The Daily Battle Against Subjectivity

War Making 101 - A User's Manual

2006-03-31T18:56:00.000-05:00

I've lived through 7 decades and can remember the late 1930s before WW II began. In fact, I began my formal education in kindergarten within days of when Hitler sent his Wehrmacht across the Polish border in an act of illegal aggression and began that near six year horror. I was too young to understand it then, and I can barely remember that fateful "first Pearl Harbor" on December 7, 1941. Franklin Roosevelt wanted in on that fight and did all he could to goad the Japanese to attack us. He knew with enough prodding they would, and when it came, we knew about when and where it would happen. We were ready to mobilize and join the battle, we did it, and nothing's been the same since.

FDR at least took the country to war as the Constitution says we must. On December 11,1941 he asked the Congress to make that declaration against Japan and also Nazi Germany in response to Hitler's declaring it against us. It was the last time a US Congress would ever use the constitutional authority it alone is allowed in Article I, Section 8 of that sacred document. The Founding Fathers thought that authority so important they codified it. They believed that on what is the single most important issue a nation ever faces, that awesome power should never placed in the hands of a single person. They wanted only the Legislative Branch to have it and only exercise it after careful, deliberative debate. That Branch still has it if it so wishes, but for the last 65 years it decided in its infinite indifference to abrogate it's authority and allow the President to usurp it and use it at his pleasure and choice. We've seen the result - a mess without end. We've had war after war after endless war (including the ones fought by others we encouraged and financed plus all the CIA covert mischief and abuse) with no end in sight and in every instance since WW II against designated "enemies" that never threatened or attacked us or had any intention to. Doing that by direct intervention based on no provocation, as we have, is called illegal aggression, which is exactly the crime the Nazis were tried for at Nuremburg. In the words of the Tribunal: "To initiate a war of aggression....is not only an international crime, it is the supreme crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." The worst of those found guilty in that Tribunal were hanged. Think any of our leaders will ever meet the same fate as they should, of course? Fat chance, even though the worst of ours are as guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity as were the worst Nazis.

THE RESULT OF THE CONGRESS SCRAPPING THE MOST IMPORTANT CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY IT ALONE HAS

Here's one definition of a dictator or at least one practicing to become one. It's a head of state able to decide alone with unchallengeable authority whether or not to take a nation to war for any reason. Here's an add-on to that definition. If a leader does it for any reason other than to respond to an attack by another nation or clear evidence an attack is coming, that leader is also a war criminal. Noam Chomsky believes every US president since WW II was and is a war criminal. Ditto, so do I.

This essay will concentrate on the current "war criminal in charge." With some background for the historically uneducated, I'll then fast forward to the present and take you into the heart of the beast we better get to know well and quickly before it eats us alive. I'll lay out what I call a war maker's manual, step by step or rule by rule, from when we were new at this ugly business and still learning to the present. Ready? Here we go.

I can't match the famous Chinese general Sun Tzu who wrote his masterful Art of War 2400 years ago and won't even try. But I've seen the modern day script played out enough times and think I've gotten the hang of it now. First, some basic rules:

A. Get the language right. It's not enough to say Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or Venezuela are threats to our national security. We have to say or imply it's the new Hitler Saddam, the "crazed Arabs and mullahs" running Iran (sorry - they're Persians, not Arabs, and only changed the country's name to Iran in 1934......you can call them "crazed Arabs" though, who'll know the difference besides the Iranians), the demonic Taliban who beat up on defenseless women, or the "demagogue" Hugo Chavez "awash in oil money and trying to destroy democracy and destabilize the region"........he happens to have the most vibrant democracy in the Western Hemisphere and is selling the country's oil at a discount to poor nations and poor US communities in need. Think Exxon-Mobil would do that? Now you're getting it.

B. Always pick on a much weaker target country, the weaker the better, preferably defenseless and unable to fight back. It's then best to soften them up in advance by stealth bombing or sabotaging their strategic infrastructure. It's also best to pick on a weak nation of color (we almost always do - Yugoslavia was a rare exception), and best of all is to pick on a Muslim nation of color. Arab nations (and Persia/Iran) qualify as they're not quite white enough, not at least the "crazed Arab ones."

C. When you "pull the trigger", strike the target with overwhelming force. You know the new "Militaryspeak" language - "shock and awe." Who dreams up this stuff? You can bet it's a big PR firm, ad agency or something out of a Hollywood bad dream factory. The target country may be defenseless, and likely is, but you gotta hit 'em like a using a howitzer to kill a gnat even though a strong wind will do the trick. The reason for the "blitzkrieg" approach is it not only grinds your enemy to dust and fast, it also scares hell out of all other nations worried they may be next or in the queue and moving up.

D. There's one other element peculiar to today in the US that's not a rule but a resurrection of sorts from the First Crusade 900 years ago. Back then Pope Urban II, who no doubt believed he got his marching orders from the Almighty, launched his assault against Islam and Muslims in his holy Crusade to regain control of the sacred city of Jerusalem. When his forces finally got into the city they weren't very nice to the Muslims, Jews and even Eastern Christians living there.

It's timely for this essay to note that the Vatican has begun to rehabilitate the Crusaders by sponsoring a late March conference that portrays those holy wars as having been fought with the "noble aim" of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity. I'm sure all Muslims around the world will understand, forgive and forget.

Students of Western Civilization might also recall that Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 for "glory" (that's French for empire) and to restore Islam to its genuine teachings (I guess meaning to bring those misguided souls back to their Christian roots). The Little Corporal didn't fare much better there than he did at Waterloo or that a latter day Napoleon wannabe is now doing in Iraq. It's a shame he's not still around to explain that to our current "head dreamer of empire." But I doubt it would do much good as below I explain the only authority our warrior president listens to.

The point from my brief history lesson is to connect it to our own present situation. For the first time ever, we now have a president, at least the first one admitting it publicly, who also believes the Almighty speaks to him, tells him what to, and he's just following orders from that higher authority. I don't think he's kidding when he says God told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. I wonder if that same God told him to steal from the poor and give to the rich. I also wonder what God he's referring to. It's not the one I was brought up to believe in and the principles I was taught to think are pretty sacred in the Ten Commandments, especially the core "golden rule" one.

NOW LET'S GO THROUGH THE STEPS/RULES

Rule No. 1- Develop a tradition of militarism over time. It takes many years of practice to hone skills and perfect them. The US has followed this practice and incredibly has been at war (real war with mass slaughter) internally and/or abroad every year without exception with one or more adversaries since its inception.

No other nation today is more addicted to war than the US. It seems like it's always been that way, and it has. Of course, you'd never know it from the sanitized history we're taught up to the highest levels in all our schools - even the best of them like the two esteemed universities I was lucky enough to attend. I later understood their mission was to program my mind, teach me acceptable doctrine to "make me a good citizen." It's part of the package called "The American Way." Fill their heads with mush and make 'em believe the sun is out when it's really dark and pouring rain. They did teach me how to learn though, and I've tried to use that skill ever since to discover and understand what they should have taught me but never did.

Militarism and empire go way back to our Founding Fathers including the one we call the Father of the country. Some Father. He referred to the nation as a "rising empire", and he helped build it during and after the Revolutionary War. During that conflict he not only dispatched the British (they really just decided it wasn't worth it and left), he waged a second war against our native Indians, all of whom he thought of as subhumans (American Untermenschen). He called for their total annihilation and sent General John Sullivan and 5,000 troops to attack the noncombatant Onondaga people in 1779 with orders to destroy all their villages, homes, fields, food supplies, cattle herds and orchards. He also stole Indian land from the Onieda people who aided him when he was most in need at Valley Forge. I guess it was his way of showing gratitude. The guy we're taught to revere was a racist and genocidist. With that kind of Father what could we expect from the "offspring." I'll bet they're still teaching George's military tactics to the recruits at West Point and telling these impressionable kids that "Father knew best."

George's tradition was handed down and became more robust over time. Along the way to the present day, we expanded the frontier west and south and slaughtered about 18 million of our native people in the process. Their only offense was they happened live on the land we wanted, so we stole it from them. It didn't matter that they'd been there for about 20-30,000 years. How could we let a "little tradition" stand in the way of "progress" and "development." Once we had it all from coast to coast (including the half of Mexico we also stole), we set our sights offshore for conquests and easily found a few. In our beneficence to our southern "neighbor" we let the Mexicans keep half their country, but only because the majority population was in the southern half, and we didn't want all those dark-skinned people "diluting" our white Anglo-Saxon majority.

As fate would have it we spared Canada. But it was touch and go for our northern neighbor as we coveted their land too, and it may only have been our attention diverted to other "adventures" plus a few cooler heads that kept us from taking it. During our so-called War of 1812, there were those in the US more interested in annexing territory in "British North America" than fighting the British over their naval blockades, interception of our ships and impressment of our seamen. We were humming "O Canada" again in the 1920s, when the "Canucks" as now were friendly allies with no hostile intention toward us or anyone else. We actually drew up serious war plans to invade the country and occupy it. I'm not kidding. Why? The same reason we invaded Iraq or at least one of them. To steal their oil, and back then we had plenty of our own and lots more we'd find. We also had a similar war plan approved in 1919 to attack Mexico and steal their oil too. We want everyone's oil and most everything else they have as well. One day we may change our mind and just declare both countries and all others (or just their resources, markets and cheap labor) US property by an act of Congress or a Presidential directive or decree. Our neighbors (and all other nervous nations) shouldn't worry though. Whenever we conquer or colonize we make it clear we come as friends to help them. In the old days it was to bring them civilization. Now that "help" comes in our special style of "friendship" at the barrel of an M1A1 tank or sights of a cruise missile or nuclear bomb. But "it's for their own good, to bring them democracy and freedom" and the rest of the tired old rhetoric. It was shameless bunk back then just as now.

Fast forward a bit to WW II and its aftermath when the US emerged as the only nation left standing as the world's sole superpower. The Soviets may have developed "the bomb", but the war so devastated them (along with most of Europe and East Asia) it took about 15 years of redevelopment for them to regain even a semblance of normalcy. The US was now free to run amuck and took full advantage. What "amuck" we've run since needs much more space than I have here. So fast forward again to the current era and let Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter explain more recent US policy and its incurable addiction. He did it eloquently when he said "US foreign policy can be defined as follows: kiss my arse or I'll kick your head in." He said that during the Clinton years. He had a lot more to say about the Bush administration in his 2005 Nobel lecture and acceptance speech when he called the invasion of Iraq "a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law." He went on to say the US "quite simply doesn't give a damn about the UN, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant."

YOU GOTTA SHOW YOU MEAN BUSINESS

That brings us to Rule No. 2 - When you're the meanest, toughest, baddest guy in the neighborhood, you gotta show it by beating up on a weakling occasionally. Otherwise no one will take you seriously, and someone else might try to challenge your supremacy. That's how a local godfather does it in my city of Chicago. It works the same on the global stage as it does on the South Side here.

I can hardly improve on Harold Pinter's eloquence so I'll just add to it by calling the Bush-Cheney administration an unchallengeable practioner of reckless and outrageous policies at home and abroad and being the most reactionary, statist and psychopathic administration in our history. It stands alone in its brazen uncompromising methods, fanatical extremism, bold and deceptive rhetoric and almost pathological insistence on secrecy. In sum - they're crazy and out-of-control. How's that Harold? It all came out after 9/11 that we now know was an event much different than the official explanation we were given. On that fateful day, the mask came off, the ugly face of a threatening tyranny could be spotted, and the bombs began falling.

So what's going on with us? Was this warped proclivity always there but never understood or quite so visible as now? Or is there something in our DNA that makes us like a modern day out-of-control Sparta? Is it a "bad seed?" Is it curable? Not a chance with the crowd running wild in Washington now declaring they'll throw nuclear bombs around like hand grenades in future wars and are already doing it below the radar in the two we're now fighting - that's right two ongoing wars, the other one being in Afghanistan which in case you hadn't noticed is still "hot" and killing US and other occupying forces. And that one has no end in sight either.

THEY PUT THEIR PLANS IN WRITING AND WE CAN ALL READ THEM - AND SHUDDER

Rule No. 3 - Write it all down clearly and in detail. That way everyone can read it and understand you mean business. What better way to scare shaky allies and intimidate and deter other nations thinking about defying us to forget about it or we'll beat up on them. It works most of the time.

The Bush-Cheney crowd try to make it work every time and since 9/11 have kept practicing to let everyone know they're not kidding. We believe 'em. But just to make sure no one forgets they just updated their September, 2002 National Security Strategy with more belligerent language than the original. The original, in case you didn't know or forgot, lays out an "imperial grand strategy." It's nothing less than a declaration of "preventive war" (the term "pre-emptive" is used incorrectly as that can only apply in a defensive action against a known impending attack) against any nation or force this administration decides is a threat to our national security. It doesn't mean it is, just that we say it is. That threat includes any nation we label "unstable" or a "failed state" (whatever that is). And a little add-on to the original NSS was their FY 04 Air Force Space Command Strategic Master Plan. It laid out a plan to "own outer space" (think the Martians will buy it), weaponize it with the most advanced and destructive weapons and technology including nuclear ones, and develop and place out there unmanned space vehicles to surveille the entire planet.

And there are two more gems everyone should know about. One is the May, 2000 DOD Joint Vision 2020 that outlined a plan for "full spectrum dominance." That's code language ("Militaryspeak" again) meaning total control over all land, sea, air and space and using any means including nuclear war to achieve it and keep it. The other jewel is the Nuclear Policy Review of December, 2001 that claims a unilateral right to declare and wage future wars using first strike nuclear weapons. Anyone nervous? You'd better be because the Bush administration declared a permanent state of war against "bad guys" we call "terrorists." I have my own definition of what each of those terms means and it's lots different from theirs. Dick Cheney gave us his message when he declared a "global war on terrorism" that may last for decades and may include in our target queue dozens of countries (the number keeps changing, but they have plenty in mind and don't plan to run out).

THEY'RE NOT KIDDING AND IT JUST GOT WORSE

Rule No. 4 - Just in case anyone still misunderstands, ratchet up the rhetoric, make it even meaner and tougher and start beating the war drums to announce you're planning to demonstrate your seriousness. That should get everyone's full attention.

If all this doesn't scare you, then you didn't read the morning papers right after the ides of March (amazing they didn't choose that day when another noted warning was made, went unheeded and led to a bad ending for a guy whose initials were JC - no, the other one). On March 16 we learned that an updated National Security Strategy outlined the first full statement of US strategic goals since the original 2002 document written in the run-up to the Iraq war and which, in fact, was a declaration of war against that country six months before it began. The new Strategy identifies Iran as the "single country" that may pose the biggest threat to the US and reaffirms our unilateral right to take preventive military action against them. It denounced Tehran as an "ally of terror" and "enemy of freedom" along with daily accusations they're trying to acquire nuclear weapons and even use them. It also audaciously claims "we may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran."

Iran never attacked any other nation or even threatened to. It endorses a negotiated settlement (didn't we use that ploy with Saddam) but warns of "confrontation" if that effort fails. Sound familiar? Haven't we heard that song before? The clincher will be when we call the Iranian mullahs and/or President Ahmadinejad "Hitler." And haven't we overdone that one too? Can't we let the old brute stew in his special hell without degrading his ignominy by equating all our other designated "bad guys" with him? And shouldn't the public have caught on to this snake oil sales pitch by now? You're giving them too much credit. They never get it or understand in this nation the renowned author and social critic Gore Vidal calls the "United States of amnesia." The equally renowned author and my fellow Chicagoan, Studs Terkel, calls our malady a "national Alzheimer's disease." Sadly, it's true. The public can't recall last week's headlines let alone the events of months or years past or heaven knows any knowledge or sense of history - the real kind, that is, not the mythology we're fed in school or through the corporate media.

The updated document goes further and claims the right to take preventive action against any nation we designate an enemy state or any undefined terrorist group we say seeks to acquire WMD. Again, it doesn't matter if it's true, only that we say it's true. And we never explain what WMD is, so I will. Only nuclear weapons so qualify, not chemical or biological. The war hawks want you to think all three types do, but all weapons experts know otherwise. The latter two types can only cause havoc over a small area while only the former can really cause mass destruction not only on its target but over a vast area affected by deadly toxic radiation fallout that can never be remediated.

The report goes on to warn us that while al-Qaeda has been "significantly degraded" since the Afghan war it's also been dispersed and decentralized which now poses new challenges. And it claims the "fight in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry." I wish someone would explain what that means. And there's more:

Besides Iran, clearly number one in the target queue, the document also lists North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Belarus, Burma and Zimbabwe as "despotic systems." It specifically labels Syria an ally of terror and enemy of freedom - meaning Israel wants us to do their dirty work by ousting their leader and replacing him with someone more subservient to Israeli and Western interests.

It says the US must "isolate enemy elements" but engage those willing to give up violence (read: they're violent because we say they are, but we'll forgive them if they surrender their national sovereignty to the "Godfather").

It specifically singles out Venezuela and Hugo Chavez as "a demagogue awash in oil money (who is) undermining democracy and seeking to destabilize the region." This stuff is breathtaking, and allow me to translate it. First, though let me thank and commend President Chavez for being one of the few world leaders with the courage and backbone to respond to the reckless US policy and vicious lies about him and all else by pointing his finger at the real king of destabilizers and state terrorists. In comments he made on March 19 during his regular Sunday TV program, Hello, President, for ordinary Venezuelans to call and speak to him directly, ask a question and get his response, he called George Bush "Mr. Danger", the world's greatest terrorist, a coward, murderer, immoral and sick among other things. The man's very perceptive.

