New York Sun: U.N. Official Urged Commission To Study Neocon Role in 9/11

[reprehensor]

U.N. Official Urged Commission To Study Neocon Role in 9/11

By ELI LAKE, STAFF REPORTER OF THE SUN | April 9, 2008

WASHINGTON — A new U.N. Human Rights Council official assigned to monitor Israel is calling for an official commission to study the role neoconservatives may have played in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

On March 26, Richard Falk, Milbank professor of international law emeritus at Princeton University, was named by unanimous vote to a newly created position to report on human rights in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. While Mr. Falk’s specialty is human rights and international law, since the attacks in 2001, he has devoted some of his time to challenging what he calls the “9-11 official version.”

On March 24 in an interview with a radio host and former University of Wisconsin instructor, Kevin Barrett, Mr. Falk said, “It is possibly true that especially the neoconservatives thought there was a situation in the country and in the world where something had to happen to wake up the American people. Whether they are innocent about the contention that they made that something happen or not, I don’t think we can answer definitively at this point. All we can say is there is a lot of grounds for suspicion, there should be an official investigation of the sort the 9/11 commission did not engage in and that the failure to do these things is cheating the American people and in some sense the people of the world of a greater confidence in what really happened than they presently possess.”

Continued...
http://www.nysun.com/news/foreign/un-official-urged-commission-study-neocon-role-911

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Indeed. In this article, ostensibly about Falk's 9/11 stance, reporter Eli Lake reveals his true mission; to get Falk kicked off his spot watchdogging human rights violations in the Israel/Palestine conflict.

It starts off with a misleading headline; Falk has urged no Commission to study anything, he said, "there should be an official investigation of the sort the 9/11 commission did not engage in", and he didn't do it in his capacity as a UN official. He made these comments on a back-water internet radio show with an audience of "hundreds".

Lake goes on to reference Falk's metaphor comparing the treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7335875.stm

This is a hit piece. And a pretty transparent one, at that.

[Junkdrawer]

1. Search for "Richard Falk" in Google News and you will see the Flying Monkeys...

are very much out to destroy Falk.

[Bolo Boffin]

2. A well-deserved hitpiece. What's transparent is the UN's motive is assigning this freak

to monitoring Israel. It's about as appropriate as Kissinger running the 9/11 Commission.

http://guidetotheperplexed.blogspot.com/2008/03/31-march-2008-richard-falk-anti-israel.html

The guy that secured a publisher for the monotonous books of David Ray Griffin is now using his post (as are other 9/11 Truth personalities) to gain some legitimacy for their idiotic claims about 9/11.

Why don't you guys try using facts for a change?

[Name removed]

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[Name removed]

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[HamdenRice]

3. Richard Falk is one of the great international lawyers of our age

I remember that he was counsel in one of the most important and difficult international law cases of our century -- the Southwest Africa cases before the International Court of Justice.

He has been appointed special investigator of United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for Israel/Palestine, which in its reconstituted form is considered independent and fair by most objective observers.

In that capacity, Falk succeeds John Dugard, one of South Africa's greatest lawyers, often considered the (white) Thurgood Marshall of South Africa, for his pioneering effort to craft the human rights litigation strategy that ended most apartheid practices about six years before the apartheid government itself was replaced.

Falk is also on the editorial board of The Nation, and is a prolific scholar of international law, disarmament and human rights.

It is good to see someone so brilliant, prominent and well respected airing his doubts about neo-con complicity.

[JackRiddler]

4. Richard Falk's scholarly career spans decades and has been highly influential

in the study of international relations for his contributions to the interdependency paradigm. We were reading him in our (centrist) political science college classes in the 1980s. Whatever you may think of his work, he has made a career as an academic theoretician, and not as a professional liar.

Henry Kissinger is a fugitive war criminal and a primary planner of the genocide that killed about two million civilians in Indochina and poisoned the land for generations to come, among hundreds of other severe atrocity charges. He remains armed with positions of great influence in the nuclear-armed U.S. rogue state and is to be considered an active danger to billions of people on the planet.

[Twist_U_Up]

5. John Bolton: "This is exactly why we voted against the new human rights council."

This belongs in Latest Breaking News. Have you tried posting it there ?

This guy has his work cut out for him but its nice to see decent people caught in the matrix joining the age old struggle against imperialism and evil.

I wonder if he knows how truly deep rooted the systems of governments worldwide are corrupted... I fear that there will be no defeating this evil within our current systems and the overwhelming hopelessness of the cause will force people like me that question the very fabric of reality to accept powerlessness...

