The Loss of My Friend: by Mark Dankof

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Original Investigative Journalism from the
Columnist Guild News Bureau



Hansel Dankof
Born (circa): February 14, 1992/place unknown
Death: April 26, 2007 in San Antonio, Texas

Hansel Dankof was a German Long-Haired Dachshund discovered abandoned in the summer of 1993 on Fredericksburg Road in San Antonio, in somewhat emaciated condition. His benefactor, a young man whose name is unknown, named him "Ansel," due to the former's love of Ansel Adams photography. "Ansel " was then turned over to a San Antonio-based paralegal named Lisa Jackson, who owned Dachshunds and was involved informally in the Dachshund rescue movement in south Texas.

Lisa Jackson turned "Ansel " over to Mark Dankof, a Lutheran pastor then residing in the Texas Hill Country between Kerrville and Medina on 18 acres of rented rural property off Texas Highway 16. The pastor adopted "Ansel" for several good reasons, including the fact that his fiance's English Springer Spaniel--Miniature Schnauzer mix, Zeta, needed a good companion in the convalescence that followed a Gran Mal seizure. There was another facet to the story: "Ansel " was the spitting image of the pastor's first Long Haired Dachshund, Dutchess, obtained in the summer of 1960 in Sacramento, California.

"Ansel " became forever known thereafter as "Hansel." The initial H was added to "Ansel" to Germanicize the name. Because of this fact, a nickname ensued that would also stick. The nickname was, "Mister H." It fit Hansel's quiet dignity and unique combination of princely demeanor and extroverted love for people and animals alike.

Hansel followed his family from Kerrville to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the rural beauty of the Hill Country of Texas was replaced by the urban atmosphere of the Northeastern United States for 8 years. He managed to accompany them on trips to New York, New Haven, Baltimore, Delaware, and Washington, D. C. As was the case in Texas, he was beloved by all, and made dozens of friends over the years, human, canine, and feline alike.

Hansel's companion, Zeta, preceded his passage, on January 16th, 2006 in suburban Philadelphia. Hansel returned to his native Texas with his family, departing Philadelphia on March 20th, 2006, the first day of spring that year. He enjoyed the return drive of 1800 miles through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and the I-35 corridor between Dallas and San Antonio. God would grant him 1 more year of life before passing away at the Emergency Pet Center of San Antonio (410 and Broadway), on April 26, 2007, the apparent result of the metastasizing of a tumor which began to affect the left eye and the left nostril over time. In that last year of life, Hansel quietly joined his master every morning in the radio studio for the latter's 3 hour broadcast for the Republic Broadcasting Network.

He will be rejoined by family members on the Rainbow Bridge, along with Zeta, at a time of God's sovereign choosing. Thanks are in order for the loving care Hansel received from his doctors over many years. These fine people include Dr. William Hoegemeyer of Kerrville, Texas; Dr. Jane Kirchhoffer of the Rau Animal Clinic in Glenside, Pennsylvania; Dr. Michelle Bammel of the Austin Highway Animal Clinic in San Antonio, Texas; and Dr. Young and Staff at the Emergency Pet Clinic in San Antonio.

The photo of Hansel was taken in these last 6 months of his life in front of his home in Northeast San Antonio, by Mark Dankof.

The USS Liberty Case: The Israel Who Attacked Us Then is Destroying Us Now by Mark Dankof

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Original Investigative Journalism from the
Columnist Guild News Bureau

Every once in a while, one runs across a story that stimulates tears, anger, and contemplative reflection at the same time.

I don't think I've ever encountered anything quite like the story of the USS Liberty and what happened to it on June 8th, 1967. Eric Margolis's tome on the subject in 2001, entitled, "The USS Liberty: America's Most Shameful Secret," and James Ennis's June 1993 piece entitled, "The Assault on the USS Liberty Still Covered Up After 26 Years" for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, will provide the uninitiated with the synopsis of what happened.

In short, Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty, knowing full well who and what it was. 34 dead Americans and 171 wounded was the result.

Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara deliberately ordered the American naval fighters scrambled to help the Liberty, launched from the USS America and the USS Saratoga, to stand down. Captain Ward Boston, the legal counsel for the U. S. Navy Board of Inquiry that "investigated" the Liberty tragedy, now admits to Mark Glenn of the American Free Press that the former was ordered to cover up the voluminous data which proved the Israeli assault was not an "accident," as claimed by the Zionist State. Compounding the outrage, Jewish U. S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Jay Cristol, wrote a book with the assistance of the Israeli government and intelligence community, entitled "The Liberty Incident," the transparently fraudulent character of which is fully exposed by William Hughes in the latter's online article, "USS Liberty Smearing Backfires."

Cristol is neither a professional historian, combat veteran, or intelligence analyst. His data and simian analysis in The Liberty Incident contradicts the sworn testimony of Liberty survivors, Dean Rusk, Admiral Moorer, and 3 different CIA reports from the period--one of which fingers Israeli General Moshe Dayan as the one who ordered the brutal assault on the American naval vessel--which even included the strafing of lifeboats and their occupants, a criminal act in complete violation of the Geneva Convention.

