A New Year Greeting from the IHR
Mark Weber

From all of us at the Institute for Historical Review, best wishes of this joyous season! May the new year bring happiness and fulfillment to you and your loved ones.

We've received so many cordial Christmas and New Year's messages in recent weeks that it's not been possible to respond to each and every one of them. So please excuse this somewhat impersonal way of expressing our greetings and appreciation.

It is only thanks to the generous and loyal support of friends like you — from every part of America and from around the world — that we can look back on a productive year.

Iraq: A War For Israel?

The United States Invasion of Iraq in March-April 2003, and the occupation of the country since then, has cost more than a thousand American lives and many tens of billions of dollars, and has brought death to many thousands of Iraqis.

Why did President Bush decide to go to war? In whose interests was it launched?

In the months leading up to the attack, President Bush and other high-ranking US officials repeatedly warned that the threat posed to the US and world by the Baghdad regime was so grave and imminent that the United States had to act quickly to bomb, invade and occupy Iraq.

China Expands. Europe Rises. And the United States . . .
Fred Kaplan

It's a risky business to predict the decline of the American empire. Ask Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian, who issued such a forecast in his 1987 book, "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers," only to witness an almost immediate American resurgence.

Yet the signposts, at the end of this year, are ominous. As an economic power, the United States no longer sets the rules, much less rule the game. As a military power, it vastly outguns the rest of the world, but has a harder time translating armed might into influence.

Mrs. Foley's Diary Solves the Mystery of Hess
A brief entry in the diary of the wife of a British spy has led to the discovery of the true story behind one of the greatest mysteries of the Second World War — the bizarre 1941 flight to Britain of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess.

No single incident in Britain's wartime history has given birth to so many conspiracy theories, all of them centred on an alleged plot by the intelligence services to lure Hess to Britain.
Best Selling Historian David Irving Comments...

The Legacy of Rudolf Hess
Mark Weber

On the evening of May 10, 1941, the Deputy Führer of the Third Reich set out on a secret mission that was to be his last and most important. Under cover of darkness, Rudolf Hess took off in an unarmed Messerschmidt 110 fighter-bomber from an Augsburg airfield and headed across the North Sea toward Britain. His plan was to negotiate peace between Germany and Britain.

The Life and Death of My Father, Rudolf Hess
Wolf Rüdiger Hess

When my father flew to Scotland on May 10, 1941, I was three-and-a-half years old. As a result, I have only very few personal memories of him in freedom. One of them is a memory of him pulling me out of the garden pond. On another occasion, when I was screaming because a bat had somehow gotten into the house. I can still recall his comforting voice as he carried it to the window and released it into the night.

In the years that followed, I learned who my father was, and about his role in history, only bit by bit. Slowly, I came to understand the martyrdom he ured as a prisoner in the Allied Military Prison in Berlin-Spandau for 40 long years — half a life-time.

Unbridled Trade in Arms
Shimon Naor (Hershkowitz) was a colonel in the manpower section of the Navy. In the 1990s, after he received the authorization of the Defense Ministry, he became an international arms dealer. In 1999 Naor was arrested in Romania for arms smuggling to the UNITA rebels (National Union for Total Independence of Angola), for using forged documents, and contravening a United Nations arms embargo.

The deputy defense minister at the time, Ephraim Sneh, tried to assist Naor, but the Romanians refused to release him. In the end, Naor managed to gain his release on bail and fled to Israel. In Romania he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment in absentia, and is considered a fugitive from justice. Still, he continues to trade in arms.

Brussels Leaves Out Question on Peace
A question about which countries threaten world peace was omitted from a European Commission opinion poll, in part to avoid a repeat of last year's confrontation between Brussels and Israeli and world Jewish leaders.

A year ago the Commission sparked political furore after releasing a poll showing most Europeans considered Israel a threat to world peace. The ensuing tensions with Jewish leaders also cast a shadow on the European Union's ability to play a more active role in trying to reach a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians.

In last year's poll, 59 per cent of respondents cited Israel when asked whether named countries presented a threat to world peace. North Korea, Iran and the US came joint second, ahead of Iraq and Afghanistan.