Now the translation of the NSS comments on President Chavez. What they're saying is that the Chavez extraordinary reforms bringing the Venezuelan people vital social benefits like free health care and education they never had before; his most vibrant democracy in the Americas; his innovative trade agreements that are fair to all participating countries and his opposition to the US promoted exploitive ones; and his beneficent policy of helping his neighbors, other developing countries, and some poor communities in US cities like selected neighborhoods in my own city of Chicago by selling them discounted oil (or heating oil to US cities - again, think Exxon-Mobil would do that?) are not in the interests of the US or the giant transnational corporations who want the right to exploit the country and every other developing one as well for their own benefit. That means no social programs for the people, just opportunities for US giant transnationals to have open and free access to plunder for profit. We call that "free trade." I call it "the American way." Hugo Chavez and the great majority of Venezuelans justifiably want no part of it. Neither should we.

It also emphasizes the need to enhance the administration's post-conflict capabilities and to create a "civilian reserve corps" to rebuild countries after a war ends - meaning after we destroy them by illegal aggression we'll award big no-bid contracts to the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel to rebuild them......shoddily..... and steal the US taxpayers blind while doing whatever it is they're doing. We do know Halliburton is expert at building US military bases and "torture-prisons."

Finally, it states a policy to promote nuclear power abroad to provide "reliable, emission-free energy." I love this one too. This is a sales pitch for General Electric and all other US corporations that will profit big time if we can convince other countries to let US corporations build nuclear power plants for them and all the rest that goes with them. And, oh yes, these plants most definitely are not emission-free. Where I live in Chicago is testimony to that. I'm surrounded by 11 nuclear power plants, many of them aging (as are most others) and all of them have a disturbing history of safety violations caused by aging and shoddy maintenance (another common problem in many other cities). Even without a serious accident (which will happen one day), these facilities (and all others everywhere including any newly built ones) discharge enough deadly toxic radiation daily in their normal operations to contaminate the food we eat (even organic food), the water we drink and the air we breathe into our lungs. And if one of these plants ever has a core meltdown and metropolitan Chicago is downwind from the fallout, the city and suburbs alone will become uninhabitable for the next 4.5 billion years (forever) and would have to be evacuated quickly with all possessions left behind and lost (including our homes) except for what we could carry in suitcases or in the trunks of our cars if we own one which I don't. This is the kind of madness our government is trying to sell the US public and the world. But no matter. They'll do that and anything else to help their corporate friends......even if it kills us.

SELLING WAR - IT'S NOT HARD TO DO

Rule No. 5 - After putting your intentions clearly in writing and showing you mean business, the next step is scaring the public by choosing a "target country" and convincing them it threatens our security and welfare. You explain you're trying to reason with it, but if it won't listen, force may be necessary as a last resort. But not to worry. We'll only do this for our own safety and security. If you do this well enough (and these guys are experts, they've had so much practice), you hope the public will go along with your madness even if things don't go well and despite what your real objectives are.

With two out-of-control wars on their hands, why would they ever want to start another one? We don't have enough troops to handle Iraq and Afghanistan, there's growing discontent in the ranks including desertions in the thousands, and our military spending is off the charts and running up massive budget deficits even the new Fed chairman is alarmed about. He and other experts know they're only sustainable by "the kindness of strangers" that one day may become less kind as well as the wholesale shredding of our social safety net to fund wars. For me that's a clinical definition of insanity, but that doesn't deter this crowd. The war drums are beating loudly and the demonizing of our new number one public enemy is clearly Iran. In mid-February Secretary of State Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the US would "actively confront" Iran and asked for an extra $75 million in funding for anti-Tehran propaganda and support for opposition groups outside the country. And she just turned up the heat a notch or two more by accusing Iran of lying about its (nuclear) activities and calling the country "a central banker to terrorism" - an overused false, deceptive and demonizing line she and others have used before.

Of course, this is all part of "the big lie" and prepping of the public for the "fun and games" they have in mind. What's never mentioned and what the sleepwalking public doesn't understand is there's only one "king" and undisputed world champion of "terrorism" (the state-sponsored most deadly kind of all) and central banker of terrorism. There may be a few other bit players around that come and go, but the US for at least many decades has been financing the most widespread and egregious terrorist activities on the planet - mainly its own, but it spreads it around when it can get other willing co-conspirator nations to join in. I'll let some of the worst of them go unnamed, but the reader need only check what nations have become part of our "coalitions of the willing" in victim countries now under the heel of the oppressive US boot. And then they can add a few more to that list like our closest of all allies in the Middle East and a few more in South and East Asia.

The issue with Iran has nothing to do with the furor over that country's wanting to develop its commercial nuclear industry, having the right to enrich its own uranium and even the right to develop weapons to defend itself against really hostile enemies. They'd be crazy and irresponsible not to want to want an adequate defense. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), is in full compliance with it, and has every legal right to enrich its uranium. But that doesn't cut it with the "Godfather" because Iran won't sell out its sovereignty to the US and our oil and other corporate interests. India, Pakistan and Israel, on the other hand, are nuclear outlaws, have known stockpiles of nuclear bombs, and have not signed the NPT. But they know "who's boss", show proper deference, can build and stockpile nuclear bombs (maybe even use a few) and they're valued and trusted strategic allies. It follows that attacking Iran is quite acceptable because the "Godfather" tolerates no disobedient "outliers", and such behavior must be severely punished to oust their leaders, replace them with more "friendly" ones, and deter other nations from showing the same independence or notion of moving that way.

WELCOME TO THE MODERN NUCLEAR AGE UNMASKED

Rule No. 6 - First the rule and then the message from it. The rule is: when you've got 'em, use 'em. Of course, that means using whatever most destructive or high tech weapons you have, especially if the target country only has lesser ones. It also means: what's the point of having 'em if you can't or don't use 'em. The message then is: toxic radiation is good for you. That must be what they're selling because the US has now stated its intent to use industrial strength nuclear bombs in any future wars if it chooses to. Can they really sell this line of sheer madness? They're trying, and I don't hear anyone screaming about it yet.

Waging war by illegal aggression is bad enough, but doing it recklessly in another so-called "shock and awe" attack with so-called "bunker-buster mini-nukes" that aren't mini is reckless and insane. The rhetoric about them is false and deliberately deceptive. These bombs are industrial strength and can be made to any potency and likely would be from one third to two thirds as powerful as a Hiroshima bomb. They're designed to penetrate a designated target and explode underground for supposed protection. The DOD falsely claims this fantasy. They deceptively state that these weapons are safe to use because only the protected target is destroyed while the toxic radiation from the detonation is contained underground. Baloney. This is just another shameless lie. Some of it will be contained, but any bomb this powerful will release most of its toxic and lethal radiation into the atmosphere contaminating a vast area depending only on how many targets are struck, where they are, and by how many nuclear bombs. Let's be clear what will happen if this attack goes ahead as planned or any other like it they may have in mind. It will likely be Hiroshima and Nagasaki x you pick the multiple - anywhere from double to infinity. And the result will be many thousands of innocent people murdered, many more thousands poisoned by toxic, lethal radiation and a vast area irremediably contaminated for the next 4.5 billion years. Think it's worth it, never mind unjustified, egregious and a gross breach of international law.

Should this administration be insane enough to do this (and after the announcement of March 16 it looks more likely than ever), the entire Middle East may boil over, and the US will have descended even deeper into its hellish sinkhole of endless (and now full-scale) nuclear war, massive destruction and killing, and nation bankrupting levels of endless spending with no end in sight. Doesn't this crowd understand this? They must, but that doesn't deter the damn fools. They're often wrong but never in doubt. Haven't they ever heard the great lyrics to folk singer Pete Seeger's Vietnam era ode to the damn fool of that period - "Waste deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says push on." And don't they remember the memorable Stanley Kubrick 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, that even I saw back then, and I dislike movies. Kubrick portrayed a nuclear Doomsday Machine. The film's subtitle was "how to stop worrying and love the bomb." Anyone believing that then or now can only love great suffering and large-scale death and destruction instead of life. But you can bet these guys will convince a lot of people it's worth it - for what and whom. Them maybe, but not us.

AND NOW THE NEXT STEP - THE MOVE FROM A REPUBLIC TO TYRANNY

Rule No. 7 (the last one) - Your manual is almost complete, and you're about to become as expert at this game as the big boys actually playing it. The only step left is to do at home everything you want to do abroad without having to nuke the public to sell it. Scaring hell out of them should do the trick.

We may find out and sooner than we think if it'll work. But this time we may be getting in over our heads and headed for the abyss if the alarm sounded by retired General Tommy Franks proves true. A few months after he retired he gave an interview to Cigar Aficionado magazine (a most unlikely venue - maybe he envisioned the world going up in smoke) and made what to some was an astonishing statement. He said if another terrorist attack occurs in the US "the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government." He went on to say such an attack will result in our losing our "freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years......(and that Bush)..... will likely declare martial law......."

Have I ruined your day? Fasten your seat belt, it gets worse. For some time now, a number of US government officials and private "terrorism" experts are on record predicting it's just a matter of when, not if, the US will be struck again. Some say it will be worse than 9/11. And on June 6, 2003, the AP quoted a US government report that "there is a high probability that al-Qaida will attempt an attack with weapons of mass destruction in the next two years." Now I'd never advise anyone believe anything said by any government official. But those of us, including myself, convinced our own government was behind or complicit in the first 9/11 attack, should take this warning very seriously. It means if that conclusion is true (and again, I believe it is) this warning and General Franks' grim assessment may, in fact, be advance word of what's ahead. We should heed that warning and be prepared as best we can. One astute observer I heard comment said in all seriousness that for anyone with enough resources a prudent option today would be to have "a second passport and a little property in Vancouver." He added we should think out our escape route in advance and be ready to take it.

HERE'S THE NIGHTMARISH SCRIPT YOU CAN PRACTICE LOSING SLEEP OVER

Rule (or reality) No. 8 - The script is written and the plans are ready to go. Here's how it's likely to play out.

I've discussed this scenario before in another essay, but it deserves repeating here with some added embellishment to scare you even more. I began by suggesting we're being set up (as well as being given fair warning if we can read the tea leaves) for a planned major strike against us. I then went on to say.......You know the drill by now. A major attack happens on US soil, the Bush administration and complicit corporate media hype what happened, scare the public and get them mad enough to demand retribution. If they haven't yet attacked Iran, they blame this on them so they now have public and outside support to do it claiming secret intelligence they can't reveal and it's (nuclear) bombs away - and George Bush's approval rating skyrockets just like after 9/11, and the Republicans keep control of both houses of Congress in November. Karl Rove couldn't plan it any better.

And there's one more thing I didn't write before but will add here. Tommy Franks' assessment and vision will become reality, the Constitution will be suspended, martial law will be declared and we'll have crossed the Rubicon and passed from a republic (what's left of it) to tyranny just as it happened in ancient Rome and more recently in Weimar Germany. We're no different or safer than they were. It works the same in every country, and we should understand nothing is more fragile than our sacred freedom and liberty. It can easily be taken from us without our knowledge or with our compliance when we think it guarantees us security. The reputed old Chinese proverb and curse (likely derived from another source) said "May he (or you) live in interesting times." It didn't mean "let the good times roll and all is well in the world." Whether of Chinese origin or not, I'll settle for the curse and say it surely applies to today in this country like never before in our history.

I've tried to use this essay to warn everyone reading it how deadly serious the times we're now living in are. We must understand that, spread the word, enlist the support of others, and desperately try to head off the impending disaster I think lies ahead if we all don't act in time. It's really that serious.
I could end this a lot of ways. I usually do it either inspirationally or with a warning. This time it's the latter because the situation is grave, and the time is short. What's at stake is nothing less than saving the republic (again what's left of it) and our sacred Constitutional rights. Unless enough of us are willing to fight for both and do it soon, there may be nothing left to fight for. Understand the threat, get mad, energized and heed Pogo's advice and wisdom that "we've met the enemy and it's us." Now what are we gonna do about it?" It's our move next.

American Police State: Abandoning Liberty; Gaining Insecurity

2005-02-05T10:57:00.000-05:00

Should Americans have to give up the Bill of Rights in order to be "safe" from terrorists? Actually, it doesn't matter what Americans think. The trade has already been made--and without any input from the people. The "democracy" that America is exporting is in fact a Homeland Security State with more surveillance powers than Saddam Hussein.
Americans no longer have any privacy from government. You may not be able to find out about your daughter's abortion or your son's college grades, but neither you nor your children have any secret whatsoever from your government. Banks, airlines, libraries, credit card companies, medical doctors and health care organizations, employers, Internet providers, any and everyone must turn over your private information at government demand.
Government demand no longer means a court approved warrant. A myriad of intelligence, security, military, and police agencies can on their own volition mine your personal data and feed it into data banks. Your democratic government does not have to tell you. Your bank, library, etc., are forbidden to tell you.
The government can monitor you as you use your computer, noting the web sites that you visit and reading the emails that you send and receive. Americans have privacy rights only against intrusions by private individuals and private organizations.
In 2000 Larry Stratton and I published a book documenting the erosion of all of the legal principles that protect the innocent: no crime without intent, the attorney-client privilege, due process, and the prohibitions against retroactive law and self-incrimination. The law was lost before the September 11 terrorist attack on the US.
The Patriot Act and executive branch decrees have put paid to habeas corpus. The government can pick up anyone it wishes and hold them as long as it wishes without evidence or trial. The government can torture those so detained if it wishes or murder them and say it was a suicide. Saddam Hussein may have indulged in these practices in a more thorough-going way than the US Homeland Security State has to date, but there are no essential differences in the police state powers.
While granting an element of truth, readers may see rhetorical overstatement in these words. This is because they believe, mistakenly, that the Supreme Court reined in the government in its rulings last June 28 on permitted treatment of "enemy combatants." However, as Harvey Silverglate has pointed out, this is not the case.
Silverglate's analysis shows that the Supreme Court's rulings "preserve the look and feel of liberty while sacrificing its substance." The rulings left the government with enough flexibility to prevail. One ruling created for the government a flexible due process standard invoking, in the Court's words, "the exigencies of the circumstances" and creating "a presumption in favor of the Government's evidence." Silverglate notes that this ruling overthrows a defendant's presumption of innocence that formerly could be overcome only by evidence proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
Another of the Supreme Court's rulings supported the government's position that a US citizen can be declared an enemy combatant and held without charge. Justice O'Connor found support for the demise of habeas corpus in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress after the September 11 attacks.
Defenders of the new American police state emphasize that the government's new powers only apply to terrorists. This is disingenuous. The government decides who is a terrorist and does not need to present evidence to back its decision. The person on whom the arbitrary decision falls can be held indefinitely. This is a return to the pre-Magna Carta practice of executive arrest.
Are Americans in such danger of terrorist attacks that they needed to give up legal protections won over eight centuries of struggle against the arbitrary power of governments? Surely not.
Terrorists have achieved their aims. Bringing down the World Trade Center towers gave them a great propaganda victory. Any other American target would be anti-climatic. The US invasion of Iraq gave them an opportunity for revolution in the Middle East--the real focus of their energy.
What Osama bin Laden and others of his persuasion desire is a unified Islamic Middle East shorn of US bases and puppet rulers. The US invasion of Iraq has brought Shias to power and created a Shia crescent from Iran to Lebanon. The ground is shaking under the perches of US puppets in Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan. The US demonstration of "shock and awe" in Iraq sealed Muslim hearts and minds against America and opened them to bin Laden.
Comment: Since Osama is a known CIA asset, the powers that be in the US are essentially playing "good cop, bad cop" with the American people. First, "bad cop" Osama and the invented al-Qaeda organization hurt and continually threaten the population. Then "good cop" Bush and his neocon pals swoop in and offer to "save" everyone - but only if they will give up just a few civil liberties here and there, along with the right to think for oneself.
The Bush administration handed these enormous opportunities to bin Laden on a silver platter. These opportunities, not terrorism in America, will absorb the energies of those seeking to build a new Islamic world in the Middle East.
Americans fearful of terrorism should keep in mind that their country is a very large place. If further terrorist attacks occur, very few Americans are likely to witness them except on TV. The police, however, are everywhere, and like all bureaucracies will have to show results for their new powers. If no real terrorists show up, our protectors will invent them, or they will interpret their powers expansively and apply them to ordinary felonies.
Comment: This has already happened...
For example, Child Protective Services was set up on the pretense that child abuse was rampant. It was not, so the vast bureaucracy has had to invent its clients. Playground and sports bruises, injuries from falls and accidents all become evidence of child abuse, justifying CPS seizure of children from parents.
RICO, the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act, was only supposed to apply to the Mafia, but quickly jumped outside these bounds. Asset forfeiture was only supposed to be used against drug barons, but has mainly been used to seize the property of Americans unconnected to the drug trade.
Americans might never again experience a domestic act of terrorism except from their own police state.

