR and the Paul Robeson Committee to a several-day visit to the GDR, of which be condemned partly in the Rosenberg trial Morten Sobell (left) and the attorney of the Rosenberg sons, Marshall Perlin (2nd from left, behind) accompanied. At the airport Berlin-Schönefeld, the guests were the Chairman of the Paul Robeson Committee, Prof. Dr. Franz Loeser (right), and the Secretary General of the East German Peace Council, Werner Rümpel, warmly welcomed.

[Berlin-Schoenefeld .- Morten Sobell, Marshall Perlin, Robert Meeropol, Franz Loeser (left to right) before Tupolev Tu-134 aircraft the airline "Flight International"]

Illustrated People:
Loeser, Franz, Prof. Dr.: Peace Council, Chairman of the Paul Robeson Committee, DDR


Cold Case

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union on March 29, 1951. Sixty years later, the case still crackles with controversy. Why is it so hard to put to rest?

By Ronald Radosh | Mar 29, 2011 7:00 AM

CREDIT: Collage: Tablet Magazine

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were arrested in July and August of 1950, tried for conspiracy to commit espionage, found guilty by a jury on March 29, 1951, and then condemned to death by Judge Irving Kaufman at their sentencing a week later. I sat in the courtroom at Foley Square on that final fateful day 60 years ago, and remember my shock and that of those in attendance at the handing down of this harsh sentence, as well as the judge’s words that the couple had committed a crime that was “worse than murder.” Not only had they given “the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted,” Kaufman told them, they had “already caused … the Communist aggression in Korea.” Millions more than the 50,000 American casualties in Korea, he added for good measure, “may pay the price of your treason.” By their action, the Rosenbergs alone had “altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country,” the judge said. Kaufman was so proud of his speech that he brought his son with him to the courtroom so the 10-year-old could hear his father impose the dual death sentence, which was carried out in the electric chair at Sing-Sing Prison, north of New York City, on June 19, 1953, amidst worldwide protest.

It seems that every year since has brought new revelations about the Rosenberg case and reignites a debate about the meaning of the couple’s actions, the extent of what they actually did or did not do, and whether their actions did real harm to national security. Moreover, many of the Rosenbergs’ supporters still believe, as they did at the time, that the couple were innocent and made into scapegoats for America’s loss of its atomic monopoly.

The truth is that for those who accept evidence and reason, the debate should be over. Beginning with the first release in 1995 of the Venona decrypts of KGB messages to their agents in the United States, it became clear to even the most resolute doubters not only that Julius Rosenberg was a KGB agent who put together and ran an espionage ring made up of college friends who had become engineers or scientists but that his wife, Ethel, knew of and supported his activities. So, the question must be asked: Why did so many ignore the plain evidence of the Rosenbergs’ guilt? And why do so many continue to argue that the Rosenbergs were framed by the U.S. government?

The Rosenberg case was a family affair—almost everyone involved was Jewish: the Rosenbergs and the Greenglasses, those who became government witnesses against the two couples, as well as the prosecutors, Myles Lane, Irving Saypol, and Roy Cohn, and the justice who presided at the trial, Kaufman. The trial took place in New York City, which had the largest Jewish population in the world and where many Jews were still adherents of the leftist beliefs they imbibed along with their mother’s milk from the days of FDR and the Popular Front. Many in the Jewish community feared being branded as traitors. It is no wonder that the American Jewish Committee and the various groups that fought anti-Semitism at home kept their distance from the case, proclaimed that the couple was guilty, and did not join the pleas from all over the world for President Dwight Eisenhower to commute the Rosenbergs’ death sentence.

Indeed, Lucy Dawidowicz, the late scholar of Hitler’s war against the Jews, wrote [1] in the socialist anti-Communist newspaper the New Leader that the American Communist Party was trying to use the Jews in its “war against America,” and hence no Jew who understood that should be involved in an effort to gain clemency for the condemned couple. Anti-Communists should not only oppose clemency, she argued, but should hope that the Rosenbergs’ lives would not be spared, because if judges backed away from imposing the ultimate penalty on them, it would mean America had caved in to the Party’s “moral blackmail.”

In 1983, The Rosenberg File, a book [2] I had co-authored with the late Joyce Milton, was published. That year, Robert Leiter, then as now an editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, wrote that “one aspect of the case—its particular ‘Jewishness’—has, in all but the rarest instances, escaped wider discussion.” Commentators, he wrote, “have avoided coming to grips with it.” The concern at the time of the trial was most clearly expressed by an aide to the AJC’s executive director, who wrote a memo about their fear that “the non-Jewish public may generalize from these activities and impute to the Jews as a group treasonable motives and activities.” Jury members were aware of the issue. The foreman of the all-gentile jury told the press that “I felt good that this was strictly a Jewish show. It was Jews against Jews,” and, as he put it, “it wasn’t the Christians against the Jews.”

On the left, the Communists and their allies did all they could to attribute the indictment and trial of the Rosenbergs to anti-Semitism, which fit with their assertion—as hard as it is to believe today—that the Truman Administration was leading America toward a home-grown version of Fascism. Moreover, the Rosenberg trial coincided with the actual anti-Semitic trial of the former Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership—most of whom were Jewish. Almost all of the defendants in that trial were found guilty of spying for the United States and the Zionists and, after confessions forced by brutal torture, were hanged to death. By focusing on the Rosenbergs as victims of American fascism and anti-Semitism, the Soviets hoped to deflect attention away from what they were doing in their own bloc.

Thus the Old Left newspaper that began the first Rosenberg defense efforts, the National Guardian, explained that it was “nonsensical” to view the Slansky trial as anti-Semitic, because “in Prague the defendants have confessed in open court while the Rosenbergs still proclaim their innocence.” The newspaper went on to note that the Czech prosecutor “presented photostats and documents to support the accusations.” It is no wonder that the independent leftist journalist I.F. Stone—who believed the Rosenbergs were probably guilty (possibly because decades earlier he had himself signed on to work for Soviet intelligence)—wrote that “no picket lines circled the Kremlin to protest the execution of Jewish writers and artists; they did not even have a day in court; they just disappeared. Slansky was executed overnight without appeal in Prague. How the same people could excuse Slansky and [Stalin’s] anti-Semitic ‘doctor’s plot’ and at the same time carry on the Rosenberg campaign as they did calls for political psychiatry.”

Today, so many decades later, the descendants of the people who proclaimed the Rosenbergs’ innocence have now begun yet another campaign to rehabilitate them. They now argue that although it appears Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet spy after all, he gave little of value to the Soviets, was motivated by the desire to stave off atomic war, and in any case had nothing to do with handing over atomic information of any kind to the Soviet Union.

A new variation of this argument was penned recently by the activist historian and lawyer Staughton Lynd, writing [3] in the Marxist journal Monthly Review, founded in 1949 by the late Leo Huberman and the late Paul M. Sweezy. I have written [4] at length about Lynd’s article, but his argument can be easily summarized. Lynd now accepts as fact that Julius Rosenberg led a Soviet spy network, but he objects to what he calls the triumphalism of those like me who have asserted this for years. More important for Lynd is that the couple refused to “snitch,” therefore making themselves heroes. He maintains that their trial was a “sham,” and he argues that even if they were guilty, they must be viewed as unadulterated heroes. Why? Because, he actually writes, the couple had “obligations as Communists, and as citizens of the world.” So, to Lynd, the Rosenbergs’ obligation to spy for Joseph Stalin stands above any loyalty to their own country, not to speak of their willingness to make their own children orphans. Secondly, Lynd believes that if the Rosenbergs helped the Soviets get the bomb, that “might have been justified,” since he believes Soviet strength stopped aggression by the American imperialists.

For years, the American Left argued that the Rosenbergs were framed and innocent. Now Lynd says they were guilty but that their actions were justified because they helped “preserve the peace of the world.” In effect, he is saying that instead of still attempting to prove the Rosenbergs were framed, we should celebrate them for being traitors to their own country. His argument reveals only the desperation some on the left have to descend to in order to maintain their view that the only guilty party was the United States.

The innocence of the Rosenbergs has long been a touchstone of the left, and attempts to discuss evidence suggesting their guilt have been assailed as appeasement of McCarthyism. Most recently, writing [5] in the Nation, its former editor and publisher Victor Navasky endorsed the finding of the late Walter Schneir, who argued that the Rosenbergs were framed and innocent. Walter and Miriam Schneir’s 1965 Invitation to an Inquest was the textbook for this cause, and this strain of thought continues in the latest Schneir book, Final Verdict [6], published in 2010, after Walter Schneir’s death. The real spy, the Schneirs claim in a new twist, was Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, who they claim acted on his own and in return for his cooperation with prosecutors got off with a 15-year sentence. Never mind that in their original conspiracy book [7] the Schneirs argued that Greenglass never engaged in espionage at all and did not hand anything over to Rosenberg’s courier, Harry Gold, who made up his entire testimony. Schneir and Navasky also ignore the incontrovertible fact that Julius Rosenberg, at Ethel’s request, recruited David Greenglass into his network.

Steven Usdin and I answered [8] Navasky’s charges in an article appearing in the New Republic’s website last December, and I wrote a critical review [9] of Walter Schneir’s Final Verdict that appeared in Commentary. Other publications presenting detailed and incontrovertible proof of the Rosenbergs’ guilt are The Rosenberg File; the 1995 release of the National Security Agency’s decryptions of World War II KGB cables (21 of which report on Julius’ espionage); the 2001 autobiography of Alexander Feklisov, Rosenberg’s KGB controller; and Steven Usdin’s 2005 book, Engineering Communism [10], which laid out the enormous extent of the Rosenberg ring’s espionage in the field of military technology. Although it is not freely available online, Usdin’s article [11] “The Rosenberg Ring’s Continued Impact,” in The International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, is the single most complete source for an overview of the damage the couple did to America’s national security and a detailed account of what the Soviets got from the network. There are no more lingering doubts about the Rosenbergs’ “culpability”—except in the precincts of the dwindling true believers.

Continue reading [12]: the Meeropols, dark secrets, and “I did it for the Soviet Union.” Or view as a single page [13].
As Usdin shows, the Rosenberg network, especially the agents Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, passed on the 12,000-page blueprints for the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, airborne radars for nighttime navigation and bombing, and other new radar technology. “Rosenberg’s band of amateur spies,” Usdin writes, “turned over detailed information on a wide range of technologies and weapon systems that hastened the Red Army’s march to Berlin, jump-started its postwar development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and later helped Communist troops in North Korea fight the American military to a standoff.”