But we carry on in hopes for our children.

[reprehensor]

8. Yes, I did.

It was apparently 12:01 hours old. NO SOUP FOR YOU!

[reprehensor]

7. This story is cruising on Digg

http://digg.com/world_news/U_N_Official_Calls_for_Study_Of_Neocons_Role_in_9_11

[JackRiddler]

9. kick

[jberryhill]

10. Some publications by Richard Falk

Khomeini's Promise
Richard A. Falk
Foreign Policy, No. 34 (Spring, 1979), pp. 28-34

Richard Falk, "Trusting Khomeini," The New York Times, Feb. 16, 1979.

"The depiction of Khomeini as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false,"

[mhatrw]

12. Oh, my God! He didn't hate Khomeini enough!

He is with the Axis of EVIL!

[jberryhill]

13. It's not a question of "hating" anything or anyone

...or of using screaming exclamation points. Believing that exchanging one dictator for another represented an improvement in conditions for the people of Iran suggests something of a decided blind spot.

Having written the foreword to Griffin's first book, I can't figure out why it's "news" that he agrees with Griffin.

But given some of his other views, it's also no shock he was a welcome guest on Kevin Barrett's program. He fits right in with that cast of characters.

[mhatrw]

14. And what is that "cast of characters"? People suspicious about

the Global War on Terror (tm) and its vilification of Muslims and the next commie/nazi enemy worthy of our trillion dollar defense budget?

[jberryhill]

16. I am deeply suspicious of all of those things

However, Barrett seems to have a run of folks who are suspicious of particular historical facts.

It's Falk, on the other hand, who has compared the Israelis to the nazis. You have your rhetorical excess confused.

[CrawlingChaos]

15. Exactly

If you don't hate enough, peace might start breaking out all over the place -- and we can't have that, now can we?

[jberryhill]

17. Falk hates a-plenty....

http://www.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2007/Falk_PalestineGenocide.html

Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.


The Israelis and Palestinians have both engaged in numerous unspeakable things toward each other.

Falk only seems to notice one side of that.

Wonder why.

Falk's rhetoric is something short of "peaceful", my friend.

[HamdenRice]

18. This smear by hardliners and neo cons is stupid and ahistorical

Anyone with a smidgen of historical sense would realize how stupid it is for various websites (from which this trivia was dredged) to harp on Falk's 1979 op-ed.

Notice the date: Spring 1979. At that time, very few people, including progressives in the West, knew what Khomeini's views on government were. In fact, given the events that put Khomeini in power (including a massive popular referendum vote), not a heck of a lot of people in Iran understood Khomeini's theory of Islamic Republic.

What they did know, however, was that the Shah was one of the most vicious, brutal dictators on the world stage of the day, and that millions of Iranians were clamouring for the Shah to be deposed and for Khomeini to return to Iran all through 1978 and early 1979.

If you are old enough to remember, in 1979 the Shah was so hated world wide, that when he was forced to flee Iran, he became a pariah, going from country to country being refused entry, until he was allowed into the United States. (Leave it to jberryhill and the OCTabots, those protectors of the perpetrators of the atrocities of 9/11, defenders of all that flows from the Bush regime's cooptation of 9/11, to take an implicitly pro-Shah, and hence pro Savak, and hence pro mass murder, mass torture, stand, all in order to slime a 9/11 skeptic.)

Although the Falk op-ed isn't easily available on line, it's clear that its main point was simple: the inevitable has happened, let's give the Khomeini government a chance to experiment with "Islamic governance."

Almost no Iranians wanted the Shah, and in the biggest demonstrations in middle east history, 6 million welcomed Khomeini. They may have been wrong in retrospect, but it's obvious that Falk's position in the spring of 1979 was reasonable, if ultimately wrong.

The irony meter has cracked through the right side of the dial, because this entire stupifyingly idiotic attempt to discredit Falk on the basis of an incorrect prediction he made in 1979 about the nature of the Khomeini regime, comes from the same cohort on the ideological spectrum that would forgive all manner of politicians for thinking Saddam had WMDs in 2002 (egads! a mistake in geopolitical prediction! ban that person from commentary for life!), that would argue that although Bush may be incompetent, anyone who thinks he lied, or is evil, or that the war supporters were craven or cynical, must be "crazy conspiracy theorists."

Just google Falk's name and the title of the op-ed and you'll see what kind of company OCTabots are keeping these days.