But last Friday when the Commission published a summary of its latest survey on public opinion in the EU — with the full results due to be released in February — the question was missing.

West has Bloodied Hands
Who was the first high government official to authorize use of mustard gas against rebellious Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq?

If your answer was Saddam Hussein's cousin, the notorious "Chemical Ali" — aka Ali Hassan al-Majid — you're wrong.

The correct answer: Sainted Winston Churchill. As colonial secretary and secretary for war and air, he authorized the RAF in the 1920s to routinely use mustard gas against rebellious Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq and against Pashtun tribes on British India's northwest frontier.

Iraq's U.S.- installed regime has just announced al-Majid, one of Saddam's most brutal henchmen, will stand trial next week for war crimes.

Has President Bush lost his grip on reality? In his December 1 speech in Halifax, Nova Scotia, President Bush again declared his intention to pre-emptively attack “enemies who plot in secret and set out to murder the innocent and the unsuspecting.” Freedom from terrorism, Bush declared, will come only through pre-emptive war against enemies of democracy.

How does Bush know who and where these secret enemies are? How many more times will his guesses be wrong like he was about Iraq?

What world does Bush live in? The US cannot control Iraq, much less battle the rest of the Muslim world and beyond. While Bush threatened the world with US aggression, headlines revealed the futility of preemptively invading countries: “Pentagon to Boost Iraq Force by 12,000,” “US Death Toll in Iraq at Highest Monthly Level,” “Wounded Disabled Soldiers Kept on Active Duty.”

Spy stories are always like that, but this one packs an intricate tale of a trusted ally betraying America, a White House intent on using the misstep to leverage its influence, and an American intelligence community that feels it has been made to wear horns.

AIPAC Spies Weave a Tangled Web

...To neocons, this war was never about WMD or any alleged Iraqi ties to 9/11. That was merely to mobilize the masses for war. Their real reason was empire and making the Middle East safe for Israel.

President Bush had best recognize what William Kristol is telling him [by calling for Donald Rumsfeld's ouster]. The neocon agenda means escalation: enlarging the Army, more U.S. troops in Iraq, widening the war to Syria and Iran, and indefinite occupation of the Middle East, as we forcibly alter the mindset of the Islamic world to embrace democracy and Israel.

A week-long combined air and ground maneuver has just concluded in five of the southern and western provinces of Iran, mesmerizing foreign observers, who have described as "spectacular" the massive display of high-tech, mobile operations, including rapid-deployment forces relying on squadrons of helicopters, air lifts, missiles, as well as hundreds of tanks and tens of thousands of well-coordinated personnel using live munition. Simultaneously, some 25,000 volunteers have so far signed up at newly established draft centers for "suicide attacks" against any potential intruders in what is commonly termed "asymmetrical warfare".

On Martin Luther King's Plagiarism
Fifteen years ago, with Stanford's Clayborne Carson, I was responsible for directing research on Martin Luther King's early life for the Martin Luther King Papers Project. The arrangement was a sort of three legged stool, because most of the original documents on which we were to work were located in Special Collections at Boston University's Mugar Library, the senior editor was at Stanford, and my offices were at the King Center and at Emory University in Atlanta. When I joined the Project in 1986, indeed within his own lifetime (1929-1968), it was already known that there were issues about originality in Dr. King's sermons and speeches.

What became increasingly clear as we worked through the papers from King's early career is that there were serious problems of plagiarism in his academic work. Tim Burke's colleague at Swarthmore, Allison Dorsey, was one of many graduate students at Stanford and Emory who did the fine tooth combing of the secondary sources that King wove into his own compositions. What became clear was that they were a patchwork of his own language and the language of scholars, often without clear attribution. If anything, the pattern seemed to be that the more familiar King was with a subject, the less likely he was to plagiarize. On matters that were fairly alien to his experience, he borrowed heavily from others and often with only the slightest wink of attribution.

In late November, when Congress refused to appropriate money to fund so-called "bunker busters" and "mini-nukes," this action represented not only a serious blow to the Bush administration's plan to build new nuclear weapons, but to the administration's overall nuclear arms control and disarmament policy.