But what is new or startling about this? After all, Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine, chronicled by Ilan Pappe's definitive work on the subject, has involved acts of terror and murder on an ongoing basis that include the laundry list of such deeds emanating from luminaries like Menachim Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and Ariel Sharon. The bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, the assassination of Count Bernadotte, the pogram at Deir Yassin, and the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp slaughters in Lebanon in 1982, are but the tip of the iceberg. But in an America where Corporate Media, Capitol Hill, the Bush Administration, and the State-run Educational Establishment are Zionist-Occupied Territory, such bloody blights on history are not the work of terrorists, but "freedom-fighters." Just ask the Zionist mouthpieces for the ersatz American Right at Murdoch's Fox News.

But now comes America's War on Terror in Iraq--and maybe Iran. After running a tab currently at $500 billion, with 655,000 Iraqi dead and the United States death toll continuing to mount steadily each day, signs indicate that the American Natives Are Restless. The talk--chronicled by Sy Hersh in The New Yorker--that the Bush Administration is contemplating the utilization of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran, is giving pause to even the marginally sane. Present extension of Army tours in Iraq and cannibalization of National Guard units for the same, may be followed by a return to military conscription if a preemptive attack on Ahmadinejad's regime ignites a conflagration throughout the Islamic world, followed by Iranian asymmetrical military attacks against American assets at home and abroad. Is an apocalypse unveiling before the eyes of a public still mesmerized by the World Series, the Super Bowl, and Anna Nicole Smith?

The restless natives need to become the Angry American Natives, steamed by a government run by an evil foreign lobby, that has sent its children to die in a war dictated not by the Constitution of the United States or the legitimate national security agenda of the Nation--but by the denizens of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem who epitomize the radical evil of the clinically demonic ideology known as Zionism. When the Angry American Natives figure out that Israel has been pushing the buttons of this war, along with driving the American foreign and domestic policy agenda since 1948, they will be driven to act in the interest of national survival and the recovery of the Old Republic. The clock is ticking. Time is running out.

And what should be the rallying cry of patriots euphemistically known as Angry American Natives, in the prosecution of a real War that involves family, church, home, and hearth in a fight-to-the-death struggle against Globalist Internationalism, Zionism, and the New World Order?

Remember the Liberty!

Mark Dankof's New Year's Advice for 2007: Get Your Priorities in Order: Our CFR/Trilateralist/Likudnik Establishment Won't (or Can't)

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Original Investigative Journalism from the
Columnist Guild News Bureau

As we get ready to enter the new year of 2007, one thing is abundantly clear: the national political leadership of the government of the United States--and its Israeli and Corporate Allies--have no idea as to how to extricate themselves from the mess that is Iraq. The economic cost of the war approaches $1 billion; the American death toll approaches 3,000 and counting; the British medical journal Lancet has credibly demonstrated that 655,000 Iraqis have lost their lives since March of 2003; there is no emerging credible plan to establish a political infrastructure that Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds can achieve consensus with; and the burgeoning totals of national debt to Asian bankers to finance the Project for a New American Century's plan to Secure the Realm virtually guarantee a catastrophic declension in the fortunes of the dollar, along with the fortunes of the American Empire across the board.

A second thing is also abundantly clear: the lunacy that has resulted in what CFR/Trilateralist and Kissinger protege Laurence Eagleburger freely acknowledged on the day of the release of the findings of the Iraq Study Group as an "unprecedented crisis of confidence in American leadership and political institutions" is about to escalate. My prediction: the United States and/or Israel will attack Iran within the next 12 months. The results will be even more catastrophic than the invasion of Iraq 46 months ago.

The American National Security State will discover Iran to be a more powerful opponent than imagined. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that cut its teeth in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 will turn the American--British purgatory with Iraqi Shiites into a living hell. There will be unprecedented asymmetrical attacks on the worldwide assets of the United States and the UK in the aftermath of a preemptive military action against Tehran. American/Israeli aerial strikes on Iranian nuclear power stations throughout Iran will fall short of success due to the hardened character of the sites in question, even as massive numbers of Iranian civilian casualties will result. The attacks will strengthen, not weaken the support of Iranians for the IRI regime in Tehran, as a result of Western interventionism. And as Lt. General William Odom indicated the other day to the Nieman Journalism Foundation of Harvard University, the failed character of the ill-fated American/Israeli air attacks will most surely be followed by the draconian decision to commit massive numbers of ground troops to Iran.

This will be the straw that breaks the proverbial back of the Empire's camel. The inevitable reinstitution of military conscription in the United States will produce domestic political blowback comparable to that in the Islamic world from Somalia to Indonesia. And when American debt instruments are jettisoned on the international currency markets by Asian banks protesting the latest War for the Empire, the free fall of the dollar and the ensuing economic collapse will combine with the Draft to provide a spontaneous response of political combustion on the part of the American people against the internationalist, Likudnik cabal clearly responsible for the greatest debacle in the storied history of what was the American Republic.

Will the inflammatory situation destroy the country? Or will it restore its fortunes after massive tragedy and tumult? That is the $64,000 question. Only God literally knows.

In the meantime, my recommendation is to get your own priorities and house in order. Put love of God first in life, followed by family members and friends. Read good books. Avoid Corporate Media like the plague. Find good sources of alternative news and information like BATR News, the Republic Broadcasting Network, and American Free Press. And pray for the courage to resist the Empire to the point of martyrdom, in the spirit of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Adams. The clock is ticking. The absolute arrival at the ultimate crossroad is near.

Oh, yes, one other quick recommendation before New Year's Day. Enjoy my December 29th RBN interview with Mark Weber of the Institute of Historical Review. Click here for his web site.