Pentagon doubles forces' death benefit on eve of Bush speech

2005-02-02T11:09:00.000-05:00

Responding to intense pressure from Congress, the military and the general public, the Pentagon announced a large increase yesterday in death benefits for US soldiers killed in combat zones, doubling the total compensation paid to relatives to $500,000 (£266,000).
Under the proposals, outlined in testimony by senior defence officials on Capitol Hill on the eve of President Bush's first State of the Union address of his second term, the tax-free "death gratuity" will go up from $12,420 to $100,000.
At the same time, maximum life insurance coverage will increase to $400,000 from the current $250,000, with the extra premium to be paid by the Pentagon. Both changes will be retroactive to October 2001, to cover troops who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thus far, 1,415 troops have died in the Iraq war alone, and almost 100 more in Afghanistan, and the total cost of the measure could reach $450m. But congressional and Pentagon leaders consider that a small price to pay given the strains placed on the military, in Iraq in particular. These strains are already depressing recruitment.
Democrats argued yesterday that the improved benefits should apply to all soldiers who die in the course of duty, not merely in specific combat zones designated by the Pentagon.
It has also been pointed out that even the higher benefits pale beside the average $2.1m paid to families of victims of the 9/11 attacks. Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee described the existing gratuity as "derisory" and "paltry". US troops are being killed almost daily in Iraq - last Wednesday was the single deadliest day of the war, with 37 deaths.
These developments are all likely to be discussed by Mr Bush in his address to Congress tonight, in which Iraq, alongside domestic proposals including social security and tort law reform, will be a central topic. Though he will stress that Iraq is only part-way along the road to democracy, his officials are not concealing their sense of vindication that the elections went off relatively smoothly.

What They're Not Telling You About the "Election"

2005-02-01T11:16:00.000-05:00

The day of blood and elections has passed, and the blaring trumpets of corporate media hailing it as a successful show of "democracy" have subsided to a dull roar.
After a day which left 50 people dead in Iraq, both civilians and soldiers, the death toll was hailed as a figure that was "lower than expected." Thus…acceptable, by Bush Administration/corporate media standards. After all, only of them was an American, the rest were Iraqis civilians and British soldiers.
The gamble of using the polling day in Iraq to justify the ongoing failed occupation of Iraq has apparently paid off, if you watch only mainstream media.
"Higher than expected turnout," US mainstream television media blared, some citing a figure of 72%, others 60%.
What they didn't tell you was that this figure was provided by Farid Ayar, the spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission for Iraq (IECI) before the polls had even closed.
When asked about the accuracy of the estimate of voter turnout during a press conference, Ayar backtracked on his earlier figure, saying that a closer estimate was lower than his initial estimate and would be more like 60% of registered voters.
The IECI spokesman said his previous figure of 72% was "only guessing" and "was just an estimate," which was based on "very rough, word-of mouth estimates gathered informally from the field. It will take some time for the IECI to issue accurate figures on turnout."
Referencing both figures, Ayar then added, "Percentages and numbers come only after counting and will be announced when it's over ... It's too soon to say that those were the official numbers."
But this isn't the most important misrepresentation the mainstream media committed.
What they also didn't tell you was that of those who voted, whether they be 35% or even 60% of registered voters, were not voting in support of an ongoing US occupation of their country.
In fact, they were voting for precisely the opposite reason. Every Iraqi I have spoken with who voted explained that they believe the National Assembly which will be formed soon will signal an end to the occupation.
And they expect the call for a withdrawing of foreign forces in their country to come sooner rather than later.
This causes one to view the footage of cheering, jubilant Iraqis in a different light now, doesn't it?
But then, most folks in the US watching CNN, FOX, or any of the major networks won't see it that way. Instead, they will hear what Mr. Bush said, "The world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle East," and take it as fact because most of the major media outlets aren't scratching beneath film clips of joyous Iraqi voters over here in the land of daily chaos and violence, no jobs, no electricity, little running water and no gasoline (for the Iraqis anyhow).
And Bush is portrayed by the media as the bringer of democracy to Iraq by the simple fact that this so-called election took place, botched as it may have been. Appearances suggest that the majority Shia in Iraq now finally get their proportional representation in a "government." Looks good on paper.
But as you continue reading, the seemingly altruistic reasons for this election as portrayed by the Bush Administration and trumpeted by most mainstream media are anything but.
And Iraqis who voted are hearing other trumpets that are blaring an end to the occupation.
Now the question remains, what happens when the National Assembly is formed and over 100,000 US soldiers remain on the ground in Iraq with the Bush Administration continuing in its refusal to provide a timetable for their removal?
What happens when Iraqis see that while there are already four permanent US military bases in their country, rather than beginning to disassemble them, more bases are being constructed, as they are, by Cheney's old company Halliburton, right now?[...]
Comment: Mind control. It goes on every day and it doesn't need fancy devices from some above top secret project. It is called TV, spoon-feeding pre-digested sound bites to people who have given up, if they ever had it, the ability to think for themselves.
"I saw it on Fox News, so it must be true." Think of the divide between someone who believes that and what, dear reader, have come to know about the world from doing your own research, pulling together the facts from many different sources, and thinking through the relations and interconnections, the patent lies, the disinformation and the rare gem of truth.
Do you still think there is any hope for the world?
What kind of shock would it take to wake up the people who watch Fox News?

The Iraqi Elections and How to Save the Planet

2005-01-31T19:24:00.000-05:00

There is little to say about the Iraqi elections, held as they were in the midst of the Iraqi war of resistance against the American and British occupation. What is astonishing is that observers of this farce can say, with a straight face, that everything was on the up and up.Take the following for example:
Iraqi election well-run but needs more transparency, Canada-led group says
09:23 AM EST Jan 31
AMMAN, Jordan (CP) - The Canadian-led international mission to assess the Iraqi election gave good marks Sunday to Iraqi electoral authorities for their independence and organization, but said there should be better rules governing campaign finances, voter registration and who's eligible to run.
"Iraq's Electoral Commission has prepared and put in place a framework for an election that generally meets recognized standards in terms of election law, planning and preparations," the International Mission for Iraqi Elections, or IMIE, said in a preliminary report released after the polls closed.
Jean-Pierre Kingsley, Canada's chief electoral officer and head of the mission, said Iraqi electoral authorities should be "congratulated for the rapid progress it has achieved in establishing the foundations for democratic participation in Iraq, particularly given the short time frame and arduous circumstances."
In a statement issued in Amman, from where the mission's team of electoral experts stayed in touch with various organizations in Iraq during the balloting, Kingsley said:
"It is a remarkable testimony to the resolve of the Iraqi people, and to the importance of democratic values, that millions of Iraqis faced personal risk in order to vote today, and that tens of thousands of individual Iraqis put their lives at risk by volunteering to work in polling locations explicitly threatened with attack."
He said their courage "must redouble international resolve to assist the Iraqi people in their ongoing transition to successful self-government."
The IMIE report praised the Iraqi electoral commission for its independence and the extent and quality of its planning and organization.
"Areas recommended for further development include transparency regarding financial contributions and expenditures, improvements to the voter registration process, and reviewing the criteria for candidate eligibility," the report said.
Asked to elaborate, an IMIE spokesman in Amman said: "We're not particularly saying that there are problems so much as there seems to be perhaps not as many rules in that particular area as other countries with more developed electoral processes are familiar with."
It will be up to the Iraqi electoral commission and the newly election national assembly to decide whether to act on the recommendations, the spokesman said.
IMIE was created last month in Ottawa to assess and advise Iraqi electoral authorities in the elections.
Members of the mission include the electoral management organizations of Albania, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Indonesia, Mexico, Panama, Romania, United Kingdom, Yemen, and the Association of Central and Eastern European Election Officials.
In light of the poor security situation in Iraq, the mission does not have its own election observers monitoring the vote inside the country. It sent a liaison representative to Baghdad but otherwise relied largely on about a dozen Iraqi organizations to feed information about the election to IMIE experts working in neighbouring Jordan.
Canada has provided $7 million Cdn to support the work of the mission, which will be assessing two other votes planned later this year in Iraq.
Did you get that? The IMIE didn't even go to Iraq due to the "poor security situation". It stayed in the Jordan capital of Amman.
And yet it is capable of writing a report that says that "Iraq's Electoral Commission has prepared and put in place a framework for an election that generally meets recognized standards in terms of election law, planning and preparations." What kind of international standard is it that includes situations where observers are too scared for their own skins to actually observe the elections themselves?
If the observers aren't safe, under what conditions are the people voting?
Not that they really had any idea of who they were voting for, as the candidates themselves were too scared of being assassinated to list their names, and so they voted for party lists, not individuals.
While most of the world's leaders and all of the mainstream news outlets are proclaiming the success of the Iraqi elections and what a triumph for democracy the whole public relations stunt is, the reality of the situation is that the elections are being stage managed by the very same people who, just 3 months ago, pulled off a second stolen election in the space of four years in the US. So our question is: if it was so easy to fool the entire world into thinking that Bush was legitmately elected, not once, but twice - when a little objective research shows that both elections were stolen - how easy would it be for these people to pull another fast one in war torn Iraq!? Oh, we'd say about as easy as it for US troops to squeeze off a few hundred rounds into the car, and bodies, of an Iraqi family - which is real easy when you're fighting "evil terrorists".
The US troops in Iraq are an occupying force, as in, illegally invading a country that was no threat, killing anyone who didn't like foreign troops in their land, and imposing a quisling government of yes-men to the occupiers.
It is not simply "a mistake" based upon "erroneous intelligence". It was a calculated invasion that was decided in advance of the intelligence.
We sometimes hear opponents to the occupation, from the US and elsewhere, saying that "At least we got rid of Saddam", as if that justifies in any way the crime. There is no justification, no more than Hitler's need for "living space" for the German people justified his invasion of Poland in the second world war. Some Americans, well, propbably most of them, are upset when the Bush Administration is compared with Nazi Germany. Well, maybe it's time they woke up and grew up. Bush is on a crusade, a holy mission from the voice he hears in his head that tells him it is his creator speaking and that gives him his marching orders. Although his crimes far surpass anything done by Bill Clinton, the zombies in Congress remain unmoved.
Are they all so corrupt that that can all be blackmailed to keep their silence if they are not actively part of fascist takeover? Or are they really so ignorant that they do not see what is happening?
In either case, it does not bode well for either the US or the rest of the world.
French President Jacques Chirac phoned Bush to congratulate him on the elections. Russian President Vlaidmir Putin called them a step in the right direction. Our guess is that those most adamantly opposed to Bush's wars have changed their tactics. Bush has shown that he does not care what the rest of the world thinks. Let them be opposed to his politcies, he and the neocons will go it alone, or with a restricted Coalition of the Bought Off. We suspect that while Chirac and Putin are whispering sweet nothings in Bush's ear over the telephone, they are rather actively involved in finding other means to quell the American beast, perhaps of the economic sort.
Russia in particular, after the US-backed soft revolutions in Georgia and the Ukraine, is not going to sit idlely by while US influence increases in the former Soviet block. Chirac, attacked within his own party by the strongly Atlanticist Nicolas Sarkozy, is going to want to ensure the Atlanticist position is weakened in France.
And then there is China, the manufacturer of more and more products sold in the US and holder of a large amount of the US debt.
If the rest of the world gets serious about stopping Bush and the neocons, the show will be an entertaining one. Bush and his friends have shown to what ends they will go to implement their policies: they are willing to kill 3000 Americans and blame it on "Islamic terrorists", blatantly lie about Saddam and his WMD, and destroy the American economy. This bespeaks a degree of fanaticism that will not be easily stopped.
Unfortunately, the opposition within the US, most of them, are not willing to admit that 9/11 was an inside job. Such a refusal suggests that they will be impotent in the face of the enemy because they do know really know the enemy, do not, or can not, admit just how evil these people really are. Only a terrible shock will open up the possibility of their awakening to the danger because they prefer their dreams and wishful thinking to the truth.
The Truth.
But even the Truth might not be enough to save the planet. What if the truth is that it cannot be saved? At least as we know it today.
Laura Knight-Jadczyk recently received a letter from a reader who was interested in her opinion of what he should do to help save the planet. He was thinking of running for office in the US on an ecologically centred platform This is part of her reply:
"[I]t seems that you perceive that we here at cass may, indeed, have a pretty good track record of seeing and predicting, even if we point out that prediction can only be statistical, and attaching dates is a fool's game.
It also seems that what you are seeking to do is a sort of "let's tell people as much as we have to in order to make this or that adjustment, but we can't tell them everything..." approach.
It's already way too late for that.
For example, just the other night we had a couple questions about the recent earthquake and tsunami. Here is the exchange:
Session date: Jan 9, 2005
[...] Q: Regarding the recent earthquake and tsunami, there is a huge buzz on the net that this was not a natural phenomenon. Some say it could have been a meteor; others say it was a US nuke; others say it was India and Israel playing around in the undersea trenches. Then there is the speculation on an EM weapon of some description. The New agers are saying it was the start of the final 'Earth Changes". So what really caused this earthquake that happened one year minus one hour after the earthquake in Iran?
A: Pressure in earth. Not any of the proferred suggestions. But remember that the human cycle mirrors the cycle of catastrophe and human mass consciousness plays a part.
Q: In what way does mass consciousness play a part?
A: When those with higher centers are blocked from full manifestation of creative energy, that energy must go somewhere. If you cannot create “without” you create “within”.
Now, with that in mind, read the signs page of Hallowe'en, 2004 where I wrote, in part:
There is more than a little scientific support for the above ideas that consciousness - the root of existence and BEing - has two fundamental states: on, or off. In the final analysis, it seems that the metaphor of humanity and its collective "higher selves" being a movie and an audience, may be simply anthropomorphizing creative and entropic forces of the universe for the purposes of "self-calming." The stakes, it seems, are a lot higher and more real.
This brings us to the issue of subjectivity vs. objectivity. [...]
We must regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. Consider an intelligence which, at any instant, could have a knowledge of all forces controlling nature together with the momentary conditions of all the entities of which nature consists. If this intelligence were powerful enough to submit all this data to analysis it would be able to embrace in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atoms; for it, nothing would be uncertain; the future and the past would be equally present to its eyes. Pierre Laplace
Certainly, such an intelligence as Laplace describes would be "Godlike," you agree? And certainly, no one of us human beings is capable of such "seeing," you will also agree. However, what does seem to be true is that this is a significant clue to the solutions to the pressing issues of our day: knowledge that leads to awareness.
Here I will insert a major clue: As the brain interacts with its environment, synaptic circuits combine to form synaptic maps of the world perceived by the senses. These maps describe small segments of that world - shape, color, movement - and these maps are scattered throughout the brain. As the brain's synaptic network evolves, beginning at birth - or even before - these maps process information simultaneously and in parallel.
Based on our synaptic maps of the world, we are enabled to have e more or less objective view of reality.
[snip
The view of the Bush Reich is, as it happens, diametrically opposed to the view we promote here at Signs of the Times. This view has been stated quite economically by the Cassiopaeans:
Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the "past." People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the "Future."
[big snip]
We here at Signs of the Times are not in the business of telling anyone what to do. We are only here as a lighthouse, a constant sweeping illumination that goes around and around and says, basically, the same thing over and over again. Our readership is growing by leaps and bounds, and we know that there are new readers every day who have not read every daily report for the past couple of years. We also know that there are regular readers who, after reading the page, go back to sleep and think "it can't be THAT bad." And so, again and again we shine the light, ring the alarm bell, and try to think of different ways to get through to others the extreme peril in which we stand.
This brings us back to the issue of how does Knowledge Protect?
In the past three years, as I noted at the beginning of today's page, we have made some considerable progress on our mandate of discovering what really makes reality tick and how does humanity fit into it. Much of this work is pure science - physics and mathematics - but I'm not going to give you the formulas or the computer simulation codes, I'm going to explain it to you in simple terms.
Our universe seems to be made up of matter/energy and of consciousness.
Matter/energy by itself "prefers", as it seems, a chaotic state.
Matter/energy by itself doesn't even have a concept of "creation" or "organization". It is the consciousness that brings to life these concepts and by its interaction with matter pushes the universe towards chaos and decay or towards order and creation.
This phenomenon can modeled mathematically and simulated on a computer using EEQT (Event Enhanced Quantum Theory). Whether EEQT faithfully models the interaction of consciousness with matter, we do not know; but chances are that it does because it seems to describe correctly physical phenomena better than just the orthodox quantum mechanics or its rival theories (Bohmian mechanics, GRW etc.)
What we learn from EEQT can be described in simple terms as follows:
Let us call our material universe "the system". The system is characterized by a certain "state". It is useful to represent the state of the system as a point on a disc. The central point of the disk, its origin, is the state of chaos. We could also describe it as "Infinite Potential." The points on the boundary represents "pure states" of being, that is states with "pure, non- fuzzy, knowledge". In between there are mixed states. The closer the state is to the boundary, the more pure, more 'organized' it is.
Now, an external "observer", a "consciousness unit", has some idea - maybe accurate, maybe false or anywhere in between - about the "real state" of the system, and observes the system with this "belief" about the state. Observation, if prolonged, causes the state of the system to "jump". In this sense, you DO "create your own reality", but the devil, as always, is in the details.
The details are that the resulting state of the system under observation can be more pure, or more chaotic depending on the "direction" of the jump. The direction of the jump depends on how objective - how close to the reality of the actual state - the observation is.
According to EEQT if the expectations of the observer are close to the actual state of the system, the system jumps, more often than not, into more organized, less chaotic state.
If, on the other hand, the expectation of the observer is close to the negation of the actual state (that is when the observer's beliefs are closer to being false than to being true according to the ACTUAL state - the objective reality), then the state of the system, typically, will jump into a state that is more chaotic, less organized. Moreover, it will take, as a rule, much longer time to accomplish such a jump.
In other words, if the observer's knowledge of the actual state is close to the truth, then the very act of observation and verification causes a jump quickly, and the resulting state is more organized. If the observer's knowledge of the actual state is false, then it takes usually a long time to cause a change in the state of the system, and the resulting state is more chaotic.
What this means is that order can be brought out of chaos by observing chaos as it IS and not pretending that it is otherwise.
In short, everyone who "believes" in an attempt to "create reality" that is different from what IS, increases the chaos and entropy. If your beliefs are orthogonal to the truth, no matter how strongly you believe them, you are essentially coming into conflict with how the Universe views itself and I can assure you, you ain't gonna win that contest. You are inviting destruction upon yourself and all who engage in this "staring down the universe" exercise with you.
On the other hand, if you are able to view the Universe as it views itself, objectively, without blinking, and with acceptance, you then become more "aligned" with the Creative energy of the universe and your very consciousness becomes a transducer of order. Your energy of observation, given unconditionally, can bring order to chaos, can create out of infinite potential.
In the Adventure Series, I concentrated to a great extent on the problem of psychopathy in our world today. I was motivated to do this by the fact that we had been victimized by a psychopath whose behavior was utterly incomprehensible. As a consequence of this research, I was much better prepared to understand George Bush and his Reich and that served to "inoculate" me against the fear tactics that are utilized by the psychopath to paralyze their victims. I realize that Americans who are "stupid" are that way by design. In a sense, it is not their fault. They are no more capable of thinking on their own than the mouse is capable of escaping the claws of the cat determined to eat it.
But not everyone is a mouse. It is for those who are evolving that we continue to keep the lighthouse going. But be aware, the day may come - and sooner than you might expect - when the storm is so violent that the keepers of the flame will abandon the task, knowing that no light can be seen in such Stygian darkness.
In the Adventure Series, I wrote the following:
Could it ever be an evolutionarily stable strategy for people to be innately unselfish?
On the whole, a capacity to cheat, to compete and to lie has proven to be a stupendously successful adaptation. Thus the idea that selection pressure could ever cause saintliness to spread in a society looks implausible in practice. It doesn't seem feasible to outcompete genes which promote competitiveness. "Nice guys" get eaten or outbred. Happy people who are unaware get eaten or outbred. Happiness and niceness today is vanishingly rare, and the misery and suffering of those who are able to truly feel, who are empathic toward other human beings, who have a conscience, is all too common.
Nevertheless, a predisposition to, conscience, ethics, can prevail if and when it is also able to implement the deepest level of altruism: making the object of its empathy the higher ideal of enhancing free will in the abstract sense, for the sake of others, including our descendants.
In short, our "self-interest" ought to be vested in collectively ensuring that all others are happy and well-disposed too; and in ensuring that children we bring into the world have the option of being constitutionally happy and benevolent toward one another.
In short, if psychopathy threatens the well-being of the group future, then it can be only be dealt with by refusing to allow the self to be dominated by it on an individual, personal basis.
Preserving free will for the self in the practical sense, ultimately preserves free will for others.
Protection of our own rights AS the rights of others, underwrites the free will position and potential for happiness of all.
If mutant psychopaths pose a potential danger then true empathy, true ethics, true conscience, dictates using prophylactic therapy against psychopaths.
It seems certain from the evidence that a positive transformation of human nature isn't going to come about through a great spiritual awakening, socio-economic reforms, or a spontaneous desire among the peoples of the world to be nice to each other. But it's quite possible that, in the long run, the psychopathic program of suffering will lose out because misery is not a stable strategy.
In a state of increasing misery, victims will seek to escape it; and this seeking will ultimately lead them to inquire into the true state of their misery, and that may lead to a society of intelligent people who will have the collective capacity to do so.
And so it is that identifying the psychopath, ceasing our interaction with them, cutting them off from our society, making ourselves unavailable to them as "food" or objects to be conned and used, is the single most effective strategy that we can play. [...]
To allow oneself to be conned, or used by a psychopath is to effectively become part of his "hierarchy" of feeding. To believe the lies of the psychopath is to submit to his "bidding" (he bids you to believe a lie, and you acquiesce), and thus, to relinquish your free will.
In strictly material terms, this doesn't seem to be much of an issue, right? After all, somebody lies to us and who really cares? Is it going to hurt us to just let them lie? Is it going to hurt us to just go along with them for the sake of peace, even if we know or suspect they are lying? After all, checking the facts and facing the psychopath with truth, and telling them "no" is generally very unpleasant. Remember, the game is set up so that we pay a lot for being ethical in dealing with the psychopath. In material terms, it really doesn't seem to be worth it because we suffer all kinds of attack - verbal, psychological, and even physical abuse - so it's just easier to let sleeping dogs lie, right? [...]
At best, we can only really penetrate to the level of the psychological reality, observed behavior that is discordant, or self-destructive. And we are thoroughly programmed to help by giving until it hurts, or trying to fix, or to make nice. All of these things, all of these accommodations of psychopathy, on just a practical level, can be seen to "select for psychopathy" in terms of the gene pool.
But on another level, considering the great amount of evidence we have that there is something very mysterious going on that has to do with "controlling the minds of humanity," and covering up something that may affect every single human being on this planet, we find that the issue is crucial. Refusing to accommodate the manipulations and maneuvers of the psychopath may, indeed, be critical to the positive transformation of our planet. [...]
And we see that the ultimate aim of the psychopath, as living representatives of the Universal forces of Entropy, of Non-Being, is to MASTER creative energy. To assimilate it to the self, to deprive others of it by inducing them to believe lies.
Because, when you believe the lie of the psychopath, you have given him control of your Free Will - the essence of Creativity. [...]
As I quoted above: Thus, the first Divine Command is BE! And that includes Being and Non-being instantaneously. Therefore, the second law is "follow Being or Non-being according to your choice and your inherent nature."
All creation is a result of the engendering command. So, in this respect, there is no Evil. But the second, prescriptive law determines to which "Face of God" one will return: Life or Death.
There ARE such things as "evil planets," and dark stars. And the real question at this time is: Is Mother Earth about to become one?
Happy Hallowe'en.
Now, you are a smart guy - no question in my mind about that - so I am sure you can do a bit of extrapolating from the above and understand that there is one, and ONLY one way to "save the earth." Since humanity - as a whole - is an "organ for transducing cosmic energies onto our planet", the condition of humanity - as a whole - is reflected by the planet. The suffering of humanity, the lies that humans believe, all have a profound effect on the planet.
VERY IMPORTANT: it is not whether or not one "believes" in good things or bad things that makes good things or bad things happen. It is the factual observation of reality and whether or not it leads to a true assessment or lies.
The effort to view the universe AS IT VIEWS ITSELF with love and acceptance even in the face of what might be termed "horror" can actually lead to amelioration of that horror. To view the universe and to deny the truth and to insist that one can believe whatever one wants and thereby make it so, is to deny reality and contributes to the chaos, the destruction, the suffering.
And so, what is the solution? The TRUTH - as close to it as we can objectively get - MUST be propagated as widely and as soon as possible.
That is the only thing that will "save the planet." Because it is in the creative centers of humanity - both kinds, those with souls and those without - that the fate of the earth lies.