That policy has been to prevent the development of nuclear weapons by nations the Bush administration considers "evil." The military invasion of Iraq, like the gathering confrontation with Iran and North Korea, reflects, at least in part, the administration's obsession with preventing nations potentially hostile to the United States from acquiring a nuclear capability. This focus upon blocking nuclear weapons development in other countries has some legal justification for, in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, non-nuclear nations agreed not to develop nuclear weapons.

But the NPT also calls for nuclear nations to rid themselves of the nuclear weapons they possess. Indeed, in the meetings that fashioned the treaty, the non-nuclear weapons states demanded a commitment to nuclear disarmament by the nuclear powers. And they received it -- not only in the form of the treaty's provisions, but in the formal pledges made by the nuclear powers at the periodic treaty review conferences that have been held since the NPT went into effect.

The Neocons Haven't Won Yet
Patrick J. Buchanan

While there is no shortage of neocon war plans for a Pax Americana, President Bush is bumping up against reality — a U.S. Army tied down and bleeding in Iraq, the rising costs of war, soaring deficits, a sinking dollar, and an absence of allies willing to fight beside us or even help. He is facing the Vietnam dilemma.

Does he plunge deeper into Iraq in hope of victory, risking all, or cut his losses and revert to a more affordable, less ambitious foreign policy that secures the nation, but no longer seeks to convert the world to the American idea of democracy?

For 15 years, some of us have warned that if we fail to adopt a traditionalist foreign policy, the world will, to our humiliation, impose such a policy upon us.

Teddy’s Corollary After a Century: Perpetual Intervention for Perpetual Peace

In the case of Panama, of course, Roosevelt acknowledged that he “took” the area while the Congress debated. One aspect of Roosevelt’s approach to foreign policy, which links him to George W. Bush, is that he attempted to rationalize such policies underneath a pile of moralistic balderdash.

Next Target: Iran?
Ivan Eland

Will the newly energized President Bush interpret his narrow election win as public approval for his spaghetti Western-style shoot-’em-up foreign policy? Many neo-conservatives outside the Bush administration have made noise about going after Iran. Could the swaggering sheriff be convinced by these pundits to take on the black-hatted mullahs of Iran? Let’s hope not; attacking Iran would be a bigger folly than invading Iraq.

U.S. Invasion Of Iran Draws Closer
Paul Craig Roberts

Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith is the neocon Likudnik who was tasked with cooking up the false "intelligence" that President Bush used to deceive the US public into supporting an illegal invasion of Iraq. With the US military now trapped in the Iraqi quagmire, Feith wants the US to attack Iran.

President Bush falsely claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq was linked to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and that Iraq would give weapons of mass destruction to anti-American terrorists. Senior members of the Bush administration terrified the US public with prospects of mushroom clouds going up over US cities.

Having been proved 100% wrong about Iraq, the Bush administration now claims that the nonexistent WMD are in Iran, or maybe Syria. During recent weeks the Bush administration worked overtime to terrify the US public into believing that Iran is building nuclear weapons and missiles with which to destroy American cities.

Mounting Scandal at AIPAC Prompts Talk of Lobbying Powerhouse's Demise
With senior officials at America's top pro-Israel organization facing the specter of federal indictments, staffers at other groups are beginning to waver in their support and are warning that the mounting legal scandal could damage the political credibility of the entire Jewish community.

The doubts were prompted by last week's FBI raid of the offices of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and by news that four of its top officials had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury. In particular, the doubters said, the decision of a federal prosecutor to turn to a grand jury on a matter involving AIPAC was ominous and severely undermined the organization's claim that it was the victim of a few rogue investigators.

Prosecution of Revisionist Publisher Fails

On Friday, the judicial court of Kortrijk (Belgium) decided not to extradite Siegfried Verbeke to Germany. The court brought up that Verbeke is Belgian and has already been convicted for these same acts in Antwerp.