So why, then, is there still a campaign to declare the Rosenbergs innocent victims? The answer must be found in the desire of now aging New Leftists and the few remaining elderly veterans of the Old Left to keep alive their hope of proving that the United States is the main villain in the world. In an essay [14] written about today’s Tea Party for the New York Review of Books, the historian Gordon S. Wood reflects on the differences between popular memory and history. He notes that “there has always been a tension between critical history and popular memory, between what historians write and what society chooses to remember.” In the case of the Rosenbergs, what the veterans of the old “the Rosenbergs are innocent” school desire is to keep the memory of the cause alive. To admit the couple’s guilt is to demolish in one fell swoop the case their defenders have made over the years about their martyrdom and to force their supporters to face up to issues they would rather ignore. That is why the distinguished historian Eric Foner—one of the most prominent historians in the United States—can write that “the execution of the Rosenbergs was only the most extreme example of a broader pattern of shattered careers and suppressed civil liberties”—rather than an actual espionage case in which two American Communists were recruited out of the Communist Party USA to work for the KGB.

Foner continues to assert that “rather than the nest of Soviet spies portrayed by the FBI, or creatures of Moscow … the party emerges in new [revisionist historical] work as a complex and diverse organization.” He sees the CPUSA as a legitimate political group no different than any other organization or party. But in fact, if not exactly a “nest of spies,” it was, from its top leadership down, a willing recruiting agency for the KGB. It might have been complex, but its diversity included the membership’s willingness to do whatever Moscow ordered.

Indeed, Walter Schneir inadvertently admitted as much, when he wrote in Final Verdict that if Julius Rosenberg had talked, he would have been forced to name “the very friends who he had himself recruited,” as well as reveal “the dark secret” that the CPUSA and its leader, Earl Browder, “had involved itself in enlisting dozens of members for espionage.” When Schneir writes that if Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had confessed, they would have “fueled the hysteria of the times,” he is admitting that the so-called hysteria had a real basis in fact—the CPUSA and its members’ principal loyalty was to Moscow.

The Schneirs saw the Rosenberg trial as an American show trial, in which acknowledging the truth that Rosenberg was a Soviet agent would have given their enemies—the U.S. government—invaluable ammunition for their anti-Communist policies. Ironically, the Rosenbergs and their supporters were at the same time giving their total support to a power that was holding real show trials and sending innocent people to their deaths.

When the Rosenbergs’ co-defendant Morton Sobell confessed [15] in 2008 to Sam Roberts of the New York Times that despite his decades of asserting his innocence, he was in fact a Soviet spy, the old game ran into big trouble. Sobell qualified his confession by saying he never thought of himself as a spy, just as an individual who was helping “a wartime Soviet ally,” who only handed the Soviets “defensive” weaponry that would be of no harm to America. Moreover, Sobell also argued that the information coming from Greenglass was only “junk.”

Yet even while confessing, Sobell fudged the facts. In an article Steven Usdin and I wrote that appears in a recent issue [16] of the Weekly Standard, we revealed that Sobell decided to admit that what he stole was in fact major military data desired by the Soviets. He told us how on a nonstop photo session over a July 4 weekend in 1948, he, Julius Rosenberg, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics scientist William Perl, and a fourth man took films of 1,885 pages of classified documents stolen for them by Perl from a Columbia University safe belonging to Theodore von Kármán, at that time the nation’s most prominent aerospace engineer. It included information about the designs and capabilities of every American bomber, designs for analog and digital computers used to automate antiaircraft weapons, and specifications for land-based and airborne radars later used in Korea. He thus provided information that advanced the capabilities of the Soviet military machine.

Moreover, Sobell acknowledged that he engaged in this espionage not because he was anti-fascist, but, as he told us, “I did it for the Soviet Union.” His spying continued until the day he fled to Mexico to try and escape arrest in 1950, well into the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were no longer allies.

As new information found in espionage historian Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks revealed, Greenglass had in fact not only given a primitive sketch of the bomb’s lens configuration to Harry Gold, Rosenberg’s courier, but later delivered to him the physical mold of a detonator for the bomb. The detonators were built in the shop in which Greenglass worked. Moreover, the supposedly “harmless” material the Rosenberg ring handed over to the KGB included radar specifications and aircraft designs that gave the Soviet military critical information about American capabilities, allowed the Red Army to jam U.S. radar, and contributed to the development of sophisticated Soviet fighters that equaled those deployed by the U.S. Air Force. There can be no doubt that this technology directly led to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers in Korea and Vietnam.

Sadly, the Rosenbergs’ sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, still continue their campaign to exonerate their parents. After Sobell’s confession, Michael—the elder—acknowledged [17] that for years “we believed they were innocent and we tried to prove them innocent.” But now, he said that they believe “truth is more important than our political position.” However, they are continuing to obscure the truth. After all, their parents went to their deaths admonishing them, in their last letter, to “NEVER LET THEM CHANGE THE TRUTH OF OUR INNOCENCE,” or as the couple put it another time, “The Fact of our innocence will not change. We are the first victims of American Fascism.”

So, it is understandable that it has been hard for their sons to let it go. Perhaps it is more painful for them to direct their anger at their parents who lied to them about their guilt, preferring to leave them orphans rather than to dishonor their pledge to serve Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. Robert Meeropol explained to Sam Roberts that had his farther talked, he would have had to “send his best friends to jail, and he could not do that.” He also added that “my parents would have made a bigger betrayal to avoid betraying me, and frankly I don’t consider myself that important.” Evidently, remaining silent to protect the spies he recruited was something Julius saw as sacrosanct, while allowing his sons to become orphaned was excusable. So, now his sons admit only that their father engaged only in “non-atomic espionage,” which somehow makes it appear less wrong. Of course, this is also false, since the Rosenbergs recruited David Greenglass precisely because he was working at the Manhattan Project, where they hoped he would hit pay dirt. Moreover, we now know, thanks to Spies, the book [18] by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, that Julius Rosenberg also recruited yet another atomic spy, Russell McNutt.

The sons also claim that even if Julius was guilty, their mother, Ethel Rosenberg, was completely innocent. They make their claim on an evaluation of the once-secret grand jury hearings released by the government in 2008. That material showed that Ruth Greenglass, David’s wife, lied when she testified that material received from her husband was typed up by Ethel. In her grand jury testimony, she said to the contrary that she herself wrote it up in longhand. KGB Venona decrypts confirm that what they received was “hand-written.” (You can find my analysis of the grand jury testimony here [19].)

This, however, did not mean that Ethel was innocent, even though the government got Ruth to change her testimony. Venona also corroborated that Ethel had recommended Ruth, her sister-in-law, to the KGB as a suitable recruit. She also knew about her husband’s espionage work as well as that of other members of his ring, Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant. Ethel, in other words, was knowledgeable, and in legal terms was a conspirator. The fact that the government sought to break Julius by getting him to realize that his children would be left without both their parents does not prove that Ethel was innocent.

The truth is that both Meeropol sons are not what they continually claim to be: objective historians who are researching the Rosenberg case. They are partisans in the fight to prove their parents morally innocent, if not factually innocent. Michael Meeropol once wrote that his parents refused to cooperate because they wanted to keep the United States from creating “a massive spy show trial,” and they hence “earned the thanks of generations of resisters to government repression.” That statement is truly ironic, since the couple gave up their lives on behalf of the Soviet Union, the home of the show trial.

The late Howard Zinn tried to shift the terms of the Meeropols’ argument. Even if their parents were guilty, he wrote before his death, the “most important thing was that they did not get a fair trial in the atmosphere of cold war hysteria.” That statement would have had some credibility if Zinn had acknowledged the couple’s guilt. But of course he argued that most of the witnesses against them were lying. No one on the left, it seems, is willing to offer any condemnation for the way in which the Rosenbergs betrayed their own country.

There is, finally, the claim [20], made by Victor Navasky and echoed [21] by others, that “these guys thought they were helping our ally in wartime.” A nice try—except the new evidence reveals two things: Julius Rosenberg set up his network during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when the United States and Russia were not allies, and second, he kept his network alive after the war’s end, in the period when the Cold War had started. The myth that Julius was motivated by anti-fascist concerns, rather than a desire to serve Stalin, is the greatest myth of all. As David Greenglass told me personally, he and Julius saw themselves as “soldiers for Stalin.”

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, David and Ruth Greenglass, and Morton Sobell all saw themselves as soldiers in a good fight, working behind enemy lines. They were Soviet rather than American patriots, who hid their own motivations in phony remonstrations of their supposed love for the United States.

Ronald Radosh is an adjunct fellow at The Hudson Institute and a writer for Pajamas Media. He is author, with the late Joyce Milton, of The Rosenberg File and other books.

A Rosenberg Co-Conspirator Reveals More About His Role

March 20, 2011
A Rosenberg Co-Conspirator Reveals More About His Role
By SAM ROBERTS

Morton Sobell, who was convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 in an espionage conspiracy case and finally admitted nearly six decades later that he had been a Soviet spy, now says he helped copy hundreds of pages of secret Air Force documents stolen from a Columbia University professor’s safe in 1948.

According to an article by two cold war historians, Ronald Radosh and Steven T. Usdin, in The Weekly Standard, Mr. Sobell, who is 93, said in an interview last December that he, Julius Rosenberg, William Perl and an unidentified fourth man spent a weekend, probably Independence Day, frantically copying the classified documents in a Greenwich Village apartment before they were missed.

That Monday, Mr. Sobell is quoted as saying, he and Mr. Rosenberg filled a box with canisters of 35-millimeter film and delivered it to Soviet agents on a Long Island Rail Road platform.

In addition to elaborating on Mr. Sobell’s admission in a 2008 interview with The New York Times that he had stolen military radar and artillery secrets, the December interview appears to stoke the smoldering embers of the case on several other counts.

Mr. Sobell’s comments, according to the authors, identify Mr. Perl not as an innocent aeronautical engineer who was entitled to inspect the secret papers and was implicated in the espionage conspiracy only by circumstantial evidence, but as a conspirator against his mentor, Theodore von Karman.

Mr. Perl, a fellow student with Mr. Sobell and Mr. Rosenberg at City College, worked with Professor von Karman for the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics at Langley Army Air Base in Virginia during World War II. Testifying before the Rosenberg grand jury, Mr. Perl denied any relationship with Mr. Rosenberg or Mr. Sobell. He was convicted of perjury in 1953.