Fear grips Baghdad before election

2005-01-29T13:19:00.000-05:00

Baghdad kicked into panic mode three days before the election, with terrified Iraqis stockpiling food and evacuating homes near polling places Thursday for fear that insurgents would make good on threats to disrupt Sunday's vote with violence.
At least 15 Iraqis and a U.S. Marine were killed Thursday. Insurgents blew up six polling places, detonated car bombs in three cities, triggered at least three roadside bombs and gunned down several Iraqi policemen, according to the U.S. military and Iraqi authorities.
Iraqis who support the parliamentary election and those who oppose it agreed on one thing: They expect such attacks to grow much, much worse.
"How much fear is there? A lot of fear. A whole lot of fear," said Dhikra Hussein, 25, who lives a block from a polling center. "Our neighbors are all gone. We've bought 3 kilos of everything we need."
Leaflets passed out to residents of several neighborhoods in Baghdad warn of more attacks that will "strike voting centers powerfully and without mercy." Another insurgent flier says "a gift" is waiting for each polling place. Rumors abound that Iraqis in line to cast ballots Sunday will be mowed down by gunfire or blown up by suicide bombers posing as voters.
While many Iraqis said they wouldn't risk their lives to vote, others said the first step to democracy was worth the sacrifice.
"Since when are Iraqis afraid of anything? We don't have time for fear," said Mohammed Abbas, a supermarket owner in his 40s. "We're ready for anything. Right now, as I'm talking, a mortar could just fall and kill us. We expect anything these days."
The insurgents' campaign of intimidation appears successful in nearly paralyzing a city of millions. The capital's notorious traffic snarls were gone Thursday, and residents locked themselves inside at dusk, even though the interim government's strict curfew and ban on civilian cars don't begin until Saturday.
Local newspapers announced Internet-only editions because printing-press employees won't leave their homes starting Friday. Shops sold out of large burlap bags of rice, potatoes, lentils and other Iraqi staples. Men lugged home huge canisters of fuel and kerosene. Women stripped duct tape over their windows to prevent the glass from shattering in explosions.
Travel agencies were packed all week with families desperate to make it to Jordan or Syria before the borders are completely sealed Saturday. Iraqi bus drivers who dropped passengers at checkpoints along the border said they found no one waiting for rides back into Iraq. The airport also will be closed until after the election.
The Iraqi army and police forces are better trained than they were in 2003, when they were given a week's training and a gun.
But the security scene across Iraq is a stark reminder of how unprepared the Iraqis are as Sunday's vote approaches:
• In Mosul, violence remains uncontrolled, despite the presence of thousands of American troops and more than 4,000 Iraqi police and army reinforcements sent to supplement the 8,000 Iraqis already on duty there. Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, who's in charge of American forces there, says that the challenge in Mosul is the lack of a "credible and capable police force."
• There are 11 Iraqi army battalions in the areas controlled by the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division south of Mosul, each with about 900 men and based in key cities such as Samarra, Tikrit, Baqouba, Balad and Kirkuk. Only two or three are capable of conducting operations much beyond roadblocks, U.S. officers say. Infiltration remains a major problem. Soldiers from the 1st Infantry arrested one battalion commander for allegedly collaborating with the insurgents.
• More than four months after U.S. and Iraqi forces retook Samarra from insurgents, U.S. and Iraqi units are still waiting for the arrival of new police recruits being trained in Jordan or Baghdad. Insurgents carry out an average of five attacks a day there, according to Maj. Gen. John R.S. Batiste, commander of the 1st Infantry Division.
• In Baghdad, where there are seven Iraqi army battalions, many of the soldiers wear ski masks and street clothes to hide their identities out of fear that insurgents will kill their families.
Impromptu neighborhood-watch teams have sprung up in areas near polling places, which are mostly schools and community centers. In the heavily Shiite Muslim district of Kadhemiya, for example, Nadhim Abed and two friends nervously watched passers-by through the window of his real-estate office right across from a primary school designated as a polling place.
"We weren't expecting this to be a polling center," said Abed, 33. "So we just got together, and we're watching the streets now, looking for anything strange."
A lone policeman who looked no more than 18 stood guard at the school, which was protected by a single, puny coil of razor wire. Abed and his friends observed the "security perimeter" with resignation."It's all in God's hands," he said. "If it happens, we can't stop it."

Auschwitz: The Final Count

2005-01-27T20:40:00.000-05:00

A thought-provoking new anthology edited by English historian Vivian Bird casts stark new light on what really happened at Auschwitz during World War II. As the evidence shows, the official "facts" just don’t add up.
In the summer of 1997 I was invited to speak at a California college seminar about my book, Final Judgment, which contends that Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, played a front-line role in the JFK assassination conspiracy alongside the CIA. Almost instantaneously I was hit by a media barrage orchestrated by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, a lobby for Israel.
The ADL told the press I was "a Holocaust denier" and, for that reason alone, I should not be allowed to discuss my book (which, incidentally, never once mentions the Holocaust). Evidently the ADL was determined to shift the focus away from what my book really does address, so they determined the best way to discredit me was to smear me as "a Holocaust denier" (which I am not).
The ADL’s tactic succeeded, setting off a firestorm of opposition—a "holocaust," so to speak—and the seminar was canceled, illustrating one point most clearly: The Holocaust has become a powerful propaganda tool for the state of Israel.
And what is important to remember is this: What did—or did not—happen at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland is, in fact, integral to the foundation of the basic story of the Holocaust.
Auschwitz is central to the Holocaust legend. If it can be proved that the official stories we have been told about Auschwitz are not true, the entire fabric of the Holocaust ultimately has to unravel. What, then, did happen at Auschwitz?
On April 18, 1945, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, The New York Times reported that 4 million people died at Auschwitz. This "fact" was reported over and over again during the next half-century, without being questioned.
However, on January 26, 1995, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation, both The Washington Post and The New York Times itself reported that the Polish authorities had determined that, at most, 1.5 million people (of all races and religions)—not "4 million"—died at Auschwitz of all causes, including natural causes.
Yet this was not the first time this drastically reduced figure appeared in the major media. Almost five years previously, on July 17, 1990, The Washington Times reprinted a brief article from The London Daily Telegraph. That article stated:
Poland has cut its estimate of the number of people killed by the Nazis in the Auschwitz death camp from 4 million to just over 1 million . . . The new study could rekindle the controversy over the scale of Hitler’s "final solution" . . .
Franciszek Piper, director of the historical committee of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, said yesterday that, according to recent research, at least 1.3 million people were deported to the camp, of whom about 223,000 survived.
The 1.1 million victims included 960,000 Jews, between 70,000 and 75,000 Poles, nearly all of the 23,000 Gypsies sent to the camp and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war.
Shmuel Krakowsky, head of research at Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, said the new Polish figures were correct: "The 4 million figure was let slip by Capt. Rudolf Hoess, the death camp’s Nazi commander. Some have bought it, but it was exaggerated." . . . [P]laques commemorating the deaths of 4 million victims were removed from the Auschwitz museum earlier this month.
This detail of history was intriguing, since, after all, history books had said for a generation that of the 6 million Jews who died during the Holocaust, 4 million died at Auschwitz alone. Thus, if the new facts were correct, the actual overall number of Jewish Holocaust victims had to be considerably less than the much-talked-about figure of 6 million. Put simply: subtract the former 4 million Jews dead at Auschwitz from the popular 6 million, and that leaves 2 million Jews dead. Simple math—and a controversial conclusion indeed.
More recently, Walter Reich, former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, jumped into the debate over Auschwitz. On September 8, 1998, The Washington Post published an article by Reich in which he addressed Jewish outrage over a group of elderly Polish nuns who wanted to place crosses in memory of Christians who died at Auschwitz. Reich was responding to what he described as a "well-meaning" August 31, 1998 editorial in The Post about the affair.
Reich commented that the editorial "illustrates how old fictions about Auschwitz have been accepted as facts—fictions that have been used repeatedly to distort the camp’s history." Evidently, the Post had forgotten its own report on the Auschwitz numbers that it had published three years previously and chose, instead, to repeat "old fictions . . . accepted as facts." What, then, were those "old fictions . . . accepted as facts"? Here’s what Reich had to say:
The Post identified Auschwitz-Birkenau as the death camp "where 3 million Jews and millions of others were murdered by the Nazis." Recent scholarship by a Polish historian has put the number of deaths there conservatively at about 1.1 million, with other estimates ranging to about 1.5 million. Approximately 90 percent of the dead were Jews.
The Post’s numbers may have been derived in part from the inflated estimate—originally of Soviet origin and endorsed by Polish authorities after the war—of about 4 million dead. This number, and other numbers of similar magnitude, were repeated so often that they came to be accepted by many as true, even though historians in Poland and elsewhere have revised this number down considerably.
Honest people find no problem with Reich’s call (in the essay) for "only words of accurate history" in reportage about Auschwitz. Today, a major first step toward "only words of accurate history" is the release of a new anthology on Auschwitz, assembled by English writer Vivian Bird.
Auschwitz: The Final Count examines the "new" reports in the mainstream media (outlined above) and provides essential additional facts that must be considered in order for the full story of Auschwitz to finally be told. Bird’s 109-page book is a compendium (supplemented with commentary by Bird) of four complete, previously published works relating to Auschwitz and the Holocaust.
The book features a fascinating introduction by Bird exploring the little-known but thoroughly documented phenomenon in which the numbers of the official Auschwitz "death toll" have plummeted from a "high" of 9,000,000 dead to a rock bottom of 73,137 (of whom 38,031 were Jews). And readers will note that of the 26 widely varying figures cited by Bird, all come from a variety of "responsible" and mainstream sources. No figure Bird cites comes from any source accused of "denying the Holocaust," whatever that means.
Clearly, the number of people who died at Auschwitz is central to understanding what did happen there. But the figures keep changing. If Bird’s book proves anything, it proves that.
However, there’s much more to Auschwitz than the changing numbers. The essays in Bird’s volume each provide a uniquely different facet to the overall problem:
• The Auschwitz Lie by Thies Christophersen is an insider’s view of Auschwitz. The German author, an agrarian, was sent to Auschwitz, not as an inmate, but as a scientist researching the development of synthetic rubber. Working side by side with inmate staff, Christophersen saw, firsthand, day-to-day life at Auschwitz and, in postwar years, was astounded to hear the stories of "gassings" and all the tall tales that we today associate with Auschwitz.
His essay, The Auschwitz Lie, first published in German in 1973, caused great consternation. However, Christophersen would not back down, and, as a consequence, he was variously fined or imprisoned for daring to tell his eyewitness account. Those accustomed to "docu-drama" renditions of Auschwitz will find a new perspective in Christophersen’s report.
• Zyklon B, Auschwitz, and the Trial of Dr. Bruno Tesch is the second feature in Bird’s anthology. Written by a veteran chemist, the late Dr. William Lindsey, this is a carefully documented demolition of the war crimes trial of Dr. Tesch, who was ultimately convicted and hanged. The unfortunate Tesch was co-owner of a company which bought in bulk (from the manufacturers) and then supplied (as the middleman) to the German concentration camp authorities the now-infamous Zyklon B pesticide.
Although we have been told Zyklon B was used to gas millions of Jews to death, Lindsey shows that the compound was used as an insecticide and disinfectant to delouse not only the Auschwitz inmates but also SS members running the camp and to fumigate their clothes, bunkhouses etc. Zyklon B, in short, was used to maintain and sustain human life—not to end it. Lindsey’s essay examines the fraudulent evidence and testimony in the Tesch trial and eviscerates another critical element of not only the Auschwitz legend, but of the Holocaust story as a whole.
• Inside the Auschwitz "Gas Chambers" is by Fred A. Leuchter, a spunky American engineer once known as perhaps the foremost U.S. authority on the mechanics of judicial execution. Leuchter describes how he conducted scientific experiments on the structures at Auschwitz that court historians say were used to exterminate vast numbers of people—the infamous gas chambers. Leuchter concluded no such gassings could have ever taken place as the official story describes. For daring to present his findings—the only known such study carried out at the gas chambers—Leuchter was relentlessly harassed. But his point was made. His findings cut right to the core of the matter of Auschwitz.
• The final essay is Why Is "The Holocaust" Important? written by TBR publisher Willis A. Carto, who points out that the Holocaust has become a lucrative industry unto itself, used as a highly effective political tool to not only extort billions of German and American taxpayer dollars to Israel but also to force the United States to conduct its foreign policy in a fashion beneficial to Tel Aviv (and contrary to U.S. national interests). Carto’s essay puts the Holocaust in perspective.
Thus, there’s clearly much more to the story of Auschwitz and the Holocaust than meets the eye. The facts assembled paint a perhaps much more interesting story about what really did happen.
Bird’s book will, in many ways, very much serve as the final judgment on Auschwitz. Auschwitz: The Final Count will outrage many—but as Bird puts it: "For those who care to investigate the facts—not the myths—about the events of World War II, this volume should put at least some of the major legends of the Holocaust to rest."