The office of the public prosecutor didn’t appeal to this decision and thus Siegfried Verbeke was able to walk freely again after some two weeks of imprisonment. This proves some rather important facts...

Siegfried Verbeke of Free Historical Research Arrested by Joint German-Belgian Thought-Police.

History Lessons: How Textbooks From Around the World Portray U.S. History
For thousands of years political thinkers have recognized that myths are essential instruments of political power. Plato’s vision of a well-ordered republic famously employed a Myth of Metals to justify inequality. Similarly, Nietzsche argued that myths were necessary in the creation of national identity and, indeed, for human life to propel itself forward.

Two recent books, Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward’s History Lessons and Ray Raphael’s Founding Myths make great strides toward challenging conventional myths and broadening our understanding of American history. Raphael works within the interstices of American mythology to reveal the genealogy of fictional stories central to the American “founding.” Lindaman and Ward demythologize U.S. history by compiling textbooks from nations with whom the U.S. has engaged to examine events such as the Monroe Doctrine from a Caribbean perspective or the way the Vietnam War is taught in Vietnam. From their respective vantage points, both reveal the highly myopic and provincial perspective that often shapes the American understanding of American history.

U.S. Government Moves to Muzzle Dissident Voices
In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval.

The restriction, condemned by critics as a violation of the First Amendment, means that books and other works banned by some totalitarian regimes cannot be published freely in the United States, a country that prides itself as the international beacon of free expression.

Pictures of the Year 2004
An Israeli border policeman fires a teargas canister during a protest by Palestinians against the construction of the controversial Israeli security barrier in the West Bank village of Az-Zawiya June 20, 2004. Reuters/Goran Tomasevic

More pictures here.

Greek Farmer Finds 2,000-Year-Old Monument
A farmer tending a cotton field in central Greece has uncovered a stone monument marking the spot where the Roman army stopped a major westward offensive more than 2,000 years ago, a Greek archaeological official said Wednesday.

"This is the location of one of the biggest battles in Greek history ...where a huge army from the east was assembled against Rome," the official said.

Dear Mr. O'Reilly:
We were deeply offended, as were many of your listeners who have contacted us, at your remark to a Jewish caller on the December 3 Radio Factor that, "if you are really offended" about attempts to convert Jews to Christianity, then "you gotta go to Israel then."

O'Reilly to Jewish Caller: "If you are really offended, you gotta go to Israel"

Jewish Congresswoman Demands that Bill O’Reilly Apologize

Last Rocketeers Set Sights on Mars
Four men and one woman, all around 90 years old, gather in a conference room and pour themselves coffee — rocket fuel for the last of the original rocketeers.

Just outside, in Rocket Park, looms some of their handiwork: Gemini and Mercury capsules, a lunar lander and a gigantic rusting Saturn V from the Apollo program.

These five people were among 118 German rocket scientists bundled up and brought to the USA after World War II. Working for the Nazis, the rocket scientists had made Hitler's deadly V-2s. Reconstituted in Huntsville, the group vaulted U.S. rocket technology ahead by a decade and developed the rockets that allowed their adopted country to win the space race.

To that end, ADL and a coalition of national organizations has recommended a series of changes to the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Advisory Policy Board that would enable better and more accurate reporting of hate crimes by local law enforcement authorities pursuant to the 1990 Hate Crime Statistics Act.

Ex-CIA Officer Alleges Agency Retaliated After He Didn't Falsify Report
A senior CIA operative who handled sensitive informants in Iraq asserts that CIA managers asked him to falsify his reporting on weapons of mass destruction and retaliated against him after he refused.

The operative, who remains under cover, claims in a lawsuit made public yesterday that a co-worker warned him in 2001 "that CIA management planned to 'get him' for his role in reporting intelligence contrary to official CIA dogma."