Mr. Sobell’s latest comments also validate an account of the photocopying of the secret papers conveyed to federal investigators by Jerome Tartakow, a jailhouse informer often discredited by supporters of the Rosenbergs, who said he learned of the photocopying from Julius Rosenberg himself.

Finally, Mr. Sobell’s comments, as quoted by the authors, shed more light on his motive.

“I did it for the Soviet Union,” he said, leading Mr. Radosh and Mr. Usdin to conclude that Mr. Rosenberg and his fellow American Communists “were motivated by loyalty to the Soviet Union, not opposition to fascism as their defenders claim.”

The Rosenbergs, who were accused of conspiracy to steal atomic bomb secrets from the United States, were sentenced to death and executed in 1953. Mr. Sobell served 18 years for nonatomic spying. He was released in 1969 and, until the Times interview, maintained his innocence and insisted that he had been framed by the government.

British document: Israel initiated Entebbe hijack.

British document: Israel initiated Entebbe hijack

Official government file quotes unnamed source as claiming Shin Bet cooperated with Air France flight's hijackers, PFLP group, in instigating crisis in bid to weaken PLO

Ynet
Published: 06.01.07, 09:45 / Israel News

The state of Israel was behind the hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe in 1976, and cooperated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in staging the affair, a UK government file compiled at the time of the occurrences and published by the BBC Friday revealed.


According to the file released by the National Archives, an unnamed contact told a British diplomat in Paris that the Shin Bet and the PFLP collaborated to seize the plane, which was hijacked in Athens and flown to Entebbe in Uganda, where 98, most of hem Israelis, were held hostage.


The crisis was brought to an end after Israeli commandos stormed the airport. Three Israeli hostages and one Israeli commander, Yonatan Netanyahu, were killed during the raid.



In the document, written on 30 June 1976 when the crisis was still unresolved, DH Colvin of the Paris Embassy wrote that according to his source, "the hijack was the work of the PFLP, with help from the Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Bet.



"The operation was designed to torpedo the PLO's standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans."



He added: "My contact said the PFLP had attracted all sorts of wild elements, some of whom had been planted by the Israelis."

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0%2C7340%2CL-3407333%2C00.html

ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE: 2001 INTERVIEW WITH HAMID GUL, FORMER ISI CHIEF

IN 2001 ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE OF UPI INTERVIEWED HAMID GUL ON 9/11
WHAT DOES THIS INCREDIBLE INTERVIEW MEAN TO US 9 YEARS LATER?

By Arnaud de Borchgrave for UPI

(Veterans Today Editors note: This is being reprinted in consultation both with de Borchrave and Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan’s controversial ISI. In light of the 92,000 documents that many claim to be fabrications, highly critical of Pakistan’s intelligence organization, this historic interview is more important than ever. G. Duff)

De Borchgrave: So who did Black Sept. 11?

Gul: Mossad and its accomplices. The U.S. spends $40 billion a year on its 11 intelligence agencies. That’s $400 billion in 10 years. Yet the Bush Administration says it was taken by surprise. I don’t believe it. Within 10 minutes of the second twin tower being hit in the World Trade Center CNN said Osama bin Laden had done it. That was a planned piece of disinformation by the real perpetrators. It created an instant mindset and put public opinion into a trance, which prevented even intelligent people from thinking for themselves.

Q: So you’re already convinced bin Laden didn’t do it?

A: I know bin Laden and his associates. I’ve been with them here, in Europe and the Middle East. They are graduates of the best universities and are highly intelligent with impressive degrees and speak impeccable English. These are people who have rediscovered fundamental Islamic values. Many come from the Gulf countries where ruling royal families have generated hatred by the way they flout divine law, wasting billions on gratifying their whims, jetting around in large private jets by themselves, and sailing the Mediterranean in big private boats for weeks on end. Osama’s best recruits come from feudal areas that are U.S. protectorates and where millions of poor people are seeking human dignity. I have even visited a Christian convent school in Murree, 60 miles from here, where my 13-year-old daughter is studying. The young girls there have told me Osama is their hero. Osama’s followers identify with Mujahideen freedom fighters wherever they are defending Islam and its values.

Q: So what makes you think Osama wasn’t behind Sept. 11?

A: From a cave inside a mountain or a peasant’s hovel? Let’s be serious. Osama inspires countless millions by standing up for Islam against American and Israeli imperialism. He doesn’t have the means for such a sophisticated operation.

Q: Why Mossad?

A: Mossad and its American associates are the obvious culprits. Who benefits from the crime? The attacks against the twin towers started at 8:45 a.m. and four flights are diverted from their assigned air space and no air traffic controller sounds the alarm. And no Air Force jets scramble until 10 a.m. That also smacks of a small scale Air Force rebellion, a coup against the Pentagon perhaps? Radars are jammed, transponders fail. No IFF — friend or foe identification — challenge. In Pakistan, if there is no response to IFF, jets are instantly scrambled and the aircraft is shot down with no further questions asked. This was clearly an inside job. Bush was afraid and rushed to the shelter of a nuclear bunker. He clearly feared a nuclear situation. Who could that have been? Will that also be hushed up in the investigation, like the Warren report after the Kennedy assassination?

Q: At this point, someone might be asking what you’ve been smoking. What is Israel’s interest in such a monstrous plot, which, of course, no one believes except Islamist extremists who concocted this piece of disinformation in the first place, presumably to detract from the real culprits?

A: Jews never agreed to Bush 41 (George H.W. Bush, the 41st president) or 43 (his son George W. Bush, the 43rd president). They made sure Bush senior didn’t get a second term. His land-for-peace pressure in Palestine didn’t suit Israel. They were also against the young Bush because he was considered too close to oil interests and the Gulf countries. Bush senior and Jim Baker had raised $150 million for Bush junior, much of it from Mideast sources or their American go-betweens. Bush 41 and Baker, as private citizens, had also facilitated the new strategic relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran. I have this from sources in both countries. So clearly the prospect of a Bush 43 was a potential danger to Israel.

Jews were stunned by the way Bush stole the election in Florida. They had put big money on Al Gore. Israel has given its imperialist guardian parent opportunities to turn disaster into a pretext for imposing an all-encompassing military, political and economic agenda to further the cause of global capitalism. While Colin Powell is cautious and others are reckless and want to make up for their failure to defeat Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War 10 years ago, the global agenda is the same.

Israel knows it has a short shelf-life before it is overwhelmed by demographics. It is a state that was born in terrorism that terrorized Palestinians into the exile of refugee camps, where they have now subsisted in squalid refugee camps, and is now very much afraid of Pakistan’s nuclear capability.

Israel has now handed the Bush family the opportunity it has been waiting for to consolidate America’s imperial grip on the Gulf and acquire control of the Caspian basin by extending its military presence in Central Asia. Bush conveniently overlooks — or is not told — the fact that Islamic fundamentalists got their big boost in the modern age as CIA assets in the covert campaign I was also involved with to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Bush senior was vice president during that entire campaign. And no sooner did he become president on Jan. 20, 1989, than he summoned an inter-agency intelligence meeting and issued an order, among several others, to clip the wings of ISI (Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence) that had been coordinating the entire operation in Afghanistan. I know this firsthand as I was DGISI at the time (director general, ISI).

Q: So how do you read U.S. strategy in Pakistan?

A: The destabilization of Pakistan is part of the U.S. plan because it is a Muslim nuclear state. The U.S. wants to isolate Pakistan from China as part of its containment policy. President Nixon’s book “The Real War” said China would be the superpower of the 21st Century. The U.S. is also creating hostility between Pakistan and Afghanistan, two Muslim states to reverse the perception that the Islamic world now has its own nuclear weapons. Bush 43 doesn’t realize he is being manipulated by people who understand geopolitics. He is not leading but being led. All he can do is think in terms of the wanted-dead-or-alive culture, which is how Hollywood conditions the masses to think and act.

All summer long we heard about America’s shrinking surplus and that the Pentagon would not have sufficient funds to modernize for the 21st century. And now, all of a sudden, the Pentagon can get what it wants without any Democratic Party opposition. How very convenient! Even your cherished civil liberties can now be abridged with impunity to protect the expansion of the hegemony of transnational capitalism. There is now a new excuse to crush anti-globalization protests.

Bush 43 follows Bush 41. Iraq was baited into the Kuwaiti trap when the U.S. told Saddam it was not interested in his inter-Arab squabbles. Two days later, he moved into Kuwait, which was an Iraqi province anyway before the British Empire decreed otherwise. Roosevelt baited the Pearl Harbor trap for the Japanese empire, which provided the pretext for entering World War II.

And now the Israelis have given the U.S. the pretext for further expansion into an area that will be critical in the next 25 years – the Caspian basin.

Q: Were you a fundamentalist in the days of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan when you worked closely with the CIA?

A: Not as much as I am today.

Q: What turned you against America?

A: Betrayals and broken promises and what was done to my army career.

Q: And what was that?

A: President Ishaq Khan, who succeeded Zia ul-Haq after his plane was blown out of the sky, wanted to appoint me chief of staff, the highest position in the Pakistani army. The U.S., which by then had clipped ISI’s wings, also blocked my promotion by informing the president I was unacceptable. So I was moved to a corps commander position. As ISI director, I held the whole Mujahideen movement in the palm of my hands. We were all pro-American. But then America left us in the lurch and everything went to pieces, including Afghanistan.

The U.S. pushed for a broad-based Afghan government of seven factions and then waved goodbye. Even in the best of democracies, a broad-based coalition does not work. So we quickly had seven jokers in Kabul interested in only one thing – jockeying for power. The gunplay quickly followed, which led to the creation of Taliban, the students of the original Mujahideen, who decided to put an end to it.

Q: What happened to the 1,000 shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that were supplied by president Reagan in 1986 and 87 to the Mujahideen, and that literally grounded the Soviet air force?

A: After the Soviets pulled out, the CIA allocated $60 million to try to buy them back. This just drove the black market price up for one Stinger from $100,000 to $300,000. The Taliban still have about 250 of them for the kind of situation they face today against U.S. aircraft.

Q: Is the U.S. now your enemy?

A: Is the U.S. national interest in contradiction with the Muslim world? The U.S. needs oil, as do its European allies. You have between 6 and 8 million American Muslims and their ranks are growing. About the same number in Europe. Israel aside, we are America’s natural allies. Prof. Sam Huntington in his “Clash of Civilizations” puts Confucius and Judeo-Christians in one corner, and us in the other. His prescription is wrong but is being adopted by Bush 43 who has now put 60 countries on his hit list. This is the diabolical school that wants to launch an anti-Muslim “crusade.” Muslims understood what Bush meant when he used that word.