Israel’s “Religious Coloration” Nukes

2005-01-26T16:50:00.000-05:00

It’s not only Iran an Syria, Meir Dagan, Mossad boss, told Haaretz, but it is also Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Arabs want nukes and you know what Arabs with nukes will do to Israel. Dagan didn’t say Egypt and Saudi Arabia would necessarily nuke Israel. But he did say Iran is urging “Hezbollah to carry out terror attacks in Israeli territory, and giving assistance to Palestinian terror organizations,” in other words organizations resisting Israeli occupation. As for “Israel territory,” we can only assume Dagan is talking about the Shebba farms area, part of Syria until the Israelis stole it. Last week Hezbollah blew up an Israeli bulldozer near Shebba farms and the Israelis responded by bombing villages in southern Lebanon, an obvious violation of that nation’s sovereignty, although it was not framed that way in Haaretz.
Shimon Peres chimed in on the Israeli broken record mantra. “Iran is the problem of the Middle East,” Peres said. “It is a group of people who have freed themselves from speaking the truth, who think that the means justify the ends, and who hide everything they do,” he told Army Radio. “It is the center of terrorism in the Middle East. It is trying to create a nuclear option with a religious coloration.”
Never mind that Israel’s nukes—numbered between 200 and 400 and ready to go—have both a religious and nationalist coloration. Israel is a weapons of mass destruction state, the only one in the Middle East with the exception of Pakistan, and is not shy about using them. In 1948, specialized Israeli military units sabotaged water wells with typhoid and dysentery bacteria in Acre (near Haifa), a rather vicious war crime. Israel is not a signatory to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and it has signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. As James Brooks points out, Israel has used chemical warfare against Palestinians demonstrating against the apartheid wall. “What the army used here [in the West Bank village of al-Zawiya] yesterday [June 10th, 2004] was not tear gas,” wrote Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group.
We know what tear gas is, what it feels like. That was something totally different…. When we were still a long way off from where the bulldozers were working, they started shooting things like this one (holding up a dark green metal tube with the inscription “Hand and rifle grenade no.400″ - in English). Black smoke came out. Anyone who breathed it lost consciousness immediately, more than a hundred people. They remained unconscious for nearly 24 hours. One is still unconscious, at Rapidiya Hospital in Nablus. They had high fever and their muscles became rigid. Some needed urgent blood transfusion. Now, is this a way of dispersing a demonstration, or is it chemical warfare?
Further evidence of Israeli development of chemical weapons surfaced on October 4, 1992, when a Boeing 747 airliner of the Israeli airline El Al crashed into apartment blocks at Bijlmermeer, near Schiphol Airport, south-east of Amsterdam, en route from New York to Tel Aviv. “At least 47 people were killed and over a thousand local residents fell ill to respiratory, neurological and mobility ailments and experienced a rise in cancer and birth defects,” writes Neil Sammonds. In 1998 the Dutch daily Handelsblad revealed that the Israeli plane not only carried depleted uranium, but “10 tons of chemicals, including hydrofluoric acid, isopropanol and dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP) —three of the four chemicals used in the production of sarin nerve gas.”
In 1998, the London Times reported Israel has conducted research into “ethnic bombs,” a “biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews, according to Israeli military and western intelligence sources. … In developing their ‘ethno-bomb’, Israeli scientists are trying to exploit medical advances by identifying distinctive genes carried by some Arabs, then create a genetically modified bacterium or virus. … The programme is based at the biological institute in Nes Tziyona, the main research facility for Israel’s clandestine arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.”
Not surprisingly, the biological studies were first initiated by the racist South African Apartheid regime, a natural ally of the equally racist and vicious Israelis. “The idea of a Jewish state conducting such research has already provoked outrage in some quarters because of parallels with the genetic experiments of Dr Josef Mengele, the Nazi scientist at Auschwitz.” The claim Israel is developing ethnic weapons was confirmed by the Foreign Report, a Jane’s publication that closely monitors security and defense matters. “It reports unnamed South African sources as saying Israeli scientists have used some of the South African research in trying to develop an ‘ethnic bullet’ against Arabs.”
In short, Israel is “the center of terrorism in the Middle East,” not Iran, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. It has more weapons of mass destruction than all of the countries Dagan mentioned—and it has used them against Palestinians. Considering this, it is perfectly natural for Iran to build a nuclear program in response to Israel’s use of WMD and its non-stop threats issued against the Iranian government and the people of Iran. It has little to do with “religious coloration” and everything to do with making sure Israel does not attack, something they continually urge the Americans to do.
Obviously, tiny Israel, barely capable of containing Palestinian resistance to occupation, is unable to take on Iran. “Peres cautioned against Israel taking on the burden of confronting Tehran,” notes Haaretz. “The Iran issue is a global one. Let the world conduct the war. How much do we need to take upon ourselves,” said Peres. “In any event, Peres continued, diplomatic solutions must be explored by Washington and others before any decision for military action should be taken.”
“Pentagon hardliners,” i.e., Strausscons in the Pentagon, are mulling “the use of air and special operations attacks against Iran’s suspected nuclear facilities” in order to “stop the ruling clerics in Tehran [from] acquiring warheads,” write Julian Borger and Ian Traynor. “Washington has stood aside from recent European negotiations with Iran, and Pentagon hardliners are convinced that the current European-brokered deal suspending nuclear enrichment and intensifying weapons inspections is unenforceable and will collapse in months.” In other words, the Strausscons and the Likudites are waiting for the European negotiations to fail before they attack Iran, telling the world it will be a last ditch effort to get rid of Iran’s phantom nukes of “religious coloration.”
This is scary business. Iran’s Shahab-4 and Shahab-5 missiles are more than capable of striking Israel with conventional explosive payloads. If Israel or the United States attack Iran—as they will most assuredly do after the Europeans give up on negotiations—Iran will undoubtedly respond by attacking Israel and U.S. forces in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. If this happens, all hell will break loose and Israel will respond with its weapons of mass destruction. It will be the first chapter of World War IV, as envisioned by the Strausscons.
You can almost hear the exuberant salivation of the “civilians” over at the Pentagon in response to the prospect of waging “total war,” a quote apparently misattributed to Michael Ledeen. In fact, the quote is attributed to Adam G. Mercurial, a National Review columnist. Mercurial wrote:
if we are going to win a total victory in the war on terrorism while deterring other major wars around the globe, we will first have to rid ourselves of our aversion to total war. By ‘total’ war, I mean the kind of warfare that not only destroys the enemy’s military forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely personal point of decision, so that they are willing to accept a reversal of the cultural trends that spawned the war in the first place. A total-war strategy does not have to include the intentional targeting of civilians, but the sparing of civilian lives cannot be its first priority… The purpose of ‘total’ war is to permanently force your will onto another people group… [T]octal war pits nation against nation, even culture against culture.
It is “total war” the Strausscons want to wage against the Iranians, Arabs, and the Muslims of South Asia. How better to do this than to nuke them, or unleash an “ethno-bomb” to decimate them because “sparing of civilian lives cannot be its first priority"? For as Ledeen has said, “There is every reason to believe we will succeed in revolutionizing the Middle East, for we have always excelled at destroying tyrannies… We wage total war, because we fight in the name of an idea—freedom —and ideas either triumph or fail.”
“Freedom,” or rather “a reversal of the cultural trends that spawned the war in the first place” (because Likudites and Strausscons hate Muslim culture) through bunker-buster, cruise missile, depleted uranium, and possibly nukes and ethno-bombs is what the Strausscons are all about, as Iraq and Afghanistan make painfully obvious.
Bush has his “political capital,” plans to spend it, and the Strausscons are “ascendant,” as the corporate media reports, so we can expect perpetual bombing campaigns, invasions, and occupations in the near future. It is, after all, what the Strausscons have promised for more than a decade now. Surprise in response to the unleashing of World War IV will be inappropriate.

Six degrees of pure evil

2005-01-25T16:01:00.000-05:00

I find it an absolute mystery how any American can support George W. Bush. The man is walking personified evil. An endless deceit, upright and on two legs. Bush is without moral restraint and without conscience. He neither listens to wise counsel nor does he allow himself to be influenced by consequences.

Bush’s claim to be “guided by God” is without the fruits of that claim. Jesus Himself stated, “by their fruits you shall know them.” It means that the proof of a man’s convictions is in the actions and work that man performs. In the vernacular that means, Bush talks the talk but he does not walk the walk.

The Bush family is classically dysfunctional in the American sense. Deception and covert practice are the root for the Bush/Machiavellian family coat of arms and therefore the coat of arms reads, “a profitable end justifies whatever means are necessary.” Prescott Bush (George’s grandfather) was the financial architect and banker for the Third Reich and Adolph Hitler. Therefore the Bush family fortune was made on the backs of the Jewish Holocaust. Sounds harsh, I admit.

The Bush family is a proud member in good standing of the ‘east coast ruling elite’. The original “good old boy network” and what they (the Bush family) cannot achieve on personal merit, they simply purchase using their ample family fortune. This is not an indictment of personal wealth. It is merely an illustration of the Bush family motto at work and deceit. The Bush family may not have been born to the life of privilege, but they bought their way into American aristocracy compliments of millions of dead Jews at the hands of the Third Reich. The collective guilt that is associated with the family’s procurement of their vast fortunes, goes a very long way to explain the obsession of George W. Bush and the State of Israel.

With some apologies to Kevin Bacon, you have Germany pre-World War II and the German economy is reeling under inflation and a pending global depression. The German economy is in desperate straits and with the rise of the Third Reich and Adolph Hitler’s plan for world domination, Germany is in need to ramp up it’s economy and its war machine. Enters Prescott Bush and a conspiracy of American corporate aristocrats that will facilitate Germany’s revitalization and budding war machine, for a profit. Prescott Bush is father to George H. W. Bush who is father to George W. Bush. You have three degrees of war necessity and three degrees of paternal connection -- Adolph Hitler to George W. Bush. In the very least, that is one eerie synchronicity.

George H. W. Bush has an aide-de-camp that wears the face of James Baker. George W. Bush has his Rasputin that wears the face of Karl Rove. James Baker was instrumental in procuring the presidency for George W. Bush. Baker called in some markers that were in the possession of members of the United States Supreme Court and the rest is relevant twisted American history. Whether it was fate or simple criminal collusion on the part of Baker, the Supreme Court, the Republican Party, and America is chained to George W. Bush until someone is able to break that intolerable chain.

Karl Rove is the grandson of Karl Heinz Roverer, the Gauleiter of Oldenburg. Roverer was Reich-Stat halter or Nazi State Party chairman for the region of Germany that the Rove or Roverer family is from. Heir Roverer was also the senior engineer in the Roverer Sud-Deutche Ingenieurburo A. G. Engineering -- the firm built the Birkenau death camp.

The holocaust survivors know full well about Birkenau but, I would venture that not many of those survivors know about Karl Rove and his infamous grandfather’s construction prowess. So, you have three degrees of Nazi Party chairman/engineers of death camps and you have three degrees of distancing from a black past and viola, Bush and Rove are conjoined at the soul by grandfathers and fathers and Machiavellian intrigues. In American politics, it just doesn’t get any better than this.

Rove is an interesting study in behind-the-scenes manipulation and cut-throat politics and win-at-any-cost discipline. If there is anyone in the Bush administration that has internalized and put into practice Machiavellian principles, it is Karl Rove.

Considering his family history, it is no small wonder that Rove prefers the shadows. Rove grew up in Utah, is Mormon, and is influenced by Mormons. The Republican assault on the National Democratic Party has its roots in Utah, where Democrats have been castrated and silenced, and it is to Rove’s credit and skill as a political hit-man and cold political killer/theoretician that Utah Democrats are non-existent. Rove has put his extinction plan into action on the national scene, and the National Democratic Party’s days are numbered. Utah is the home of the original one-party state/religion and the demise of Democrats in Utah was fait accompli about twenty years ago. Add in three degrees of Rasputin like political intrigue, three degrees of seditious assault on America’s two party political system, and it adds up to Ayatollah Republicans and the beginning of the one-party state and religion in America. Rove is merely carrying on a family tradition of fascist subversion of standing political systems, and Rove does his work with a zeal that borders on the fanatical.

The idea that America would or could support George W. Bush is as mysterious as it is suspect. National polls show that at best, polls are misleading, ambiguous, and ridiculous in their conclusions. The mainstream media polls are suspicious by simple association with the corporate media concerns. The polls are geared to produce skewed results that are then broadcast to the American public as news. The mainstream media concerns are owned by a very few companies and the heads of these concerns are all friends with George W. Bush and his administration.

The subversion of American government is a fascist pogrom devised and implemented by a cult of greed. The cult of corporate American greed. The members of this cult of greed are the members of the Republican National Committee and the insiders that run Wall Street.

Fascism by its very definition is a profitable enhancing of the symbiosis between corporate interests and government interests. Corporate America is very interested in keeping George W. Bush in power, at the expense of American democracy and the American people. The government that is “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is not in the interests of corporations, and that is an unacceptable diorama. Therefore corporate America is in collusion with media concerns to keep the American people stupid, in dire financial need, and in support of the very people that are un-democratizing America. It is as convoluted as it is brilliant and sinister. Tease, tantalize, and subvert. Three degrees of dummying down America, conjoined with three degrees of heinous corporate sedition, and that equals George W. Bush and the death of democratic America.

The idea that Americans in general could support torture, preemptive war, presidential deceit, fraudulent elections, congressional deceit, and corporate collusion with fascism is not only suspect, it is an outright boldfaced lie. Therefore you have three degrees of corporate monopoly on media and you have three degrees of Americans in the dark. Their right to know has been severely hampered by dumb-assed players in a game of the prophetic six degrees of George W. Bush.

The prophetic part is the karma that will fall on those that would subvert the American democratic process. The consequences of sedition are coming, and once the great sleepy giant that is the American people wake up, there is going to be hell to pay. Six degrees of separation will not be enough to save the criminals that have attempted to play America as the stooge.

THE COMING WARS - What the Pentagon can now do in secret

2005-01-24T17:05:00.000-05:00

George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.

Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush’s reëlection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing.

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”
Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrong—whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s’ vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld’s dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt.

Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”

For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries in the European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon as a race against time—and against the Bush Administration. They have been negotiating with the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear-weapons ambitions in exchange for economic aid and trade benefits. Iran has agreed to temporarily halt its enrichment programs, which generate fuel for nuclear power plants but also could produce weapons-grade fissile material. (Iran claims that such facilities are legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or N.P.T., to which it is a signator, and that it has no intention of building a bomb.) But the goal of the current round of talks, which began in December in Brussels, is to persuade Tehran to go further, and dismantle its machinery. Iran insists, in return, that it needs to see some concrete benefits from the Europeans—oil-production technology, heavy-industrial equipment, and perhaps even permission to purchase a fleet of Airbuses. (Iran has been denied access to technology and many goods owing to sanctions.)

The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in these negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so. The civilian leadership in the Pentagon has argued that no diplomatic progress on the Iranian nuclear threat will take place unless there is a credible threat of military action. “The neocons say negotiations are a bad deal,” a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told me. “And the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure. And that they also need to be whacked.”

The core problem is that Iran has successfully hidden the extent of its nuclear program, and its progress. Many Western intelligence agencies, including those of the United States, believe that Iran is at least three to five years away from a capability to independently produce nuclear warheads—although its work on a missile-delivery system is far more advanced. Iran is also widely believed by Western intelligence agencies and the I.A.E.A. to have serious technical problems with its weapons system, most notably in the production of the hexafluoride gas needed to fabricate nuclear warheads.

A retired senior C.I.A. official, one of many who left the agency recently, told me that he was familiar with the assessments, and confirmed that Iran is known to be having major difficulties in its weapons work. He also acknowledged that the agency’s timetable for a nuclear Iran matches the European estimates—assuming that Iran gets no outside help. “The big wild card for us is that you don’t know who is capable of filling in the missing parts for them,” the recently retired official said. “North Korea? Pakistan? We don’t know what parts are missing.”

One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what he called a “lose-lose position” as long as the United States refuses to get involved. “France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody knows it,” the diplomat said. “If the U.S. stays outside, we don’t have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse.” The alternative would be to go to the Security Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed by China or Russia, and then “the United Nations will be blamed and the Americans will say, ‘The only solution is to bomb.’”

A European Ambassador noted that President Bush is scheduled to visit Europe in February, and that there has been public talk from the White House about improving the President’s relationship with America’s E.U. allies. In that context, the Ambassador told me, “I’m puzzled by the fact that the United States is not helping us in our program. How can Washington maintain its stance without seriously taking into account the weapons issue?”

The Israeli government is, not surprisingly, skeptical of the European approach. Silvan Shalom, the Foreign Minister, said in an interview last week in Jerusalem, with another New Yorker journalist, “I don’t like what’s happening. We were encouraged at first when the Europeans got involved. For a long time, they thought it was just Israel’s problem. But then they saw that the [Iranian] missiles themselves were longer range and could reach all of Europe, and they became very concerned. Their attitude has been to use the carrot and the stick—but all we see so far is the carrot.” He added, “If they can’t comply, Israel cannot live with Iran having a nuclear bomb.”

In a recent essay, Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (and a supporter of the Administration), articulated the view that force, or the threat of it, was a vital bargaining tool with Iran. Clawson wrote that if Europe wanted coöperation with the Bush Administration it “would do well to remind Iran that the military option remains on the table.” He added that the argument that the European negotiations hinged on Washington looked like “a preëmptive excuse for the likely breakdown of the E.U.-Iranian talks.” In a subsequent conversation with me, Clawson suggested that, if some kind of military action was inevitable, “it would be much more in Israel’s interest—and Washington’s—to take covert action. The style of this Administration is to use overwhelming force—‘shock and awe.’ But we get only one bite of the apple.”

There are many military and diplomatic experts who dispute the notion that military action, on whatever scale, is the right approach. Shahram Chubin, an Iranian scholar who is the director of research at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, told me, “It’s a fantasy to think that there’s a good American or Israeli military option in Iran.” He went on, “The Israeli view is that this is an international problem. ‘You do it,’ they say to the West. ‘Otherwise, our Air Force will take care of it.’” In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor, setting its nuclear program back several years. But the situation now is both more complex and more dangerous, Chubin said. The Osirak bombing “drove the Iranian nuclear-weapons program underground, to hardened, dispersed sites,” he said. “You can’t be sure after an attack that you’ll get away with it. The U.S. and Israel would not be certain whether all the sites had been hit, or how quickly they’d be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they’d be waiting for an Iranian counter-attack that could be military or terrorist or diplomatic. Iran has long-range missiles and ties to Hezbollah, which has drones—you can’t begin to think of what they’d do in response.”

Chubin added that Iran could also renounce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “It’s better to have them cheating within the system,” he said. “Otherwise, as victims, Iran will walk away from the treaty and inspections while the rest of the world watches the N.P.T. unravel before their eyes.”

The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.

Some of the missions involve extraordinary coöperation. For example, the former high-level intelligence official told me that an American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts. (In 2003, the I.A.E.A. disclosed that Iran had been secretly receiving nuclear technology from Pakistan for more than a decade, and had withheld that information from inspectors.) The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices—known as sniffers—capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs.

Getting such evidence is a pressing concern for the Bush Administration. The former high-level intelligence official told me, “They don’t want to make any W.M.D. intelligence mistakes, as in Iraq. The Republicans can’t have two of those. There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.” The official added that the government of Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani President, has won a high price for its coöperation—American assurance that Pakistan will not have to hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, to the I.A.E.A. or to any other international authorities for questioning. For two decades, Khan has been linked to a vast consortium of nuclear-black-market activities. Last year, Musharraf professed to be shocked when Khan, in the face of overwhelming evidence, “confessed” to his activities. A few days later, Musharraf pardoned him, and so far he has refused to allow the I.A.E.A. or American intelligence to interview him. Khan is now said to be living under house arrest in a villa in Islamabad. “It’s a deal—a trade-off,” the former high-level intelligence official explained. “‘Tell us what you know about Iran and we will let your A. Q. Khan guys go.’ It’s the neoconservatives’ version of short-term gain at long-term cost. They want to prove that Bush is the anti-terrorism guy who can handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against the long-term goal of eliminating the black market for nuclear proliferation.”

The agreement comes at a time when Musharraf, according to a former high-level Pakistani diplomat, has authorized the expansion of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons arsenal. “Pakistan still needs parts and supplies, and needs to buy them in the clandestine market,” the former diplomat said. “The U.S. has done nothing to stop it.”

There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, coöperation with Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said that the Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. (After Osirak, Iran situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east, in an attempt to keep them out of striking range of other countries, especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection, however: Israel has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise missiles and has equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel tanks, putting Israeli F-16I fighters within the range of most Iranian targets.)

“They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population centers, or buried too deep, to be targeted,” the consultant said. Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by American or Israeli commando teams—in on-the-ground surveillance—before being targeted.

The Pentagon’s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics.

It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the need to eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part of a propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons planning. If so, the signals are not always clear. President Bush, who after 9/11 famously depicted Iran as a member of the “axis of evil,” is now publicly emphasizing the need for diplomacy to run its course. “We don’t have much leverage with the Iranians right now,” the President said at a news conference late last year. “Diplomacy must be the first choice, and always the first choice of an administration trying to solve an issue of . . . nuclear armament. And we’ll continue to press on diplomacy.”

In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. “We’re not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers here,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “They’ve already passed that wicket. It’s not if we’re going to do anything against Iran. They’re doing it.”

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse”—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

“The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,” said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. “You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated.” Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, “will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime.”

Rumsfeld planned and lobbied for more than two years before getting Presidential authority, in a series of findings and executive orders, to use military commandos for covert operations. One of his first steps was bureaucratic: to shift control of an undercover unit, known then as the Gray Fox (it has recently been given a new code name), from the Army to the Special Operations Command (socom), in Tampa. Gray Fox was formally assigned to socom in July, 2002, at the instigation of Rumsfeld’s office, which meant that the undercover unit would have a single commander for administration and operational deployment. Then, last fall, Rumsfeld’s ability to deploy the commandos expanded. According to a Pentagon consultant, an Execute Order on the Global War on Terrorism (referred to throughout the government as gwot) was issued at Rumsfeld’s direction. The order specifically authorized the military “to find and finish” terrorist targets, the consultant said. It included a target list that cited Al Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior leadership, and other high-value targets. The consultant said that the order had been cleared throughout the national-security bureaucracy in Washington.

In late November, 2004, the Times reported that Bush had set up an interagency group to study whether it “would best serve the nation” to give the Pentagon complete control over the C.I.A.’s own élite paramilitary unit, which has operated covertly in trouble spots around the world for decades. The panel’s conclusions, due in February, are foregone, in the view of many former C.I.A. officers. “It seems like it’s going to happen,” Howard Hart, who was chief of the C.I.A.’s Paramilitary Operations Division before retiring in 1991, told me.

There was other evidence of Pentagon encroachment. Two former C.I.A. clandestine officers, Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who publish Intelligence Brief, a newsletter for their business clients, reported last month on the existence of a broad counter-terrorism Presidential finding that permitted the Pentagon “to operate unilaterally in a number of countries where there is a perception of a clear and evident terrorist threat. . . . A number of the countries are friendly to the U.S. and are major trading partners. Most have been cooperating in the war on terrorism.” The two former officers listed some of the countries—Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Malaysia. (I was subsequently told by the former high-level intelligence official that Tunisia is also on the list.)

Giraldi, who served three years in military intelligence before joining the C.I.A., said that he was troubled by the military’s expanded covert assignment. “I don’t think they can handle the cover,” he told me. “They’ve got to have a different mind-set. They’ve got to handle new roles and get into foreign cultures and learn how other people think. If you’re going into a village and shooting people, it doesn’t matter,” Giraldi added. “But if you’re running operations that involve finesse and sensitivity, the military can’t do it. Which is why these kind of operations were always run out of the agency.” I was told that many Special Operations officers also have serious misgivings.

Rumsfeld and two of his key deputies, Stephen Cambone, the Under-secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, will be part of the chain of command for the new commando operations. Relevant members of the House and Senate intelligence committees have been briefed on the Defense Department’s expanded role in covert affairs, a Pentagon adviser assured me, but he did not know how extensive the briefings had been.

“I’m conflicted about the idea of operating without congressional oversight,” the Pentagon adviser said. “But I’ve been told that there will be oversight down to the specific operation.” A second Pentagon adviser agreed, with a significant caveat. “There are reporting requirements,” he said. “But to execute the finding we don’t have to go back and say, ‘We’re going here and there.’ No nitty-gritty detail and no micromanagement.”

The legal questions about the Pentagon’s right to conduct covert operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. “It's a very, very gray area,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate who served as the C.I.A.’s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-nineties.
“Congress believes it voted to include all such covert activities carried out by the armed forces. The military says, ‘No, the things we’re doing are not intelligence actions under the statute but necessary military steps authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to “prepare the battlefield.’” Referring to his days at the C.I.A., Smith added, “We were always careful not to use the armed forces in a covert action without a Presidential finding. The Bush Administration has taken a much more aggressive stance.”

In his conversation with me, Smith emphasized that he was unaware of the military’s current plans for expanding covert action. But he said, “Congress has always worried that the Pentagon is going to get us involved in some military misadventure that nobody knows about.”

Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities. Some operations will likely take place in nations in which there is an American diplomatic mission, with an Ambassador and a C.I.A. station chief, the Pentagon consultant said. The Ambassador and the station chief would not necessarily have a need to know, under the Pentagon’s current interpretation of its reporting requirement.

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and we financed them,” he said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.”

One of the rationales for such tactics was spelled out in a series of articles by John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, and a consultant on terrorism for the rand corporation. “It takes a network to fight a network,” Arquilla wrote in a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle:

When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists. These “pseudo gangs,” as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists’ camps. What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today’s terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult.

“If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with Al Qaeda,” Arquilla wrote, referring to John Walker Lindh, the twenty-year-old Californian who was seized in Afghanistan, “think what professional operatives might do.”

A few pilot covert operations were conducted last year, one Pentagon adviser told me, and a terrorist cell in Algeria was “rolled up” with American help. The adviser was referring, apparently, to the capture of Ammari Saifi, known as Abderrezak le Para, the head of a North African terrorist network affiliated with Al Qaeda. But at the end of the year there was no agreement within the Defense Department about the rules of engagement. “The issue is approval for the final authority,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “Who gets to say ‘Get this’ or ‘Do this’?”

A retired four-star general said, “The basic concept has always been solid, but how do you insure that the people doing it operate within the concept of the law? This is pushing the edge of the envelope.” The general added, “It’s the oversight. And you’re not going to get Warner”—John Warner, of Virginia, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee—“and those guys to exercise oversight. This whole thing goes to the Fourth Deck.” He was referring to the floor in the Pentagon where Rumsfeld and Cambone have their offices.
“It’s a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld—giving him the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally,” the first Pentagon adviser told me. “It’s a global free-fire zone.”

The Pentagon has tried to work around the limits on covert activities before. In the early nineteen-eighties, a covert Army unit was set up and authorized to operate overseas with minimal oversight. The results were disastrous. The Special Operations program was initially known as Intelligence Support Activity, or I.S.A., and was administered from a base near Washington (as was, later, Gray Fox). It was established soon after the failed rescue, in April, 1980, of the American hostages in Iran, who were being held by revolutionary students after the Islamic overthrow of the Shah’s regime. At first, the unit was kept secret from many of the senior generals and civilian leaders in the Pentagon, as well as from many members of Congress. It was eventually deployed in the Reagan Administration’s war against the Sandinista government, in Nicaragua. It was heavily committed to supporting the Contras. By the mid-eighties, however, the I.S.A.’s operations had been curtailed, and several of its senior officers were courtmartialled following a series of financial scandals, some involving arms deals. The affair was known as “the Yellow Fruit scandal,” after the code name given to one of the I.S.A.’s cover organizations—and in many ways the group’s procedures laid the groundwork for the Iran-Contra scandal.

Despite the controversy surrounding Yellow Fruit, the I.S.A. was kept intact as an undercover unit by the Army. “But we put so many restrictions on it,” the second Pentagon adviser said. “In I.S.A., if you wanted to travel fifty miles you had to get a special order. And there were certain areas, such as Lebanon, where they could not go.” The adviser acknowledged that the current operations are similar to those two decades earlier, with similar risks—and, as he saw it, similar reasons for taking the risks. “What drove them then, in terms of Yellow Fruit, was that they had no intelligence on Iran,” the adviser told me. “They had no knowledge of Tehran and no people on the ground who could prepare the battle space.”

Rumsfeld’s decision to revive this approach stemmed, once again, from a failure of intelligence in the Middle East, the adviser said. The Administration believed that the C.I.A. was unable, or unwilling, to provide the military with the information it needed to effectively challenge stateless terrorism. “One of the big challenges was that we didn’t have Humint”—human intelligence—“collection capabilities in areas where terrorists existed,” the adviser told me. “Because the C.I.A. claimed to have such a hold on Humint, the way to get around them, rather than take them on, was to claim that the agency didn’t do Humint to support Special Forces operations overseas. The C.I.A. fought it.” Referring to Rumsfeld’s new authority for covert operations, the first Pentagon adviser told me, “It’s not empowering military intelligence. It’s emasculating the C.I.A.”

A former senior C.I.A. officer depicted the agency’s eclipse as predictable. “For years, the agency bent over backward to integrate and coördinate with the Pentagon,” the former officer said. “We just caved and caved and got what we deserved. It is a fact of life today that the Pentagon is a five-hundred-pound gorilla and the C.I.A. director is a chimpanzee.”

There was pressure from the White House, too. A former C.I.A. clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the resignation of the agency’s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White House began “coming down critically” on analysts in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded “to see more support for the Administration’s political position.” Porter Goss, Tenet’s successor, engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a “political purge” in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior analysts who were known to write dissenting papers that had been forwarded to the White House. The recently retired C.I.A. official said, “The White House carefully reviewed the political analyses of the D.I. so they could sort out the apostates from the true believers.” Some senior analysts in the D.I. have turned in their resignations—quietly, and without revealing the extent of the disarray.

The White House solidified its control over intelligence last month, when it forced last-minute changes in the intelligence-reform bill. The legislation, based substantially on recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, originally gave broad powers, including authority over intelligence spending, to a new national-intelligence director. (The Pentagon controls roughly eighty per cent of the intelligence budget.) A reform bill passed in the Senate by a vote of 96-2. Before the House voted, however, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld balked. The White House publicly supported the legislation, but House Speaker Dennis Hastert refused to bring a House version of the bill to the floor for a vote—ostensibly in defiance of the President, though it was widely understood in Congress that Hastert had been delegated to stall the bill. After intense White House and Pentagon lobbying, the legislation was rewritten. The bill that Congress approved sharply reduced the new director’s power, in the name of permitting the Secretary of Defense to maintain his “statutory responsibilities.” Fred Kaplan, in the online magazine Slate, described the real issues behind Hastert’s action, quoting a congressional aide who expressed amazement as White House lobbyists bashed the Senate bill and came up “with all sorts of ludicrous reasons why it was unacceptable.”

“Rummy’s plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the Pentagon keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Then all the pieces of the puzzle fall in place. He gets authority for covert action that is not attributable, the ability to directly task national-intelligence assets”—including the many intelligence satellites that constantly orbit the world.

“Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government’s intelligence wringer,” the former official went on. “The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What’s missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone’s priorities—in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security—are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or ‘What are your priorities?’ Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it.”