Articles about the Pearl Harbor attack from the IHR's Journal of Historical Review:

Pearl Harbor: 50 Years of Controversy
Charles Lutton
Pearl Harbor's Place in History
James J. Martin
The Mystery of Pearl Harbor
Percy L. Greaves, Jr.
An Interview with Admiral Kimmel
Dean Clarence Manion
Pearl Harbor Attack No Surprise
Roger A. Stolley
Was Pearl Harbor Unavoidable?
Percy L. Greaves, Jr.
Pearl Harbor: Case Closed?
Theodore J. O'Keefe
Exonerating Pearl Harbor's Scapegoats
John Weir

The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor
John T. Flynn, October 1945

On Wednesday, August 29, 1945, President Truman gave out the reports of the Army and Navy Boards directed by Congress to investigate the responsibility for the great disaster of December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor. These Boards had filed their reports nine months ago. Under the pretext that issuance of them would disclose important military secrets President Roosevelt suppressed them. But President Truman has not by any means given out the whole story. Portions of it are still suppressed. He says they will never be given out. And that is the simple truth. They will never be given out by this government until Congress compels the government to release all the information which it is hiding from the people and which it hopes to hide from history.

Israeli Banks Profit from Holocaust
Investigations by the Israeli parliament have dug up disturbing evidence that Israel has been profiting for decades from vast sums invested in local banks by European Jews who died in the Nazi death camps. And even now the banks are delaying returning the money to their heirs.

But unlike a similar scandal that hit European banks in the mid-90s, almost no pressure is being brought to bear on the Israeli banks by the Israeli government or by Jewish reparation organisations representing Holocaust families, who were the main critics of the European banks.

James Knox Polk: Forgotten as One of Our 'Greatest' Presidents
This past year's election campaign and the death of President Ronald Reagan prompted journalists and scholars to once again rate our Presidents. Aside from George Washington, "greatness" tends to depend on a particular commentator's ideological bent. Next to our first President, Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy are most often cited as "great" — perhaps reflecting the bias of those participating in the surveys.

If you believe presidential "greatness" should be based upon personal character, the attainment of a positive agenda for the country, and the ability to lead during wartime, then our 11th President, James Knox Polk, surely deserves to be ranked among the very greatest. In a recent addition to the American Presidents Series, James K. Polk: 1845-1849, John Seigenthaler, former editorial director of USA Today and founder of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, has written a concise and highly readable biography of this shrewd and decisive commander in chief.

2 C.I.A. Reports Offer Warnings on Iraq's Path
A classified cable sent by the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in Baghdad has warned that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and may not rebound any time soon, according to government officials.

The cable, sent late last month as the officer ended a yearlong tour, presented a bleak assessment on matters of politics, economics and security, the officials said. They said its basic conclusions had been echoed in briefings presented by a senior C.I.A. official who recently visited Iraq.

Over all, the officials described the station chief's cable in particular as an unvarnished assessment of the difficulties ahead in Iraq. They said it warned that the security situation was likely to get worse, including more violence and sectarian clashes, unless there were marked improvements soon on the part of the Iraqi government, in terms of its ability to assert authority and to build the economy.

Hitler's Rise Captures Spirit of Era
In the old newsreel, he looks like the kind of man you might have invited home to dinner — smiling, relaxed, well-groomed, good suit.

But it is the little blobby moustache, the weirdly shaped searchlit crosses his followers carried and, above all, the knowledge of what he did afterwards that makes the image compulsive.

Almost 60 years after his suicide in a Berlin bunker, Adolf Hitler is still the prime figure most people associate with the 20th century.

The Nazi leader today emerges far ahead of Winston Churchill, John F Kennedy, Mother Teresa or the discoverer of penicillin, Alexander Fleming, in the 20 most popular film clips viewed on the Pathe News online film archive. Eighty seconds of footage catches Hitler in his first moment of national triumph as newly appointed German chancellor in 1933. The headline says: A Wondering World Awaits ... What?

You Asked for my Evidence, Mr Ambassador. Here It Is.
In Iraq, the US Does Eliminate Those Who Dare to Count the Dead

US authorities have denied that hundreds of civilians were killed during last April's siege, and have lashed out at the sources of these reports. For instance, an unnamed "senior American officer", speaking to the New York Times last month, labeled Falluja general hospital "a center of propaganda." But the strongest words were reserved for Arab TV networks. When asked about al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya's reports that hundreds of civilians had been killed in Falluja, Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defense, replied that "what al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable ..." Last month, US troops once again laid siege to Falluja - but this time the attack included a new tactic: eliminating the doctors, journalists and clerics who focused public attention on civilian casualties last time around.