We need a meeting, not a clash, of civilizations. We are on the brink of disaster. It is time to pull back from the brink and reassess before we blow ourselves up. The purpose of Islam is service to humanity. The time for like-minded people to have a meeting of the minds is now.

Q: But you are against democracy, so how can there be a meeting of the minds?

A: Democracy does not work. Politicians are constantly thinking of their next election, not the public good, which means, at best, constantly shading the truth to hide it from their constituents. Their pronouncements are laced with lies and the voters are lulled or gulled into believing utter nonsense. The Koran says call a spade a spade. It is the supreme law and tells right from wrong. There is no notion of “my country right or wrong” under divine law. The creator’s will predominates. All if subservient to Allah’s will and adherence to a set of basic, fundamental values.

Q: So what kind of a system are you advocating?

A: The world needs a post-modern state system. Right now, the nation-state and round the clock satellite TV lead people to imitate America’s way of life. Which is mathematically impossible. You have 4 percent of the world’s population consuming 32 percent of the world’s resources. The creator through Prophet Mohammed said equal distribution. Capitalism is the negation of the creator’s will. It leads to imperialism and unilateralism.

Q: So what does this post-modern state system look like?

A: A global village under divine order, or we will have global bloodshed until good triumphs over evil. Islam encapsulates all the principal religions and what was handed down 1,400 years ago was the normal evolutionary sequel to Judaism and Christianity. The prophet’s last sermon was a universal document of human rights for everyone that surpasses everything that came since, including America’s declaration of independence and the U.N. Charter of universal rights. If you superimpose true secular values on true Islamic values, there is no difference. So surely divine law should supersede man-made law. Islam is egalitarian, tolerant and progressive. It is the wave of the future.

Q: Marxism also believed that the nation-state would eventually wither away.

A: Socialism jumped the rails when it was co-opted by the imperialist Soviet state. Islam believes in dynamism, Christianity stands for static statism. The pope in all his pronouncements has expressed a dogmatic attachment to the status quo. Why are so many black Americans converting to Islam? Because they are looking for true equality which they cannot find under capitalism. Allah has no gender, neither male nor female. Islam has no indirect taxation in an interest-free economy. Usury was a Jewish concept.

Q: Is Iran your model?

A: There isn’t a single true Islamic state in the world today. Iran has moved forward from its 1979 revolution, but I am not sure whether it’s the right direction.

Q: And Taliban?

A: They represent Islam in its purest form so far. It’s a clean sheet. And they were also moving in the right direction when this crisis was cooked up by the U.S. Until Sept. 11, they had perfect law and order with no formal police force, only traffic cops without sidearms. Now, in less than two weeks, they have mobilized some 300,000 volunteers to fight American and British invaders if they come.

Q: And your reaction to U.S. demands on Pakistan?

A: If Pakistan gives the U.S. base rights we will have a national upheaval. And if the U.S. attacks Afghanistan, there will be a call — a fatwa — for a general jihad. All borders will then disappear and it will be a no-holds-barred Islamic uprising against Israel and American imperialism. Pakistan will be engulfed in the firestorm. So I can only hope that cooler heads will prevail in Washington.

Q: What about the other U.S. demands?

A: Overflight rights are meaningless since the U.S. violates air space daily all over the world. As for intelligence sharing with ISI, you can’t even catch your own terrorists. And what ISI gives you will be of marginal value anyway.

Q: President (Pervez) Musharraf has made strong statements supporting the U.S.

A: He was my student in the army. He is a good man, but he doesn’t understand Islam. The army will never fight the masses. If push comes to shove, Musharraf will say no to the Americans rather than turn against the people. He is not just facing a handful of angry people. By his own admission, it’s 10 percent to 15 percent of the population, or at least 10 million people willing to fight. For openers, they would close the port of Karachi. A country cannot breathe without lungs.

Q: Back to Osama’s terrorist network. Who was behind the bombing of the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya?

A: Mossad is strong in both countries. Remember the Israeli operation to free hostages in Entebbe (Uganda)? Both Kenya and Tanzania were part of the logistical tail. A so-called associate of Osama was framed at Karachi airport. The incidents took place on Aug. 8, 1999, and on the 10th a short, clean-shaven man disembarks at Karachi airport and presents the passport of a bearded man. Not your passport, he was told. He then tries to bribe the clerk with 200 rupees. A ludicrously small sum given the circumstances. The clerk says no and turns him in and he starts singing right away. Not plausible. Osama has sworn to me on the Koran it was not him and he is truthful to a fault. Pious Muslims do not kill innocent civilians who included many Muslim victims. The passport must have been switched while the man was asleep on the plane in what has all the earmarks of a Mossad operation. For 10 years, the Mujahideen fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and not a single Soviet embassy was touched anywhere in the world. So this could not have been Osama’s followers.

Q: What if bin Laden has been lying to you and is guilty. Is that inconceivable?

A: If Taliban are given irrefutable evidence of his guilt, I am in favor of a fair trial. In America, one is entitled to a jury of peers. But he has no American peers. The Taliban would not object, in the event of a prima face case, to an international Islamic court meeting in The Hague. They would turn extradite Osama to the Netherlands.

End of transcript: UPI United Press International, Sep. 26, 2001, Interview with General Gul

Gertler’s Bling Bang Torah Gang, Israel and the Ongoing Holocaust in Congo (Part 1)

Gertler’s Bling Bang Torah Gang, Israel and the Ongoing Holocaust in Congo (Part 1)

by Keith Harmon Snow / February 9th, 2008

Maurice Tempelsman is one of the top funders of the Democratic Party who has funded Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Templesman was the unofficial ambassador to the Congo (Zaire) for years, but a new Israeli-American tycoon has replaced him. In the world of bling bling and bling bang, some things change, some stay the same. The CIA, the MOSSAD, the big mining companies, the offshore accounts and weapons deals—all hidden by the Western media. The holocaust in Central Africa has claimed some six to ten million people in Congo since 1996, with 1500 people dying daily.1 But while the Africans are the victims of perpetual Holocaust, the persecutors hide behind history, complaining that they are the persecuted, or pretending they are the saviors. Who is responsible?

For Israeli-American Dan Gertler, business in blood drenched Congo is not merely business, it is a quest for the Holy Grail. Young Dan Gertler goes nowhere—does nothing—without the spiritual guidance of Brooklyn-born Rabbi Chaim Yaakov Leibovitch, a personal friend of Condoleeza Rice.2 Gertler and Leibovitch are two of the principals behind a diamond mining company, Emaxon Finance Corporation, involved in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Gertler and gang won the majority rights to the diamonds from the state mining company, Société Minière de Bakwange, MIBA, found near the government-controlled town of Mbuji-Mayi, the rough diamond capital of the world.

Emaxon Finance Corp. has apparently out-maneuvered diamond competitors, especially the big rivals Energem and De Beers. Energem is one of the many shady mining companies connected to Anthony Teixeira, a Portuguese born businessman now residing in South Africa whose daughter married Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba. The warlord’s deadly battle in Congo in March 2007 was a bid between rival agents—Jean-Pierre Bemba and Joseph Kabila—to be the black gatekeeper for the mining cartels run by dynastic families like Templesman, Oppenheimer, Mendell, Forrest, Blattner, Hertzov, Gertler and Steinmetz, and for companies like NIKANOR, whose stock prices rose early in July 2006 in expectation of a July 30th “win” for Joseph Kabila.3 Africa Confidential called President Kabila’s 2003 visit to the Bush White House a “coup” for the Israeli diamond magnates Dan Gertler and Beny Steinmetz.

Canadian-based Energem, formerly DiamondWorks, is owned by British mercenary Tony Buckingham and its director/shareholders include Mario and Tony Teixeira, J.P. Morgan, and Gertler’s partner Israeli-American Beny Steinmetz (50%).4 Through subsidiary Branch Energy, the Energem-DiamondWorks gang has perpetuated war in 11 African countries.5 In December 2007, Energem re-launched itself on the London Stock Market with the newly laundered image of a renewable energy company. Regarding diamonds, it said only it “had decided to give up exploration rights in the Central African Republic.”6 The Energem spokesman explained that Tony Teixeira “had a clean bill of health” etc., etc. Of course, Energem “quit” the C.A.R. because Jean-Pierre Bemba marched his troops into C.A.R., where they raped and pillaged widely.7 Energem is still operating in Congo, but Dan Gertler is the new, unofficial ambassador to the Congo for the George W. Bush gang.

Gertler and partners like Beny and Danny Steinmetz, Nir Livnat, Chaim Leibovitz and Yaakov Neeman run a hornet’s nest of companies involved in African hotspots, including: Dan Gertler International (DGI), Steinmetz Global Resources, International Diamond Industries, NIKANOR and Global Enterprises Corporate.