Comment: To sum up: There has been a coup in the US. A group of right wing megalomaniac nut jobs have decided that the concept of democratic oversight or limits on their power is not something they are prepared to accept. 9/11 was their manufactured catalyst to force Congress and the American people to accept their covert policy of manufacturing 'on the ground' terrorist threats in nations which they desire to invade and appropriate. To do this they have demolished and/or co-opted the existing intelligence apparatus in the US and in its place established a 'think tank' made up of people who fully embrace their belief in pre-emptive attacks on other nations.
The fundamental lie that underpins their entire ideology is the idea that Muslim nations must be prevented from gaining nuclear capability on the grounds that such capability poses an immediate threat to America and its people. The American government has done much over the years to simply the concept of nuclear weapons in the mind of the average citizen. The truth is that the manufacture of 'nukes' is beyond the capabilities of all but a handful of the largest countries in the world. The possession of nuclear weapons by major nations has for years been touted as the best defence against the world ever experiencing a 'nuclear holocaust' because of the mutually assured destruction that any nuclear war entails. As such it is not reasonable to suggest that countries like Iran would preemptively attack any Western nation (or Israel). In fact, Iran's any desire or attempt on Iran's part acquire nuclear capabilities is most likely for the purpose of discouraging the type of illegal invasion and conquest that is currently being planned by the US. This is the real reason for the rush to convince the world that an invasion of Iran is necessary.

In recent years, some political commentators (most notably Mike Ruppert) have been noisily sounding the alarm over "peak oil", claiming that this issue is the hidden motivation for the current US administration's campaign for complete domination of the Middle East and much of the rest of the world. There are however many problems with the peak oil argument, not least of which is the fact that it has not been convincingly proven that the world's oil reserves are seriously depleted with no new reserves in sight.

From our own extensive research, we have come to a rather different explanation for the current geopolitical climate.

History shows that our planet undergoes cyclical natural catastrophes, be they from cometary bombardment or terrestrial upheavals. We believe that another event such as those that have plagued our planet for millennia is imminent. We also surmise that certain individuals at certain levels of government, both in the US and other countries, are aware of this fact. In line with the nature of the 'ruling elite' in the US, and also due to its preeminence in terms of military and economic might, it is the US that has taken the lead in attempting to prepare for this event. This preparation involves securing for itself the natural resources that are required to sustain civilisation. First and foremost among these is oil.
It is not hard to see that the advent of a natural cataclysm poses serious problems for those people who have become accustomed to possessing absolute power. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to predict just where a large incoming meteorite might strike. For example, it might impact the landmass of the US, decimating the population and rendering the country uninhabitable for many years. Faced with such incertitude the US governing elite have decided to hedge their bets against just such a calamity and annex those areas of the world that will be essential to the maintenance of their positions of power in the aftermath of a global upheaval.
That's the long and the short of it. For now anyway.

The Rhetoric of Bush's Inaugural Address versus the Reality of Bush Policy

2005-01-22T16:17:00.000-05:00

President Bush’s second inaugural address has received widespread praise for its recognition of the imperative of advancing human freedom worldwide, not just for its own sake, but for America’s own national interest.

Unfortunately, this ignores the fact that the United States has long been the number one military, diplomatic, and economic backer of the world’s most repressive regimes, a pattern that has only been strengthened under the Bush administration.

Correctly recognizing the roots of terrorism, President Bush noted that “as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat.” For much of the second half of his first term, he has emphasized that as a necessary means of curbing the threat of terrorism the United States much push for reform and democratization of the autocratic governments of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, and the Palestine Authority.

It is important to note, however, that none of the 9/11 hijackers came from those countries. Instead, they came from U.S.-backed dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, which continue to receive billions of dollars worth of U.S. military equipment annually. Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Tunisia and Morocco are also among the autocratic regimes in the Islamic world which continue to receive unconditional support from the United States.

A look at the six family dictatorships of the Persian Gulf region propped up by American arms and advisors underscores the irony that the nation founded in one of the first republican revolutions against monarchial rule is now the primary supporter of the world’s few remaining absolute monarchies.

It is presumably no coincidence that the only autocratic regimes toward which the Bush administration has pressed for reform have been those which have traditionally opposed American hegemonic goals in the region.

In addition, while Israel serves as an exemplary democracy for its Jewish citizens, the right-wing government of Ariel Sharon has engaged in a pattern of gross and systematic human rights violations in its occupied Palestinian territories, practices made possible in large part through billions of dollars worth of unconditional military and economic assistance sent annually courtesy of the American taxpayer.

If U.S. policy is indeed so contrary to the promotion of freedom and liberty, why has this become such a focal point of the Bush administration at the start of its second term?

Perhaps it is a means of diverting attention from the administration’s disastrous policies in Iraq. Though claims that Saddam Hussein still possessed “weapons of mass destruction” and had operational links with Al-Qaeda have been proven false, no one can deny the repressive nature of his regime or the Iraqi people’s right to live freely. Unfortunately, American forces have been responsible for far more civilian (deaths) in the nearly two years since the U.S. occupation began than during the final two years of Saddam’s regime.

It may also be a means of silencing opposition. If, for example, the American public can actually be made to believe that the primary purpose of U.S. foreign policy under President Bush is to promote democracy, critics of Bush administration policy can therefore be depicted as not supporting democracy. Indeed, in the only reference President Bush made to critics of his policies in his inaugural address, he blithely dismissed them as those who have “questioned the global appeal of liberty.”

President Bush promised that “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors.” If this is actually the case, President Bush must immediately make it clear to all governments that oppress their own people or those under their military occupation: unless and until you respect human rights, including the rights of people to choose their own government, the United States will immediately cease all economic and security assistance, withdraw American advisors to your police and military, block all transfers of American armaments and other implements of repression, and encourage other countries to do the same.

Unfortunately, there are currently no signs that President Bush is prepared to do this or that either party in Congress is willing to pressure him to do so.

Unless or until that time comes, President Bush’s noble words at his inauguration can only be seen as self-serving hypocrisy of the worst kind.

Deconstructing a Dictator

2005-01-21T17:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, George W. Bush was inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States. We could be forgiven for finding it hard to share in the enthusiasm and joy that his supporters in Washington undoubtedly felt. Knowing what the next four years of his rule will likely mean for the fate of the planet and all its inhabitants, it seems that Bush's speech on Capitol Hill in reality would sound more like a eulogy than a stately Presidential address.
It's difficult at the best of times to understand George's incoherent ramblings, and even though he was not the author of his 2005 Inaugural Address, the editors at Signs of the Times thought it might be helpful if we hired a translator to decipher the deeper meaning behind his words:

Vice President Cheney, Mr. Chief Justice, President Carter, President Bush, President Clinton, reverend clergy, distinguished guests, fellow citizens:

Translation: Mirror, mirror, on the wall...

On this day, prescribed by law and marked by ceremony, we celebrate the durable wisdom of our Constitution, and recall the deep commitments that unite our country. I am grateful for the honor of this hour, mindful of the consequential times in which we live, and determined to fulfill the oath that I have sworn and you have witnessed.

Translation: On this day marked by flagrant and unnecessary excess, and while the people of Iraq continue to suffer and die by our hand, we celebrate the material trappings that define our culture. I am grateful for the rigged voting machines of Diebold, the spin doctors in the media, and the Machiavellian tactics of my handler Karl Rove; and with a specious mandate, I'm determined to spend my political capital, now free to do whatever I damn well please.

At this second gathering, our duties are defined not by the words I use, but by the history we have seen together. For a half century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical - and then there came a day of fire.

Translation: Our duties are not defined by these words written for me, but by the reality that I alone create. For half a century, America has imposed it's will on any third world government that refused to capitulate to it's totalitarian demands. After Communism, there appeared to be years of relative quiet, while our secret undercover intelligence operatives staged successful coup-d'état's and political assassinations, installing ruthless puppet dictators in poorer countries so that we could exploit their people and resources. After years of this tactic, we got tired of operating in secret, and decided to bring the show out into the open by deliberately staging our own day of fire.

We have seen our vulnerability - and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

Translation: We have taken advantage of our vulnerable citizenry - by exploiting the source of their deepest fears. For as long as recalcitrant regions of the world refuse to bend to America's will - we will accuse them of resentment and tyranny - we will use our agents in the media to endlessly repeat lies about their ideologies of hatred and murder - and the imaginary spectre of a mortal threat - all the while using our own violence and destructive power against them. There is no force in history that can break our reign of fear-mongering and intimidation, nor one that can expose the pretensions of tyrants like myself and my neocon cabinet. We will dash the rewards and hopes of the decent and tolerant, knowing full well that people will choose slavery as long as we can convince them that they are free.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

Translation: We are led by dark and malicious forces that we barely comprehend, but whose conclusions we will blindly follow to the bitter end. The survival and success of their nefarious agenda increasingly depends on continued invasion and occupation of other lands. The best hope for all out apocalyptic war in our world is the relentless expansion of American hegemony in all the world.

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.

Translation: The interests of the neocon/Zionist alliance, now in control in America, in manipulating the deepest fears of the populace are now one. From the day of our founding, we have prattled on about rights, freedoms and dignity, while at the same time acting to ensure that nothing of the sort should ever become reality. We invoke the name of Jehovah/Yahweh at every opportunity so that the faceless multitudes should cower and tremble upon hearing his name. We peddle the lie of self-government while we wholly govern everything about you, we take it upon ourselves to become your masters because you so willingly agree to become our slaves. Advancing the interests of the wealthy and ruling elite is the mission that created our nation, paid for by the blood and sweat of your fathers. Once again we invoke the illusion of security so that you may all offer your sons and daughters as cannon fodder in the upcoming war to end all wars. It is the urgent calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

Translation: Watch out Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and all you other Middle Eastern nations, what is happening in Iraq will soon be happening to you. It is the ultimate goal of spreading American tyranny throughout your land, and inevitably engaging the entire world.

This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary. Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own. America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.

Translation: This is primarily a task of arms, as in testing the latest warfare technology on innocent civilians in developing nations, and we will use this force of arms indiscriminately and without provocation while saying that we are acting in our own defense. Freedom, by it's nature, must be believed by those we wish to enslave, they must believe that they choose it willingly, and thus can be easily coerced into defending their slavery, even at the cost of their own lives. And when a nation, or more accurately a nation's leader, doesn't have a soul, it's institutions, customs and traditions will reflect this absence. America has always imposed it's own style of totalitarianism, especially on the unwilling. It's goal is to plunder and decimate their people and resources, quell the voice of dissent, help other nations attain their own slavery, and imprison and kill those who would speak the truth or stand in it's way.
The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America's influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America's influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause.

Translation: The ruling elite know full well that the implementation of global tyranny is the work of many generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for publicizing it, for it's success is dependent on it's secrecy. Now that I have been given a second mandate, America's influence is practically unlimited, which is fortunate for us, but most unfortunate for the world's oppressed, because our version of freedom, as seen in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, is about to be imposed on the world at large.
My most solemn duty is to protect this nation and its people against further attacks and emerging threats. Some have unwisely chosen to test America's resolve, and have found it firm.
Translation: My most solemn duty is to disguise my true intentions, and keep repeating blatant lies about further attacks and emerging threats. Some have unwisely chosen to question my fundamentalist belief system and found it to be rigid and dogmatic.
We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.

Translation: I always speak in simplistic dualisms, like either you are with us or against us. And I mean it when I say every ruler and every nation better heed my words because the runaway freight train of American-style democracy will soon be battering down your doors. The American government will spare no effort to ensure that all dissidents, foreign and domestic, will end up in chains, and that the soldiers in my army will inflict the maximum amount of humiliation and servitude upon any men and women unfortunate enough to be labeled as enemy combatants - because when you strip away my facade of kindness and compassion, I am nothing more than an arrogant bully.

We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people. America's belief in human dignity will guide our policies, yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators; they are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty.

Translation: We will continue to propagate whatever lies we like about other governments and how they treat their own people in order to justify future military action. America's contempt for human dignity will continue to guide our policies, and we will only grudgingly pay lip-service to the notion of "rights" because we must hide the fact that we are really a bunch of petty dictators; our fear of dissent is only matched by our overwhelming scorn for the people we govern. And as long as I'm in power, there will be no justice, no freedom, no human rights, and no human liberty.

Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty - though this time in history, four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen, is an odd time for doubt. Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals. Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery. Liberty will come to those who love it.

Translation: Some, I know, have questioned my psychopathic rantings, though as Adolf Hitler, my mentor in history, used to say: A good dictator can never allow any sort of doubt. Americans, of all people, are not likely to wake up to the bubble of illusion that I have surrounded them with. Even though fascism will emerge right before their eyes, they will not accept the truth of my permanent tyranny and the high probability of their permanent slavery. For pain and suffering will come to those who fear it most and are aware of it least.

Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world:All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.

Translation: Today, America spouts the same tired rhetoric to the peoples of the world: All who live in fear of my tyranny shall be filled with hopelessness: the United States will augment your oppression, facilitate your oppressors. When you try to stand up for your liberty, we will shoot you down like dogs and label you "insurgents".

Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country.

Translation: Democratic reformers who are repressed, in prison or in exile can know for certain: America sees what you are trying to do: and our future leaders will make sure you stay that way.

The rulers of outlaw regimes can know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it."

Translation: The rulers of nations that we define as outlaw regimes can know that we will quote from any dead former President if it serves our ends. Even though the words of Abraham Lincoln apply more to us than any other country, it won't stop us from seeing this sick and twisted charade to its final conclusion.

The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to trust them. Start on this journey of progress and justice, and America will walk at your side.And all the allies of the United States can know: we honor your friendship, we rely on your counsel, and we depend on your help. Division among free nations is a primary goal of freedom's enemies. The concerted effort of free nations to promote democracy is a prelude to our enemies' defeat.

Translation: The leaders of governments who desire to emulate America's long habit of control need to know: To serve your people you must first capitulate to our will. Start on this journey of fear-mongering and intimidation and America will walk behind you with a smile on it's face and a knife at your back. And all the allies of the United States can know: your subservience will be rewarded, and even though we don't give a whit about your counsel and help, stick with us long enough and you may share in the spoils of our campaign of terror. Divide and conquer is our modus operandi. The unilateral effort of the world's greatest superpower will snuff out any chance of true democracy, and ensure whoever we label as an enemy will ultimately be defeated.

Today, I also speak anew to my fellow citizens:From all of you, I have asked patience in the hard task of securing America, which you have granted in good measure. Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill, and would be dishonorable to abandon. Yet because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well - a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.

Translation: Today, I also regurgitate the same tired rhetoric to my loyal serfs and chattel: From all of you I have demanded your total obedience and unwavering sacrifice of your young in the name of national security, which you have granted in good measure. Our country has waged an unnecessary, illegal and immoral war half a world away, whose obligations become more and more difficult to fulfill. But despite the ever-growing number of dead, and because I declare that it would be dishonourable to abandon this task, we may need to reinstate the military draft in the near future. Yet because the lives of the common folk are so insignificant to our plans for global domination, tens of millions have achieved a premature exit from this earthly plane. And if all goes according to plan, tens of millions more will be sacrificed before my bloodlust is satiated. By the efforts of a powerful and sinister few, we have lit the entire world on fire, a fire we hope will engulf every nation and every person in its all-consuming wrath. It warms the fireplaces of my heavily guarded fortress, it burns to a cinder everyone else who is unfortunate enough not to be me, and one day this untamed fire of my God's aggression will encompass all four corners of the globe.

A few Americans have accepted the hardest duties in this cause - in the quiet work of intelligence and diplomacy ... the idealistic work of helping raise up free governments ... the dangerous and necessary work of fighting our enemies. Some have shown their devotion to our country in deaths that honored their whole lives - and we will always honor their names and their sacrifice.

Translation: A few American and Israeli secret service agents have accepted the hardest duties in this cause - in the quiet work of intelligence and black-ops ... the undercover work of creating the most spectacular false-flag operation in all of history ... the stupendous feat of undertaking a new Pearl Harbour ... infiltrating and bypassing the most fortified defenses in the world by hijacking four jumbo jets and crashing them into buildings on September 11, 2001 ... and to top it all off, blaming the entire operation on a group of cave dwelling radicals in a country we had already planned to invade years earlier. They have shown their devotion to the ruling elite by sacrificing the lives of 3,000 innocent people, and shall be honoured their whole lives - and my masters will always be grateful, for none of this would have been possible without them.

All Americans have witnessed this idealism, and some for the first time. I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes. You have seen duty and allegiance in the determined faces of our soldiers. You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs. Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself - and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character.

Translation: Thanks to the media, all Americans were witness to this horrible spectacle, most for the umpteenth time. I ask our youngest citizens to unquestioningly believe the "official version" even if the evidence contradicts their very eyes. You have seen the lengths of depravity we will go to ensure that our agenda is finally realized. You have seen that life is fragile, believed that the illusion is real, and ensured that evil triumphs. You've blindly made the default choice to serve a cause antithetical to the truth, a choice that favours entropy, one that is at odds with the higher part of yourself - and in these last days you will add not just to the demise of your country, but indeed to revealing its true character.

America has need of idealism and courage, because we have essential work at home - the unfinished work of American freedom. In a world moving toward liberty, we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty.

