Israel's Ball Boys

“You in America are Israel’s ball boy,” a French intelligence source laughs at me one day when we start talking tennis. It’s an embarrassing thought and I want to punch my source in the face for saying it, simply because he’s French and I’m American and I still have to pretend at pride in the whored republic.

But he’s right, of course, and it’s in the US Congress where you’ll find the hardest working of Israel’s ball boys. Case in point: Congress’ recent vote to take loud ownership of the horror of the war crimes in Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. How easily Congress forgets that among the motivating factors behind Al Qaeda’s murder of 3,000 Americans is the continual blind US support of Israel, the heaving of billions of US taxpayer dollars into the maw of one of the most advanced and richest countries on earth. Even establishment drone Philip Zelikow admitted, in one of those riveting elephant-in-the-room moments (in testimony before Congress, as it happens), that Israeli violence and oppression in the Occupied Territories inspired Bin Laden and his chief 9/11 planner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In this regard, then, the US Congress with its Gaza cheerleading now invites new terrorist attacks on US citizens.

That the Congress has become a danger to the welfare of Americans, and, in effect, an enemy of the American people – running the ball for forces and players inimical to life and liberty – is understood by any citizen who reviews the public record. It is Congress, bending over for the Bush administration, that gave us the desecrations of the Constitution in the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act; that immunized the big telecoms to spy on our phone calls and e-mails; that failed to investigate acts of torture and the nation’s violations of the Geneva Convention; failed to demand a non-fiction version of events behind 9/11; failed to produce intelligence reform (while continuing to pour funding into the black hole of the intel budget); failed to impeach or even seriously investigate George Bush and his many criminal underlings – the list goes on. It is Congress that controls the money – every penny of it, covert and overt – that makes this waste and wantonness and insult possible. More