“Dan Gertler is ‘the new kid on the block,’” writes Yossi Melman in Israel’s Haaretz news. “Bold, sophisticated, brutal, he is an adventurer with a short fuse.” Haaratz confirmed that Dan Gertler owns a complex network of interconnected companies, often registered in offshore tax havens and involved in India, Russia, Belgium and the United States, and that Dan Gertler is looking to God for guidance.8

THOU SHALT NOT STEAL

“In the diamond industry,” Melman wrote, “Gertler is considered something of an odd bird. He maintains few ties with the other merchants and is not very sociable… Alongside his business affairs, most of his energy is channeled into matters of faith. He is a donor to religious institutions and from time to time makes a pilgrimage to the rabbi he most admires, Rabbi David Abuhatzeira, from Nahariya, in order to consult with him and receive his blessing. Gertler is surrounded mostly by religious people and laces his speech liberally with praise to God.”8

In 2003, Condoleeza Rice, then Assistant to President Bush for National Security Affairs, introduced Dan Gertler and Chaim Leibovitch to U.S. official Jendayi Frazer, a Harvard Kennedy School affiliate and former National Security Council agent focused on Africa. On December 6, 2006, Frazer, then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, was one of seven special Bush delegates sent to the inauguration of Congo’s newly installed President Joseph Kabila in Kinshasa.9

When Dan Gertler and Chaim Leibovitch and their friends visit the luxury Gertler villa in Lumumbashi, the capital of Katanga, Congo’s large southern province, their kosher meals arrive by private plane from Kinshasa. The special executive jet that flies their kosher meals a few hundred miles over the roadless Congo costs some $US 23,000 per trip.10

The average income for Congolese citizens each year—if they survive it—is about $95. Shootings at mining facilities and diamond mines are common, land is stolen from Congolese people, strikes are crushed by security forces that companies are partnered with, and black overseers of state terror routinely arrest and torture any vocal opposition—and sometimes disappear them—in support of white bosses. The Société Minière de Bakwange—MIBA— and the diamond fields of Mbuji-Mayi in Congo have a long history of bloodshed backed by Western powers, including Israel, from the beginning.11 Amnesty International points out that not a single state agent has ever been prosecuted for the extrajudicial executions of suspected “illegal” miners in Mbuji-Mayi.12

After a century of exploitation and slavery, we find MIBA consistently withholding payment of salaries to starving Congolese laborers and middle managers for months at a time. April and May 2007 saw strikes and protests leading to the Kabila government’s arbitrary arrest, detention and torture of trade union organizers like Leon Ngoy Bululu; police have also shot protestors.13 So-called ‘illegal’ diamond workers—disenfranchised local Congolese people forced into “criminal” activities to survive—were summarily executed on MIBA concessions in Mbuji-Mayi. MIBA security guards have also been sniping unemployed diamond miners.14

Meanwhile, Dan Gertler’s kosher meals depart Kinshasa, the capital of the big Congo, through the arrangements of Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila, high priest of the Chabad of Central Africa. Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila has been a Kinshasa Rabbi since 1991, and he was a spiritual force who survived the terrorism of the old dinosaur, Mobutu Sese Seko, the way most elites did: by working with him. Rabbi Bentolila is a member of the Chabad Lubavitch Global Emissary Network, headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, and his wife Miriam is the sister of Rabbi Mena’hem Hadad, a high priest in Brussels.15

“Kosher does not mean that a Rabbi blesses the food,” Rabbi Betolila corrected me, “but rather that the food was supervised by a Rabbinical Thora [sic] authority who sees that the ingredients were in accordance with the laws of Kashrut expressed in the Bible (Leviticus and Deuteronomy).”16

Dan Gertler often flies people into Congo, on his private jet, for sacred Jewish rituals. For the Bar Mitsvah of Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila’s son Binyamin Avrahim in June 2005, guests included eminent Rabbis, Hassidic singer Yoni Shlomo and special orchestra Yossef Brami, all arriving in “special flights” from Israel, New York and Brussels. The reception was held at the luxurious and exclusive Memling Hotel. Joseph Kabila sent a sizeable delegation but did not attend: his closest advisers provided a blessing on his behalf.17

The Gertler, Steinmetz and Templesman interests are advanced in part through the support of the Committee of the Jewish Community of Kinshasa—le Comité de la Communauté Israélite—that is tightly coordinated with the power structure in Kinshasa to exert influence and assure control of Israeli-Belgian-Anglo-American interests over the geopolitical arena.

From June 26-30, 2007, the Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa received a visit from the Israeli Ambassador Yaakov Revah, director of the Africa Department of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Revah also flew to Lumumbashi for meetings with Dan Gertler and his agents, including Moishe (Moses) Katumbi, the Governor of Katanga, and they most likely enjoyed a lovely, $23,000 kosher meal sent from the Chabad in Kinshasa.18 The Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa maintains very intimate political relations with President Joseph Kabila’s PPRD party, the People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy. On March 1, 2006, in a formal ceremony, the President of the Communaute Israelite de Kinshasa, Ashlan Piha, was awarded the Congo’s Medal of Civil Merit.

THOU SHALT NOT COVET

Before his assassination on January 16, 2001, Laurent Desire Kabila—the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—made a deal with the Gertler gang that would play out in favor of the current President Joseph Kabila and, it seems, be a central factor in relation to both Congo’s ongoing war and the bloody warlord’s battle in Kinshasa in March 2007.19

Back in 2000, former Congolese president Laurent Kabila offered a monopoly on Congolese diamonds, and 88% of the proceeds, to Gertler’s International Diamond Industries (IDI) in exchange for Israeli military assistance to his new government.20 Top Congolese military officials apparently flew to Israel in 2000 to negotiate the deal. Gertler pledged military assistance to President Laurent Kabila through top Israeli officials.21

The original Gertler-Kabila deal fell through after Laurent Kabila was assassinated for not cooperating with the Great White Fathers of industry (January 2001), but Gertler and Leibovitch and their disciples formed another company, Dan Gertler International, and advanced their Congo plan.22 By 2002 Gertler’s company was the leading exporter of Congolese gems, controlling a diamond mining franchise worth about $US 1 billion annually.23

In 2003, the mighty Congolese diamond parastatal Societe Miniere De Bakwanga (MIBA)—which has been forever controlled by the Great White Fathers in Belgium, Israel and America—signed an exclusive contract with Gertler’s startup company, Emaxon Finance International. The deal involved Israeli’s Foreign Defense Assistance and Defense Export Organization (SIBAT), and high-level Israeli defense and intelligence officials. Gertler and his buddies reportedly bribed Congolese officials and Angolan generals who, on and off, have commanded Angolan Army troops protecting Kinshasa, Congo’s capital.21,24

Security for mining operations in Congo is provided by exclusive security companies like Overseas Security Services (OSS) one of the many DRC interests of Belgian billionaire tycoon Philippe de Moerloose. A member of the Kinshasa elite, de Moerloose supplies jets and other presidential toys to DRC President Kabila. In 2006, President Joseph Kabila’s campaign helicopter was at the centre of a legal battle involving Philippe de Moerloose.25 De Moerloose’s companies operated in Mobutu’s Zaire from at least 1991, backing state terrorism and Western corporate plunder that was rendered invisible by the Western media. De Moerloose is also an adviser to European Union (EU) Commissioner—and diamantaire—Louis Michel.

Dan Gertler and Philippe de Moerloose were, reportedly, the only two white men who attended the wedding of Joseph Kabila and the two clearly share interests in “security” provided by OSS at MIBA and elsewhere in Congo. The April 2003 secret agreement signed between the Gertler/Steinmetz company Emaxon Finance and the Kabila government involved MIBA and two de Moerloose companies, OSS-Congo and Demimpex, and other firms.

Overseas Security Services (OSS) operations are apparently grounded in the experience of top expatriate security operatives formerly involved with the biggest security firm in Mobutu’s Zaire.26 According to OSS public relations materials, “these persons have a not unimportant experience in the safety of this country.”26 Providing mine security, body-guard and protection services, OSS operates in Burundi, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Dubai, South Africa, Republic of Congo (Brazzavile) and Belgium, placing them in cahoots with all sides warring and plundering eastern Congo today.27

Emaxon Finance International is a real gem, one of these octopuses of mining tangled up with interlocking companies and subsidiaries based in specious geographical offshore “tax havens” that work to shield from prosecution people who are responsible for money laundering, weapons and drugs operations, assassinations and other terrorism.

NIKANOR is registered as an Isle of Man (UK) company, an offshore tax haven that helps to conceal criminal activities and maximize profits. NIKANOR directors include Dan Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel (2001-2005) and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research under Madeleine Albright. NIKANOR partners include Mende and Moshe Gertner [sic], Israeli property tycoons with vast holdings in London who control 22 percent of NIKANOR. Another partner is Israeli-born Nir Livnat, managing director of Johannesburg-based Ascot Diamonds, a member of the Steinmetz Group of Diamond Companies, and a principal involved in numerous U.S.-based businesses from Miami to New York.28

THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS

Back in 2001, when the Gertler enterprises surfaced in dirty diamond deals, public relations was handled by Lior Chorev, the “Special Strategic and Communications Consultant” to International Diamond Industries (IDI), and Chorev continued in this role to support Dan Gertler businesses.29 Today, Lior Chorev is partnered with the brothers Yuval and Eyal Arad as director-owners of the Israeli marketing and public relations firm, ARAD Communications.30

“We do work for Mr. Gertler on some of his business issues,” said Lior Chorev.31 ARAD’s many clients include Dan Gertler companies, Los Angeles-based Coral Diamonds and an Israeli aeronautics weaponry manufacturer producing Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAVs)—robotic weapons and intelligence platforms like those being used against the people of Congo today.32 As a political strategist, Lior Chorev has worked for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.33 He has also participated in Israel-NATO defense planning conferences.34

Dan Gertler is close to Israeli politicians, especially Avigdor Lieberman, head of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, and he is very close to diamantaire Beny Steinmetz, a good friend of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Gertler’s inseperable friend, Chaim Leibovitz, is also very close to Lieberman, and was “a regular fixture” in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offices.35

Beny Steinmetz is considered to be one of the richest billionaires in Israel. The Steinmetz Group, controlled with his brother Daniel, is one of the biggest clients of the de Beers diamond syndicate. Steinmetz is also involved in an Israeli real estate group that purchased the assets of the British Haslemere real estate company for $1.46 billion. Steinmetz’s real estate partners include the billionaire Israeli investors David and Simon Reuben, and the Saudi Arabian Olayan Group, an investment company that is deeply connected with Bechtel Corporation.36 The Steinmetz web site map of operations hides their involvement in war-torn Congo.37

Seems Dan Gertler’s land grabs and exclusion in Congo have a lot in common with the current crimes against humanity being committed by Israel through its illegal partition in the Middle East. On January 3, 2008, the Jerusalem Post reported that Lior Chorev was an integral part of past Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s advisers, and he was recently quoted to say that even though Sharon did not get to finalize Israel’s final borders (he suffered a debilitating stroke in 2006), the route of the security fence—which he decided—would ultimately serve as the basis for the border and as Sharon’s lasting legacy.38

“He felt he needed to set the border because he didn’t trust the younger generations,” Chorev was quoted to say. “He knew the fence route by heart and the reason for every stretch of land being on one side or the other.”38

In 2003, the U.N. Panel of Experts on war in Congo revealed that Emaxon Finance International is controlled by Israeli diamond traders Chaim Leibovitz and Dan Gertler.39 Emaxon lists as its address an office in Montreal, Canada, but Emaxon’s majority shareholder is listed as FTS Worldwide, a nebulous global corporation whose business address is that of a firm of lawyers, Mossack Fonseca & Company, in Panama City. FTS Worldwide is registered with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission to lawyer Andre Zolty of Geneva Switzerland. A copy of the MIBA-Emaxon contract was signed on 13 April 2003 by Israeli-Americans Yaakov Neeman and Chaim Leibovitz.40

Yaakov Neeman is a founding partner of Herzog, Fox and Neeman, Tel Aviv, one of Israel’s top law firms, and he has held Israeli government cabinet and ministerial positions.41 Neeman is on the Advisory Board of Markstone Capital Group, a very influential group of investment bankers, with Eli Hurvitz. On the board of Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries with Eli Hurvitz is Northrup-Grumman director Philip Frost.42 Both Philip Frost and Maurice Templesman are top-level councilors for the American Stock Exchange. Eli Hurvitz sat on the International Advisory Counsel of Harvard University’s Belfer Center, 2002-2005, during the period when the Belfer Center and their intelligence operative Robert Rotberg formalized the “Kimberley Process” to officially whitewash blood diamonds.43 Yakov Neeman is also a governor of the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency for Israel.

