On August 12 SHARE/WHEEL's Tent City 4 moved to Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church in unincorporated King County for a ninety-day stay. The sixty-member homeless encampment was prepared to relocate to downtown Bothell's First Evangelical Lutheran Church when the city's needlessly restrictive and unfair permit conditions prevented the move at the last minute. While some of the 22 conditions were ludicrous, like the one calling for six-foot tall "pyramidalis" plants positioned to hide the homeless from sight, several would likely have been ruled unconstitutional. One of those conditions would have required campers to turn over their personal identifiers to the Tent City-unfriendly Bothell police for outstanding warrant and sex offender screening rather than to the King County Sheriff, as TC4 has voluntarily done since the first (St. Brendan's Roman Catholic Parish, located in Bothell!) of eight other locations on the Eastside since May 2004. The roving homeless encampment has visited sites in Kirkland, Bellevue, Woodinville, and Bothell, in addition to unincorporated King County. SHARE/WHEEL, a self-managed organization of homeless and formerly homeless men and women, also operates Tent City 3, now at Haller Lake United Methodist Church in north Seattle, 13 indoor shelters, and storage lockers for homeless people. --Peggy Hotes

Seymour Hersh is a national treasure. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who made his name exposing the My Lai massacre in 1969 and went on to expose the torture at Abu Ghraib in 2004 (with much great muckraking in between) has done it again. In the August 21 issue of The New Yorker, Hersh has revealed through his impeccable investigative skills that Israeli officials sought and were given a green light from the Bush administration for Israel's July assault on Lebanon--prior to Hezbollah's July 12 capture of two Israeli soldiers, the event that allegedly instigated this summer's conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

According to Hersh, the White House and the Israeli government had been in communication for weeks before July 12 concerning the possibility of a pre-emptive strike on Iran by one or both countries--with a strike against Hezbollah as part of the political groundwork for such a military action against Iran. Hersh writes:

"The Bush Administration ... was closely involved in the planning of Israel's retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah's heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground."

Hence, obviously, Israel's July assault on Lebanon was not a spontaneous "retaliatory" strike at all, but rather a premeditated attempt to eliminate Hezbollah--which apparently hasn't worked, as Hezbollah, legitimately or not, emerges as the clear political victor in Arab public opinion in the aftermath. Along with Hersh's assertions, Stephen Zunes, the noted Middle East scholar from the University of San Francisco, has claimed in an August 19 article on the Common Dreams website that Israel was in fact striking Lebanon "at the behest of the United States," and that "the Israeli government had been planning the attack since 2004."

The object lesson? Never trust the official version of events. To quote Mother Jones: Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflict--which is likely already being planned behind closed doors. Sy Hersh's article, "Watching Lebanon," can be found at newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060821fa_fact; the Stephen Zunes article, "How Washington Goaded Israel to Invade Lebanon," can be found at commondreams.org/views06/0819-25.htm. --Jeff Stevens