The Welch Club- Who’s Behind the Violence in Lebanon

May 25th, 2007 — peoplesgeography

Well it just gets curiouser and curiouser, and so far, this piece by Franklin Lamb (appended below) has got to be the most sensational of all. The first part of this piece for Counterpunch describes his visit to two of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Nahr al-Bared and Bedawi. The indiscriminate attacks against defenceless Palestinian civilians is appalling and so is
and the bigoted attitude of some Lebanese toward them.

In the second half Lamb then speculates about who is behind the fighting. We know that it is between Fatah al-Islam, a shadowy group from within the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon who are made up mostly of foreigners and not in fact Palestinians, and the Lebanese Army, but who is fact behind the group? In an earlier post we saw Seymour Hersh detail his blowback thesis — that this fighting was essentially the unintended consequences of combined US-Saudi and Lebanese government funding of fundamentalist Sunni groups to counter Hezbollah.

In this piece, Franklin Lamb gets more specific. He describes a group called the Welch Club after C. David Welch, the Munich-born US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and US Ambassador to Egypt from 2001 to 2005. Lamb introduces the Welch Club as a Lebanese coalition of political figures in cohoots with Israel who are willing to sell out the country for private gain.

You won’t yet find a search engine yielding much in the way of results on the “Welch Club”, and I would love to know how Lamb has put this information together. Welch visited Lebanon only a week ago. In As’ad Abu Khalil’s words (of the Angry Arab News
Service blog), Welch “met in an unprecedented manner with the commander-in-chief of the Lebanese army. … there was an American official announcement that the Lebanese government made a request for emergency military assistance. And yet the Lebanese government promptly denied that it made such a request.”

According to Lamb, the group also bears the imprint of that ubiquitous US neocon, Elliot Abrams, an Iran-Contra felon and currently Deputy National Security Adviser (I think he also has the title of National Security Adviser for Middle East Affairs and he is certainly the point person on Israel. He does not see himself as an underling to Secretary of State Rice — more in a forthcoming post).

Franklin Lamb’s thesis is essentially a combined neo-neo — neocon and neoliberal — explanation and here is where it becomes surreal:

… the Welch Club wants to keep some Palestinians in Lebanon for cheap labor, ship others to countries willing to take them (and be paid handsomely to do so by American taxpayers) and allow at
most a few thousand to return to Palestine to settle the ‘right of return’ issue while at the same time signing a May 17th 1983 type treaty with Israel with enriches the Club members and gives Israel Lebanon’s water and much of Lebanon’s sovereignty.

http://peoplesgeography.com/2007/05/25/whos-behind-the-fighting-in-north-lebanon/.

Since you say you spent your military service in the Pentagon, that makes you a coward as well.

How could you [Michael] post such a heartless thing?

This is the same little chicken sh!t apologist and informant that calls liberals cowards from behind the safety of his keyboard in his mother’s basement and rats other posters out to the FBI.

You ask how he could post such a heartless thing? I ask you: how could he post anything but?

“Was Saddam’s style of government better?”

Whatever Saddam did or didn’t do is NOT a justification for Americans to treat ANYONE like slaves. That’s not what America is about, or at least the America that I love. How could you post such a heartless thing?

Project much?

Was it worse? The death toll was certainly less.

Oooo, Mikey, you are skerrrrrrry. Jack-a$$. Actually, on second thought, you are. You would be the first, in 1939, to call the SS on a neighbor you didn’t like. You are one sick little wimp.

Comment by TripMaster Monkey — May 31, 2007″

Just sent you comment to the FBI!

Comment by john aravosis is a douche bag! — May 31, 2007″

Was Saddam’s style of government better?

High level project manager? What was his/her name?

“Mayberry also claims that workers’ medical records in total disarray or nonexistent, beds were dirty and the support staff was poorly trained”

Maybe some of you liberals could volunteer to go over there and get those medical records all straightened out. Then maybe make a few beds? I won’t hold my breath, cowards rarely venture into war zones!

Chris Floyd and Kos covered it awhile back but it will receive much more attention here.

This is depicable and a Crime Against Humanity.

sojo.net recent issue writes about slavery and the fight to end it by some real Christians and others.

I’m going to look up Wilber Wilberforce.

AMAZING GRACE hymn was written by John Newman who was a slave trader until his conversion when a storm hit the slave ship he was running and he converted and worked for abolition of slavery. Pray for the current day slave traders like bush/cheney pnac israel.