One of the main objectives of the Kimberley Process, and the Harvard Belfer Center’s role, was to protect the South African Oppenheimer and De Beers diamond cartels and their leading buyers and agents like Maurice Templesman and Beny Steinmetz.44 Added to those diamond industry firms whitewashed by the Kimberley Process are all the Zionist diamond dealers and cartels that have risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of the Holocaust.

The Israeli-American enterprises of the Gertler/Steinmetz gang have proliferated and today are major shareholders or owners of diamond concessions in Congo’s Kasai province and copperbelt concessions in Katanga. The copperbelt is the big money in Congo. Copper prices recently hit an all time high due to monopoly control by corporations and new applications in transportation, aerospace and weaponry. Cobalt is used in dye and paint processes for manufacturing. More importantly, it is elemental to superalloys used for tank armor, spacecraft, turbines, ship hulls, ship hulls, blast furnaces, refineries, petroleum drilling rigs, nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Like coltan, or columbium-tantalite, cobalt is also used in cell phone batteries. The Katanga copperbelt is also rich in germanium, a rare metal used in optical fibers, infrared lenses and telecommunication satellites.45

The entire military-industrial-prisons complex revolves around minerals like cobalt, niobium and heterogenite (cobalt oxide), yet the truth about what happens to African people in lands taken over by these mining companies is hidden by the corporate media. More and more land is being stolen, more and more atrocities committed, with less and less transparency, and less and less accountability, and fewer and fewer voices for the voiceless. And, as usual, there are always a lot of empty promises.

THOUGH SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS

Over the past fifty years, elite Israeli nationals have perpetrated conflict and injustice in Africa, fueled by and for minerals. Operatives associated with the Israeli military or intelligence services—the Mossad—maintain strategic criminal syndicates in competition and in partnership with other syndicates involving men like Philippe De Moerloose, Louis Michel, Viscount Etienne Davignon, John Bredenkamp and Tony Buckingham.

Israeli trained shock troops became Mobutu’s bodyguards, with Mossad advisers. According to a report by the American Jewish Committee: after 1980 “Mossad agents, military emissaries, and a small group of private businessmen… replaced diplomats as Israel’s main interlocutors with African leaders and political (mainly opposition) groups.” The report cites rising involvement of private defense and security interests, especially in Angola, DRC and Central Africa Republic, since 1992.46

Israeli operatives and “businessmen” appear everywhere there is egregious suffering and dispossession. Dan Gertler’s forays into the bloody world of diamonds involve Israeli arms dealers Yair Klein, who is reportedly wanted by the U.S. for training Medellin drug-cartel militias in Colombia, and Dov Katz.47 Klein was convicted by Israel (1991) for his involvement with groups that targeted and assassinated Colombian politicians, journalists, and police. Jailed in Sierra Leone in 1999, Klein was a field representative for Gertler in war-torn Sierra Leone and Liberia. Gertler also mingles with the Russian Military Brotherhood, a group of “retired Russian generals whom Gertler describes as good friends.”48,49

Retired Israeli Defense Forces Colonel Yair Klein reportedly organized arms for diamonds networks in Sierra Leone and Liberia after President Charles Taylor was deposed. In 1999, Klein was arrested in Sierra Leone on charges of smuggling arms to the rebel Revolutionary United Front.50 The U.N. also documented collaborations between Sierra Leone’ rebels and Lazare Kaplan agent Damian Gagnon; Lazare Kaplan International is one of the organized crime syndicates of Jewish American Maurice Templesman.51

The Steinmetz Group of companies are also involved in the bloody diamond fields of Sierra Leone, along with Energem (formerly DiamondWorks), the company described above that is connected to the white mercenaries depicted in Hollywood’s Blood Diamond propaganda film.52 In December 2007, local people in Sierra Leone struggling to gain the smallest livelihood from their own resources were shot by police during peaceful protests against the Steinmetz-controlled Koidu Holdings site. It’s the same old local people’s story happening everywhere. These were people from communities driven off their own land by mining companies that promised the world, cajoled the trusting people, and gave nothing after. The Steinmetz gang called in the local paramilitary, a curfew was imposed and people were shot; the police, as usual, falsely claimed that protesters were armed.53

Like most mining mafias in Africa, the Israeli octopus—organized crime syndicates, offshore subsidiaries, interlocking directorships and affiliated mercenaries—has gripped the very heart of Congo like an octopus grips and stuns its prey. Mining regulates the pulse of Congo, and foreign mining companies with their black sell-out agents are sucking the blood out of the people and the wealth out of the land.

THOU SHALT NOT KILL

Beyond the intriguing Jewish rivalry for diamonds in the heart of darkness, this tale takes a chilling turn with the involvement of certain German firms and New York City lawyers. NIKANOR, another Gertler/Steinmetz company of dubious origins operating in DRC, has a subcontract with the notorious ThyssenKrupp conglomerate, a company comprised of two former Nazi weapons manufacturers linked to the New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, to Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., Lehman Brothers, Chase Manhattan Bank, J.P. Morgan, DuPont and IBM, in the great Nazi-American money plot.54

These companies were all behind the Jewish Holocaust. The infamous German Krupp firm is the industrial corporation that collaborated with former CIA director Allen Dulles and former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Clients of the Dulles brothers’ law firm Sullivan and Cromwell included Adolph Hitler.54 Ted Terry, one of the senior counselors of the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell today, is also a director of a philanthropy called the Harold K. Hochschild (HKH) Foundation, named for the mining magnate behind AMAX, a company operating in the copperbelt in Zambia, but whose parent company, Phelps Dodge, operates in Katanga, Congo. Harold K. Hochschild was close to the CIA, and he appears to have backed the Katanga succession in the 1960’s just as Dan Gertler in recent years backed the reorganization of power in Congo by force. Sullivan and Cromwell was also the law firm for AMAX. 55,56

Brown Brothers Harriman & Company (BBH) was the primary Wall Street connection for German companies and the U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen, an early financial backer of the Nazi party. BBH bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, steel, fuel, coal, and U.S. treasury bonds to Germany. These were used to build Hitler’s war machine, and the ties proliferated even after the Nazi concentration camps began churning out skeletons. The horrors of the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Buckenwald became public knowledge long before they became public outrage. It is the same story for Congo.

A PRAYER FOR THE DEAD

There are no records or statistics of the numbers of people brutalized or killed in the diamond or cobalt mining areas, like Kolwezi, Mbuji Mayi, Tshikapa, Banalia, or Kananga in DRC, or Ndola in Zambia, and many of the victims of security abuses will never be known.

When Gertler and Steinmetz and their buddies came to Congo it was soon clear that they had to challenge Zimbabwean tycoons John Bredenkamp and Billy Rautenbach—two cronies of dictator Robert Mugabe involved in pillaging Congo and Zimbabwe for decades. The United Nations Panel of Experts on DRC named both men for plundering copper and cobalt from Katanga, and both deal globally in weapons. Bredenkamp is one of the fifty richest men in England and he reportedly owns a mansion several doors down from Margaret Thatcher’s residence in London.

On November 7, 2007 it was reported that Dan Gertler was instrumental in putting together a deal in which Katanga Mining Ltd. would buy rival NIKANOR for $2.1 billion and merge their adjacent mine projects in Congo to form the world’s largest cobalt company. Also announced was a joint venture between the Central African Mining & Exploration Company (CAMEC) and another Gertler-controlled firm called Prairie International Limited.

The CAMEC/Prairie joint venture will exploit DRC’s Luita copper processing facility, develop the Mukondo Mountain cobalt mine—called the world’s richest cobalt mine—and work on “other” exploration properties. Prairie is majority owned by the family of Dan Gertler. CAMEC is connected to Zimbabwean/South African/British tycoon Billy Rautenbach.57 The DRC government effectively banned controversial Zimbabwean businessman Billy Rautenbach from the country by declaring him persona non grata in July 2007, but this doesn’t seem to stop him from getting what he wants. Rautenbach is also wanted in South Africa on 300 charges of fraud, corruption and theft.

Rautenbach is a former motor car rally driver who controls a business empire in Southern and Central Africa through a British Virgin Islands company called Ridgepoint Overseas Development Limited. In 1998, the short-lived President of Congo, Laurent Kabila, named Rautenbach the managing director of La Générale des Carrières et des Mines (Gécamines), one of Africa’s biggest cobalt mines, the Katanga properties of the Union Miniere de Haut Katanga formerly developed by the Belgian colonial government. Rautenbach today is one of the Africa’s largest exporters of heterogenite (cobalt ore) from the DRC through his Congo Cobalt Company (CoCoCo), but he also has shares in two other lucrative DRC mining firms—Boss and Mukondo—which reportedly earn over US$100 million a month.58

While there has been a lot of Western media fanfare over the Kabila governments’ supposed “independent” review of mining contracts, little substantive change can be expected.59 Structural factors exploit the Congolese people and lands and benefit white businessmen, arms dealers, bankers, and their embraceable black agents. Big business benefits from perception management articles well-placed in media to give the impression that the international system is just, that there are watchdogs, checks and balances.

However, while the DRC and the World Bank present a propaganda front about their ostensible attention to mining reform and the new mining code, NIKANOR—Mining Journal reports—“is in the advantageous position of having entered into a post mining-code contract, ‘which makes us [NIKANOR] relatively comfortable’”60 In other words, the mining review is a sham, it may force some changes, but it will be cosmetic at best.