He also said that tensions over Iran's nuclear activities were linked to the Israeli arsenal.

"Iran doesn't need, I think, atomic bombs. Iran doesn't want to fight any state with atomic bombs," he said. "But because the world [is] ignoring Israel, that pushes Iran and other states to try to be equal with Israel."

Jews Demand 'Medals of Honor'

Among the millions of Americans who fought in the Civil War, Indian Wars, Spanish American War, Philippine American War, Boxer Rebellion, Mexican War, WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam and Mogadishu, just 3,440 received the Medal of Honor. 13 have been identified as Jews or half-Jews. (Note - According to the Army Chief of Chaplains Office, there are currently 1,488 active duty personel who identify as Jewish; that's out of a US population of around 5.5 million Jews.)

Israel Finds BBC Too Truthful for Comfort
A recent ad for a BBC documentary asked, "Which country in the Middle East has not declared the nuclear and biological weapons in its possession?"

"The BBC didn't raise anything that has not already been on Israeli television," an Israeli spokesman told the Guardian. "It's the tone not the facts we're worried about. "We're used to journalistic garbage as a cover for anti-Israeli propaganda. But it was not only this program. We feel this was the culmination of a decision by the BBC to show Israel as some kind of criminal country, a rogue police state. There's an insensitivity to the state of Israel and the Jewish people, and their history."

At Critical Time for Israel Lobby, Probe Takes a More Serious Turn
A federal prosecutor’s decision to bring an investigation involving the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to a grand jury is, at the least, an unwanted distraction at a critical time for the top Israel lobby — and some worry that it could hamper the organization’s effectiveness.

FBI agents searched AIPAC’s headquarters here Wednesday, seizing files associated with two senior staffers who were interviewed in August amid allegations that a classified Pentagon document was leaked and passed on to Israel.

The agents also served subpoenas on four other senior staffers to appear before a grand jury later this month. The four were Howard Kohr, the group’s executive director; Richard Fishman, the managing director; Renee Rothstein, the communications director; and Raphael Danziger, the research director.

FBI Raids AIPAC Offices, Four Officials Subpoenaed
Four members of the AIPAC pro-Israel lobbying group have been served with subpoenas to appear before a grand jury as the FBI investigates whether Israel had a high-level spy in the Pentagon, AIPAC said on Wednesday.

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents conducted searches Wednesday in AIPAC offices, as part of the investigation into suspicions that senior AIPAC officials received classified information from Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, and transferred that information to Israel.

200 Pledge Willingness to Carry out Suicide Attacks Against Americans, Israelis

The ceremony was organized by the Headquarters for Commemorating Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement, a shadowy group that has since June been seeking volunteers for attacks in Iraq and Israel.

A spokesman, Ali Mohammadi, described Thursday's group as the "first suicide commando unit," though another official has claimed members already have carried out attacks in Israel.

The 'December Dilemma'
December Holiday Guidelines for Public Schools

Every December, public school students, parents, teachers and administrators face the difficult task of acknowledging the various religious and secular holiday traditions celebrated during that time of year. Teachers, administrators and parents should try to promote greater understanding and tolerance among students of different traditions by taking care to adhere to the requirements of the First Amendment.

[Christmas just wouldn't be the same without Abe and the ADL telling us how to celebrate it. Oh, and let us never forget who made number 37 on this enviable list!]

Nearly Half of Britons Never Heard of Auschwitz
Nearly half of Britons have never heard of the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz in southern Poland, according to a BBC television poll that was conducted just ahead of the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation.

Forty-five percent of the 4,000 people questioned for the survey by BBC Two said they had never heard of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, the television channel said Thursday.

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) is due to broadcast several documentaries on the "Final Solution", the Nazi's plan to obliterate European Jewry, including on Auschwitz, for the 60th anniversary of the concentration camp's liberation on January 27, 2005.