Dan Gertler and the Steinmetz Group’s partner Jewish-American Nir Livnat is also a director of Anglovaal Mining with Rick and Brian Menell and Basil Hersov of the South African Menell and Hersov dynasties.61 Hersov has been named as a beneficiary of fraud and racketeering involving British BAE Systems weapons deals with shady offshore companies.62

The octopus of South African connections is a story in itself, with links to top officials from Britain to Canada, like Canadian Senator J. Trevor Eyton, and offshore mining companies involved in all the big money (diamonds, gold, petroleum, cobalt) and big corporations with interlocking directorships: Coca Cola, Nestlé, General Motors, and the Bush-connected Barrick Gold Corporation. Barrick, of course, is partnered up with the Oppenheimer/De Beers firm Anglo-American Corporation at six sites in Africa, including Congo.

Rick Menell is a director of Bateman Engineering—owned by Benny Steinmetz—the junior partner of the NIKANOR projects in Katanga. Britain’s Earl of Balfour is a director of both Bateman and NIKANOR. Menell is also the director of Teal Exploration and Mining, whose directors include Joaquim Chissano, former President of Mozambique; Murray Hitzman, a Clinton administration official with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1994-1996); Hannes Meyer, who worked with Anglo-Gold Ashanti in Congo, 1999-2006, when militias in Ituri were funded to get the gold out. Teal Exploration also has ties to Anvil Mining and Anglo-American Corporation.63

Brian Menell, Nir Livnat’s associate on the board of Anglovaal, is on the board of Energem (formerly DiamondWorks) with Tony and Mario Teixeira. The Livnat connection ties Teixeira into networks that have supported both Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba in Congo’s bloody wars. Energem is also involved in the trans-Uganda-Kenya pipeline, along with Nexant, a subsidiary of the deep intelligence and defense insider Bechtel Corporation.64

Brian Menell is also on the board of First Africa Oil, which operates in seven African countries, and First Africa Oil director John Bentley is a director of Osprey Oil and Gas, whose directors include Carol Bell, a director of the Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank. Bentley is also on the board of Adastra Minerals—formerly America Mineral Fields (AMF, AMFI, AMX), a company based in 1995 in Hope, Arkansas—and set up by Robert Friedland and Max and Jean-Raymond Boulle, notable “friends of Bill” Clinton. Since 1995, American Mineral Fields has been involved in Brazil, Russia, Norway, Zambia, Angola and the DRC. A criminal backer of the war in DRC, Jean-Raymond Boulle, who holds 36.4 % of the company stock, was the former General Director of De Beers in Zaire, part of the Templesman alliance of terrorism under the Mobutu regime.65,66

The Gertler/Steinmetz interests apparently curry huge favors with Congo’s number two most powerful man, Augustine Katumba Mwanke, one of Joseph Kabila’s closest allies and financiers, former Governor of Katanga (1998-2001) and director of Australia’s Anvil Mining. The UN Panel of Experts (2002) cited Mwanke for illegal arms deals and plunder of Congo: Mwanke negotiated arms purchases through Belgian banks and the DRC mining company MIBA.67 Reportedly, Mwanke personally clears $US 1,000,000 a day through his interests in Katanga mining deals.68

Anvil Mining has been involved in massacres in DRC.69 Anvil directors include former U.S. Ambassador Kenneth L. Brown, who served at U.S. embassies in Brussels, Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville and South Africa. Brown was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Africa (1987-1989) under George Schultz and George H.W. Bush and Director of Central African Affairs (1980-1981). The former top internal intelligence and security chief of the United Nations Observer’s Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) has been worked for Anvil mining in Katanga since 2006.70

THOU SHALT NOT RAPE AND PLUNDER

Gertler/Steinmetz interests have also been jostling for copper and cobalt concessions with Kinross-Forrest Group. Gertler has bought up or invested heavily in companies just to close them down. George Forrest also made the UN hit list of Congo’s looters and Forrest and his three sons helped bankroll Joseph Kabila’s 2006 election “victory”.71 George Forrest’s daughter is reportedly married to the son of Louis Michel. Malta and George Forrest are controlling directors in Katanga Mining Limited.

Born as Entreprise Générale Malta Forrest, the Belgian Forrest interests have been pillars of exploitation in Congo since at least 1922, when they launched mining operations in Katanga. Forrest’s Katanga Mining directors include: three Canadians; Congo’s Jean-Claude Masangu Mulongo, a former Governor of DRC and high official at the IMF and World Bank; and the current Governor of the Central Bank of DRC. The Forrest dynasty has munitions factories in Belgium and Kenya, and has partnered with OM-Group, in Ohio [USA], dealing in Congo’s cobalt and coltan. Forrest International also operates in Europe, Burundi—involving him on both sides of Congo’s bloody war—and the Middle East.72 Forrest interests in DRC include aviation, foods, plantations, construction, logging, copper and cobalt mining. Forrest companies are enmeshed in the coltan plunder in eastern Congo.

Katanga is the world’s richest mining metropolis, part of the vast copper belt that stretches across northern Zambia and southern Congo—and the home to unprecedented human misery due to state orchestrated repression and communities overrun with toxic mining, tuberculosis, cancers, immune disorders, racial discrimination and slavery. The Zambian copperbelt concessions over the border involve many of the same companies and interests mentioned above, and others.73

Workers and communities in and around these mines suffer all the standard treatable maladies (typhoid, malaria, tetanus, polio, malnutrition) as well. However, such stories are off the agenda for the North American, European, Japanese, Australian and Israeli media corporations providing the mainstay of English language indoctrination meant to instill racial superiority and a vast ignorance and obliviousness that leaves westerns populations shaking their heads and wringing their hands and clicking their tongues, while all the while wondering “what is to be done?” It does not cross people’s minds that their own hands are dirty, that their own consciousness has been falsified, as all the raw materials from Congo enrich the lives of people in the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel.

The immediate capital investment required for just one Gertler project in Katanga—the Komoto Oliveira Virgule (KOV) project—is reportedly $US 1.8 billion dollars, income to kick start billions of dollars of unused equipment mothballed in the middle Mobutu era. There are rumors that Bechtel is involved, but the KOV project involves ThyssenKrupp AG as a minor player.74

The Krupp firm is one of several German firms involved in the plunder in eastern Congo, exploitation which involves the DeutscheGesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit—GTZ—a “German technological cooperation agency” whose Supervisory Board has representatives of four Federal [German] Ministries.75 Krupp industries use coltan and cobalt for superalloys.76 Dr.-Ing. Ekkehard D. Schultz, a ThyssenKrupp director, is also a director of Bayer AG, the Germany firm whose subsidiary H.C. Starck was named for its involvement in the ongoing illegal plunder of coltan and cassiterite (tin) in eastern Congo. NIKANOR director Jay Pomrenze is also a consultant for the Deutsche Bank.77 Certain German and U.S. firms benefit from the military occupation of Rwandan-backed warlord Laurent Nkunda in North Kivu, DRC, where Nkunda controls the Lueshe niobium mine “owned” by Gesellschaft fuer Elektrometallurgie GmbH, a subsidiary of New York-based Mettalurg Group.78,79

HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER

Dan Gertler’s grandfather, Moshe Schnitzer (d. November 2007), was known in Israel as “Mr. Diamond;” in youth he joined the pre-state underground organization Etzel (Irgoun), an Israeli military cell self-defined as an “untra-nationationalist Jewish militia,” but one that committed acts of terrorism in service to the Israeli cause.8 Moshe Schnitzer assumed a major role in the Africa-Israeli diamond trade in the 1950’s in a partnership business called Schnitzer-Greenstein. Schnitzer later founded the Israel Diamond Exchange in Tel Aviv in 1960, which today brings Israel $14 billion annually in blood business, and is the country’s second-largest industry, but Israel’s top export. King Leopold III of Belgium decorated Schnitzer in recognition of his activities favoring the close relationship of Belgium, Israel and the DeBeers diamond cartels, and Schnitzer was also President of the Harry Oppenheimer Diamond Museum in Israel.80

The diamond jewelry trade in the United States is more than $30 billion annually, and 99%—everything that is not synthetic or artificial diamonds—involves blood diamonds and the above organized crime syndicates. Israel buys more than 50% of the world’s rough diamonds, and the U.S. buys two-thirds of these. The diamond factories are located in Nethanya, Petach Tikvah, Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Jerusalem, and other cities around the country, but most of the offices were in Tel Aviv in the financial district on Ahad Ha’am Street.81 Dan Gertler’s father, Asher Gertler, and his uncle, Shmuel Schnitzer, manage the original family business, and Shmuel is Vice-Chairman of the Belgian-based World Diamond Council—the entity that spends more money promoting the false image of “conflict-free” diamonds than it does helping any of the people dispossessed or brutalized by the diamond industry.48

On August 16, 2007, Rabbi Bentolila in Kinshasa received a communication asking: “What does the Torah say about men exploiting other men for vast profits while other men are starving and dying all around them? Is there some hierarchy to the Torah that suggests, for example, that black people or Africans are lesser beings, and therefore not to be a concern where profound profits are being made?”

There was no reply from Rabbi Bentolila, he was apparently busy readying for another Bar Mitsvah in Belgium. Unfortunately for Dan Gertler and his spiritual advisers, the Torah says that a Jew can keep a slave, but a Jew kept as a slave must be redeemed, and that—an empty, foolish justification for exploiting innocent people—is how religion falsifies spirituality.

In January 2008 the International Rescue Committee, who is also discussed in this article, released its second survey of mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo, estimating that 5,400,000 people have died, or some 1500 people every day. Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: an Ongoing Crisis, International Rescue Committee, January 2008. However, IRC statistics are highly biased and politicized. See: keith harmon snow, “Over Five Million Dead in Congo?” Dissident Voice, February 4, 2008. [↩]
Personal interview, Democratic Republic of Congo, August 2006. [↩]
keith harmon snow, “Warlord’s Deadly Battle, Toward Freedom, 2007. [↩]
Officers: Antonio Teixeira, President & CEO; Robert G. Rainey, CFO; Brett Thompson, COO, Mining; Dimitri (Jimmy) Kanakakis, Vice President, Corporate & Legal Affairs; Bernard Poznanski, Corporate Secretary; Board Members: Brian Menell, Richard Dorfman, Bruce Holmes, Robert Rainey, Antonio Teixeira. [↩]
See: “Africa/Diamonds: Rough diamonds,” Africa Confidential, 5 March 2004, Vol. 45, No. 5; and “Equatorial Guinea: All Theft is Property,” Africa Confidential, 17 Nov. 2006, Vol. 47, No. 23: p. 12. [↩]
Tim Hoare, the head of the advisers that launched it, Canaccord Adams, sits alongside rock star and champion of Africa Bob Geldof on the board of the television-production company Ten Alps. See: Ben Laurance, “Energy firm link to blood diamonds,” The Sunday Times, December 30, 2007. [↩]
See: keith harmon snow, “A People’s History of Congo’s Jean-Pierre Bemba,” Toward Freedom, September 18, 2007. [↩]
Yossi Melman and Asaf Carmel, “Diamond in the rough,” Haaretz, March 24, 2005. [↩] [↩] [↩]
See: keith harmon snow, “Congo’s President Joseph Kabila: Dynasty or Travesty?” Toward Freedom, November 13, 2007. [↩]
Private interview, Kinshasa, August 2006. [↩]
See: “Terror in the Diamond Fields: Excessive Force and Impunity in the DRC,” Amnesty International Canada; Democratic Republic of Congo: Government should investigate human rights violations in the Mbuji Mayi diamond fields, Amnesty International, October 22, 2002. [↩]
Making a Killing: The Diamond Trade in Government Controlled DRC, Amnesty International, 2002, AFR 62/017/2002 22/10/2002. [↩]
See: “ICEM protests Congo’s Transport, Diamond Injustices,” International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Worker’s Union, May 7, 2007. [↩]
“Diamond miners killed in DR Congo,” BBC News, 7 August 2006. [↩]
See: Jewish Africa and Chabad. [↩]
Private communication, Rabbi Chlomo Bentolila, August 16, 2007. [↩]
“Lag Baomer in Kinshasa,” June 2005. [↩]
“Visite de l’Ambassadeur Revah a’ Kinshasa,” Kadima 010, June-September 2007. [↩]
See: keith harmon snow, “Behind the Scenes: Warlord’s Deadly Battle in Congo,” Toward Freedom, August 9, 2007. [↩]
Nicole Gaouette, “Inside Israel’s diamond trade: a family affair,” Christian Science Monitor, 21 February 2002. [↩]
Yitzhak Danon, “Top Israelis accused of illegal diamond deals: Israel: Lawsuit claims corruption in Congo diamonds for arms deal,” Globes (Israel), 18 February 2004. See also: “Column One: What Lieberman Wants,” Jerusalem Post, October 20, 2006. [↩] [↩]
Christian Dietrich, “Blood Diamonds: Effective African-Based Monopolies,” African Security Review, Vol. 10, No 3., 2001. [↩]
Yitzhak Danon, “Top Israelis accused of illegal diamond deals: Israel: Lawsuit claims corruption in Congo diamonds for arms deal,” Globes (Israel), 18 February 2004. [↩]
See: keith harmon snow, “Behind the Scenes: Warlord’s Deadly Battle in Congo,” Toward Freedom, August 9, 2007. The Angolan military protected Kinshasa during the so-called “rebellion” involving Rwanda and Uganda. The Angolans do not like the Rwandans or Ugandans due to their military and commercial relations with Angolan rebels, the União Nacionalpara a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), and because Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers invaded Angola after their failed bid to control the Congo’s strategic Inga Dam power station and Matadi port between 1998 and 2001. Angola sent troops to Congo in July and August 2006, and there were black Angolan troops amongst the European Union mercenary forces—EUFOR—sent to quell any possible rebellions during the “historic national elections.” Angola also sent troops to Congo to back Kabila during the warlord’s deadly battle of March 2007. [↩]
“Presidential Chopper,” Africa Confidential, Vol. 47 Number 23, November 17, 2006. [↩]
See: Overseas Security Services Congo sprl web site. [↩] [↩]
OSS-Congo owner Philippe de Moerloose communicated with this author after his name appeared in a prior story mentioning OSS-Congo and offered to meet in Europe and provide the author with the “correct” information about his companies operations in Congo. Repeated communications with De Moerloose seeking clarifications and information for this story were not answered. [↩]
See e.g., SEC info on Lenorth Holdings and SDG Marketing. [↩]
Lior Chorev, The First [DRC] Diamond Polishing Plant to Move into Full Production, Press Release, DGI Group of Companies, January 11, 2005. [↩]
ARAD Communications web site. [↩]
Private communication, Lior Chorev, January 19, 2008. [↩]
See: keith harmon snow, “Over Five Million Dead in Congo?” Dissident Voice, February 4, 2008. [↩]
Private email communication, Lior Chorev, January 19, 2008. See also: Gil Hoffman, “Olmert, Netanyahu Rivalry Gets Personal,” Israel.jpost.com, March 26, 2006; “Sharon allies and foes joust over new party as March 28 elections are set,” Associated Press, November 22, 2005. [↩]
NATO Transformation, the Mediterranean Dialog, and NATO-Israel Relations, October 23, 2006. [↩]
Yossi Melman and Asaf Carmel, “Diamond in the Rough,” Haaretz, March 24, 2005. [↩]
The Olayan Group web site. [↩]
The Steinmetz Group. [↩]
Gil Hoffman, “Politics; Unconscious Legacy,” Jerusalem Post, features.jpost.com, January 3, 2008. [↩] [↩]
United Nations Panel of Experts Confidential Report. [↩]
Under the contract Emaxon granted Miba loans totaling $5-million in 2003, and a further $10-million subsequently. In exchange, Emaxon gained rights to 88% of Miba’s production at a discount, formally, of 5%. [↩]
Herzog, Fox and Neeman web site. [↩]
Tevapharm. [↩]
See: keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception About those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June and July, 2007. [↩]
On Neeman and Hurvitz, see Markstone Capital Group; on Robert Rotberg, Maurice Templesman and the Harvard Belfer Center, see: keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception About those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June and July, 2007. [↩]
Criminal rackets known to the United Nations security were or some time illegally shipping uranium and cobalt out of Katanga by road to Zimbabwe and Tanzania (private interview, U.N. Official, 2006). [↩]
Israel and Africa: Assessing the Past, Envisioning the Future, The Africa Institute American Jewish Committee and The Harold Hartog School Tel Aviv University, May 2006. [↩]
Ron Ben-Yishai and Molly Camprier-Kritz, “The Murder Request Went to the Wrong Address,” Yediot Aharonot weekend supplement on 19 September 1999. [↩]
Nicole Gaouette, “Inside Israel’s diamond trade: a family affair,” Christian Science Monitor, 21 February 2002. [↩] [↩]
For a discussion of the veracity of these facts and more on the “Russian Military Brotherhood” see: Central Africa Minerals and Arms Research Bulletin, Edition 2, International Peace Information Service, June 18, 2001. [↩]
Jimmy Johnson, “Israelis and Hezbollah Haven’t Always Been Enemies,” Appearing in Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions USA, 6 September 2006. [↩]
Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1306 (2000), Paragraph 19, in Relation to Sierra Leone, December 2000. [↩]
Energem web site; and also: keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception About those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June and July, 2007. [↩]
Mineweb. [↩]
Charles Higham, Trading With The Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949, Delacorte Press, 1983. [↩] [↩]
Susan Mazur, “Deeper Into the Dillon-Euphronios Nexus with David N. Gibbs,” SCOOP, April 26, 2006. [↩]
David Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crises, University of Chicago Press, 1991. [↩]
Eric Onstad, “UPDATE 2-CAMEC shares soar after agrees Congo joint venture,” Reuters, Nov. 7, 2007. [↩]
Brenna Chigonga, “Zimbabwe: Meet Country’s Richest People,” The Herald, July 14, 2007. [↩]
See: Maurice Carney, “Congo’s Contract Review,” Pambazuka News, January 17, 2008. [↩]
Martin Creamer, “Funded NIKANOR presses on with $1,8bn copper mine, refinery,” Mining Weekly, September 21, 2007. [↩]
Julie Walker, “Hersovs and Menells are in no hurry to yield control of Anglovaal,” Sunday Times. [↩]
Evelyn Groenink, “Arms deal: Who got R1bn in pay-offs?” Mail & Guardian, January 12, 2007. [↩]
Teal Exploration & Mining web site. [↩]
Press Release: Kenya-Uganda Oil Products Pipeline, Kenya-Uganda Joint Co-coordinating Commission for Extension of Oil Pipeline, August 17, 2005; see also: Energem web site. [↩]
François Misser and Olivier Vallée, “Des matières premières toujours convoitées. Les nouveaux acteurs du secteur minier Africain,” Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1998, p.24-25; also Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellon Press, 1999. [↩]
Diamond Fields International Management. [↩]
‘Inculpations à la Belgolaise’, Le Libre Belgique, 4 June 2004. [↩]
Private interview, Kinshasa, DRC, April 2007. [↩]
Norm Dixon, “Congo Massacre: Australian mining company’s managers indicted,” Green Left Review, November 4, 2006. [↩]
His name is known, but he threatened to track down and break the author’s legs if he is revealed. [↩]
See: Barry Sergeant, “NIKANOR’s Quandry: Meet Dan the Man, King of the Congo,” MoneyWeb, 4 April 2007; “Congo Kinshasa: After the Election” Africa Confidential, Vol. 47, No. 23, 17 Nov. 2006; and United Nations Security Council Report to the Secretary General, S/2003/1027, 23 October 2003. [↩]
George Forrest International. [↩]
Personal investigation, Ndola, Zambia copperbelt mines, 2000. [↩]
Nikanor. [↩]
These are: the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ); Federal Foreign Office; Federal Ministry of Finance; and Federal Ministry of Economics and Labor. Since 1998 the Supervisory Board Chairman has been State Secretary Erich Stather from the BMZ. [↩]
Karen Hayes and Richard Burge, Coltan Mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo: How tantalum-using industries can commit to the reconstruction of the DRC, Fauna & Flora Int’l, 2003. [↩]
NIKANOR web site. [↩]
Metallurg Group. [↩]
See keith harmon snow, “Three Cheers for Eve Ensler? Propaganda, White Collar Crime, and Sexual Violence in Eastern Congo,” Z Magazine on-line (Z-Net), October 24, 2007. [↩]
“Moshe Schnitzer: Un Legende s’en est Allee,” Kadima 010, June-September 2007. [↩]
“The Israel Diamond Exchange — Kiryat Moshe Schnitzer”, Diamond Key, 2002. [↩]
Keith Harmon Snow is an independent human rights investigator and war correspondent who worked with Survivors Rights International (2005-2006), Genocide Watch (2005-2006) and the United Nations (2006) to document and expose genocide and crimes against humanity in Sudan and Ethiopia. He has worked in 17 countries in Africa, and he recently worked in Afghanistan. Read other articles by Keith, or visit Keith's website.