Translation: America depends on illusory idealism and rabid nationalism, because there is still much work to be done at home - the unfinished work of preparing the hypnotized populace for economic meltdown and the imposition of martial law. In a world moving toward greater polarization, myself and the powers that be are determined to use your unwavering faith in our "high moral character" to show the real world effects of giving away your free will to small group of greedy psychopathic madmen.

In America's ideal of freedom, citizens find the dignity and security of economic independence, instead of laboring on the edge of subsistence. This is the broader definition of liberty that motivated the Homestead Act, the Social Security Act, and the G.I. Bill of Rights. And now we will extend this vision by reforming great institutions to serve the needs of our time. To give every American a stake in the promise and future of our country, we will bring the highest standards to our schools, and build an ownership society. We will widen the ownership of homes and businesses, retirement savings and health insurance - preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society. By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear, and make our society more prosperous and just and equal.

Translation: In the American version of freedom and democracy, citizens find great comfort and security in these lofty ideals, content with the material trifles of fast food and electronic gadgets, falsely believing themselves to be economically independent, all the while their entire financial system is on the verge of collapse. While the majority remains sleepily content and thinks freedom is being able to choose between different brands of carbonated sugar water, my government can then enact such draconian laws as the Homeland Security and Patriot Acts without a whisper of protest. My latest tour-de-force is to pilfer what is left of Social Security under the guise of "reform" in order to fuel my insatiable war machine. I will continue to feed you lies about having a stake in the future of our country, the high standards of our schools, and about building an ownership society. I will distract your attention away from the carnage in Iraq by talking about retirement savings, health insurance and a free society, all the while putting your sons and daughters on the battlefield in harms way with outdated equipment, and cutting their benefits when they return home either maimed or in a box. By convincing every citizen that they are indeed a master of their own destiny, when exactly the opposite is true, by motivating them with fear, bread and circuses, bankrupting society, lining my own pockets, and spouting trite slogans about prosperity, justice and equality, we will fill our fellow Americans with pride when they willingly sacrifice themselves for the fatherland, all the while dreaming that they are free.

In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character - on integrity, and tolerance toward others, and the rule of conscience in our own lives. Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people. Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before - ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Translation: In America's illusory ideal of freedom, the private interest depends entirely on the suggestibility of the public - on the false integrity of their egos coupled with a deep intolerance towards others, and their willingness to be ruled by those in positions of authority. We will continue to govern and control you by repeating the lie that you in fact govern yourselves. I will invoke the names of all three monotheistic religions to give the appearance of fairness, but we all know which one I've been talking to directly, which of course is the only one true God. Americans continue to stagnate in every generation, repeating the same mistakes of the those who came before - ignoring the truth of a grand inter-generational conspiracy which ensures that the keeper of my DNA will always be the one to sit upon the throne, while your descendants continue to live in squalor and do my dirty work. This is the true reality of justice in America as it was the same yesterday, today, and forever.

In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak. Liberty for all does not mean independence from one another. Our nation relies on men and women who look after a neighbor and surround the lost with love. Americans, at our best, value the life we see in one another, and must always remember that even the unwanted have worth. And our country must abandon all the habits of racism, because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time.

Translation: In America's illusory ideal of freedom, the only rights the weak have is to do service for those in power. The only mercy I will show, like I did when executing people as governor of Texas, will indeed be a reflection of the true nature of my heart. Liberty for all is another hypnotic phrase which is essentially meaningless given the reality of our disparate social positions, and talk of interdependence, the worthiness of the unwanted and neighbourly love are designed specifically to manipulate your emotions and direct away from the fact that judging by my past behaviour, deep down inside, I am racist and a bigot too.

From the perspective of a single day, including this day of dedication, the issues and questions before our country are many. From the viewpoint of centuries, the questions that come to us are narrowed and few. Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?

Translation: I can say whatever meaningless gobbledygook my speechwriters put on these cards as long as it has the words "freedom" and "character" in it, knowing the sheeple will lap it up.

These questions that judge us also unite us, because Americans of every party and background, Americans by choice and by birth, are bound to one another in the cause of freedom. We have known divisions, which must be healed to move forward in great purposes - and I will strive in good faith to heal them. Yet those divisions do not define America. We felt the unity and fellowship of our nation when freedom came under attack, and our response came like a single hand over a single heart. And we can feel that same unity and pride whenever America acts for good, and the victims of disaster are given hope, and the unjust encounter justice, and the captives are set free.

Translation: I am a uniter and all terrorists are dividers. I am a great healer for the wound that was inflicted upon us, because of my special relationship with that booming authoritarian voice in my head. I put my hand over my heart in a symbolic act of false piety, hopefully engendering feelings of pride and unity in my subordinates. Again, I'll make subtle reference to 9/11, and those poor victims of our deliberate attack upon ourselves, so as to remind all my slavish supporters that them evil terrorists are now on every street corner and under every bed. I'll throw in a couple more "freedoms" and "justice" because it looks like I'm getting near the end of this speech.

We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now" - they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.

Translation: I am now confident with my Texan swagger and direct connection to the Almighty that I can wage war indiscriminately and with abandon, as the Good Lord has promised me a heavenly reward should I fulfill His mandate of wiping out all the brown-skinned people who stand in His way on the path to absolute and total dominion over this dark planet. God has chosen ME to usher in these end times, to fill up the hole in His blackest of souls, to feed the hunger that gnaws at His gut. I'm George W. Bush, and I am on a mission for the Author of this reality. This is my destiny. Better throw in a couple more "liberty's" and freedoms", just to be sure.

When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.

Translation: By invoking the sentimentality of American history ingrained into each citizen by repeated indoctrination in the education system, once again I reaffirm by explicit intentions to bomb the hell out of any country that so much as looks at me the wrong way. Amen.
May God bless you, and may He watch over the United States of America.

Translation: ...who's the most evil of them all.

Coronation of Corruption - Celebration of Exploitation

2005-01-20T16:19:00.000-05:00

At the apex of the highest mountain stand the facilitators of human corruption, in proud self-adulation, glorification and ego-driven debasement readying themselves with a forty million dollar celebration of pomp and circumstance, enjoying the comforts of luxury and unfettered power spun by the web of exploitation, for victorious do they see each other, this power-addicted and profit-hungry cabal of corporatist and elitist vermin, extolling both the virtues of immorality and policies of unscrupulous undertakings that have laid waste billions of lives in the present while condemning billions that have yet to exist. For like vultures attacking a dead carcass they have descended upon Washington to further empower humankind’s enduring romance with its self-corruption and the continuing decline into our moral abyss.
Basking in the glow of power, partying to the tunes of extravagance, rubbing shoulders with their fellow immoral brethren, this minority of humanity exclusively invited to descend upon the realm of political prostitution in order to mingle, cajole, bid, wage, bribe and buy the services of the legions of whores in governance could care less about the shattered world they have both created and profited from. Dressed in the pageantry of tuxedos and designer gowns, feasting and entertained with the best money can buy, surrounded by lavish environments and barren morality, expensive taste and indigent honor, the small entity known as the Establishment continues riding the chariot of flourishing circumstances while trampling the lives of billions of humans not granted the luck of being born into privilege and fortuitous circumstances, silver-spoon fed, from the cradle to the grave destined to grip the whips of power, wealth and perpetual exploitation.
At the expense of the corporations and the royal executives they sell their souls to, these members of aristocracy will continue experiencing life without knowledge of what their actions help unleash upon the globe or without a care in the world of the effects on billions of human energies, including 290 million Americans. They are in Washington to crown the corruption of humanity, after all, in lavish celebration to the debauchery their kind have wrought to all corners of the globe, their institutions, tentacles, tools, policies, businesses, actions, laws, military might and power hijacking the world entire, corrupting the minds and bodies of American soldiers subjected to the horrors of war; corrupting the very foundations of society of one of the oldest civilizations to ever exist; corrupting and making bereft of honor, integrity and truth the media, once a shining beacon and protector of democracy, now but a blatant propaganda mechanism; corrupting, polluting and making toxic the environment we inhabit and the bodies we own through the products they manufacture and sell; corrupting and destroying billions of lives worldwide and at home for billions in profits using the centuries old exploitative tools of feudalism and slavery; and corrupting the future lives of our children through the abandonment of long-term foresight, short-term concern and historical hindsight.
Through the crowning of an emperor with no clothes, the crowning of Establishment failure and mediocrity, and the crowning of the corporatist controlled marionette smearing an entire world with the feces-stained incompetence of the elite, the Establishment can once again be seen for what it has systematically done for thousands of years, since the dawn of civilization enriching and empowering itself through the exploitation and suppression of the rest of us, genetically passing down through the generations the torch of diluted blood saturated with the oils of entrenched power.
Corruption Through Control
At the expense of the masses and the common plebian, namely you, me and billions more, the elite of society, those few at the top, whether in ancient Egypt or Sumeria, imperial Greece or Rome, whether in feudal Europe or medieval Arabia, in Renaissance times or Enlightenment eras, whether in dictatorships, tyrannies, fascist regimes, communist systems, democracy charades or fictional freedoms, have maintained power through the overthrow of the will of the people, through the evisceration of the communal interests of the many as well as through the control of all aspects of governance and society.
For what is society composed of but the mechanisms of control the Establishment places at our feet, shackling our ability to rebel and revolt under the oppression and exploitation befalling our ancestors, ourselves and our descendents to come? Since humankind rose to perceived greatness castes and social classes have been in place, forever condemning untold human beings to a hierarchical system of perpetual exploitation that robs talent, ability and opportunity. From ancient times the priest classes deemed themselves conduits of the gods, proclaiming themselves direct manifestations of unseen deities, exploiting the ignorance and primitiveness of the masses who were made to cater to high priests and their families, thereby enriching, empowering and forever setting apart this group of corrupters from those now ruled and exploited. In time rose kings and royalty classes, again conniving the people into subservience by proclaiming direct relation with gods and metaphysical manifestations of fantasy, using the blood, sweat and tears of the masses for the abundant and ever-growing power and wealth destined for the ruling nobility.
Whether Caesars or emperors or pharaohs or popes or kings or nobility or generals or politicians or corporations or capitalists the exploitation by the ruling class of the masses has never stopped. It has breathed life since our beginning, living inside our society, giving rise to the vast number of inequalities, injustices and wasted lives now ruining our civilization. The control the Establishment uses is all encompassing, from the religions that inculcate in us primitive ideology no longer useful to the world of modern man, conditioning us to believe in invisible fantasy and obey the false prophets who preach them, controlling and oppressing the mind and maintaining ignorance; to the education that brainwashes, dumbs down and fosters allegiance to the ruling elite; to the social classes that segregate, alienate and exasperate; to laws that serve to benefit those in power and wealth; to the work we must perform in order to survive which robs us of energy to care or the will to fight and resist; to the television that manipulates and re-wires human brains to the dictates of government and the corporate world, creating the escapism of entertainment to divert attention away from the exploitation that is our lives; to the charade of democracy and elections that serves only to distract and divide; to the media designed to confuse, manipulate and disseminate propaganda; to the credit card, mortgage and loan whose sole purpose is to control through debt and interest payments; to social security numbers that make of you but a mere number to the government, your entire history easily traceable and apparent; to the launching of wars to create enemies, thus taking our eyes away from the real enemy; to jingoism designed to foster rabid nationalism and blind patriotism; to government itself which is a mechanism of, by and for the ruling elite; to the exploitation of fear planned so that we acquiesce to the erosion of freedoms and rights at home and the immoral wars of aggression and war crimes abroad.
Everywhere one looks control can be seen. Everywhere one stares corruption of humanity by the Establishment can be found. The pyramid of exploitation, where the elite stand alone at the top while the masses suffocate together at the bottom must be maintained, lest the elite lose power and control. Social classes are purposefully kept the way they are because from the poor and working classes the elite find their serfs, slaves and automatons. From the middle class they find their buffers and protection from the lower classes, as those in the middle, whether lower middle to upper middle, become easily controlled through the illusion of dreams and the complacency of materialism.
Capitalists need minimum wage earners from which to exploit, paying cheaply to profit mightily. They need undereducated masses to fill dead-end jobs and assembly-line chores, transforming a plethora of blue-eyed babies into blue-collar workers and brown-eyed humans into burger flipper slaves. The corporate world of today’s crony capitalism thrives on social engineering, depending on the masses for labor, production and mass consumption. The masses cannot be allowed to find liberation through education, nor free-thinking minds through enlightenment, nor be allowed to escape the caste predetermined for them, for they are needed to push the buttons and the levers of the capitalist division of labor and operate the tools and the machines of the corporation. Thus, real education, as emancipating to the mind as it is, will never reach the mass of society, for in knowledge there is power and in ignorance there is control. This is the story of organized religion throughout history, and now it is the sad chapter of modern man’s dive into the abyss called capitalism.
Feudalism revisited, or feudalism evolved?
Threats to the Establishment are never allowed to prosper lest the majority stand up and expropriate power away from those few at the top. Yet, in the end, we remain slaves and serfs, terms now marketed under different names whose exploitations are controlled under different functions. Most of us live in worlds of corporate feudalism, working for corporations, toiling endless hours and sacrificing most valuable time for the profit of those who employ us. We are given ‘wages’ that must, inevitably, be returned to the same corporate world that ‘pays’ us as we are forced to purchase the food, shelter and clothing we produce, not to mention the vast assortment of products of escapism designed to placate and control us.
The seven day week is designed to exploit as much labor from our energy as possible, granting us two days of rest and escapism before the same routine yields its debilitating momentum month after month and year after year, until finally, after years of servitude and sacrifice to those who exploit us, we awaken in old age, our energy gone and our time spent, becoming raisins in the sun asking ourselves where a life worth living has disappeared to. The seven day week is a mechanism of control, a tool of elitist exploitation of the masses, one we never seek to question, or alter. Instead, we are conditioned to its acceptance seemingly from birth, taught to blindly follow five days of labor in exchange for two of rest, never asking ourselves why in times of over-abundance and over consumption so much of our lives is devoted sacrificing to our employers when life is too short to not enjoy and experience.
The genius is in the illusion that we own and have control over our lives, in the cascade of charades, mirages and fictions we adamantly believe in and seldom question. Yet we live in homes and property that are overpriced, forced to pay mortgages and interest to the corporate world that until the end retains control over them. We must buy the products the corporate world decides to sell us, needing their stores and goods for our nutrition, wants and needs. Through the television the corporate world tells us what to think, how to think, how to behave, interact and communicate. It conditions us to consume its products and services, creating fantasy in order to manipulate the still primitive human brain. It creates trends, dictates changes, force-feeds styles, manufactures fragile psychologies and concocts peer-pressures so that we never stop consuming in our quest to attain the fantasy we are bombarded with yet can never attain. In the end, our feudal lords give us labor, food, shelter, protection and security, all in exchange for our freedom, our valuable time left living and our ever-dwindling reserves of energy. Feudalism revisited, or feudalism evolved?
Our feudal lords, through years of methodical conditioning, establish in us and throughout society a dependency on them for survival. We cannot escape their grip, as we are forever indebted to them and addicted to what our labor helps produce. Molded into obedience and subservience, acquiescence and conformity, from cradle to grave becoming robotic producers and mass consumers, our energies methodically engineered like slaves of the past, our minds transformed to those of the automatons of the future, we cling to our feudal masters like babies to their mother’s breasts as society has been created with all the mechanisms needed for the Establishment to continue exploiting the mass of humanity.
Billions of us live in a Matrix-type fantasy; to the elite we are nothing more than an Energizer battery harvested to produce and consume, voraciously exploited for our energy and easily controlled animal passions, behaviors and instincts. The society we believe in and help protect is nothing more than one vast control mechanism, designed for exploitation, manipulation and the further corruption of humankind. It is created to maintain the status quo, where few bask in wealth and power while the many linger in virtual serfdom.
In this world the fantasy we have since birth been made to believe in hides an ominous reality we are afraid to confront. It is a world where those born in privilege prosper while the many at the bottom linger in perpetual limbo, forced to live life in a man-made purgatory full of exploitation, subjugation and oppression that is as old as civilization itself. In every era, in every corner of the globe this hierarchical scheme has ruined more human life than any war or disease, robbing individuals of talent, ability, opportunity and a chance to push themselves out of the caste the system systematically places them in since birth, unable to escape their inherited bondage, unable to enjoy the pleasures of the life of members of the Establishment and unable to experience life beyond the day to day subsistence that marks their existence on Earth. [...]
Corruption of Social Engineering
It is from the ghettos and rural areas, comprised of mostly poor and working families, that the Establishment finds the cannon fodder needed to wage war. It is these sons and daughters of misfortune, trapped in urban reservations or rural wastelands, hindered by wretched educational institutions and severe shortages of work and opportunity that are forced by social engineering to become the killing machines pushing the triggers, buttons and levers of the instruments of death so profitable to the military industrial complex. It is these young men and women whose anemic opportunity in life, thanks to decrepit environments and government abandonment, makes them the marching army of the corporate world, sacrificing the rest of their lives, forever living haunted by demons and/or the maimed horrors of man fighting man, for nothing more than profits, revenues, power and the ego of the Establishment. Through training innocent and moral boys and girls are transformed into cold-blooded killers and destroyers of life, obeying the dictates of greed addicts and warmongers.
Yet the soldiers now in Iraq and Afghanistan -- whom Bush ironically praises while helping to seal their fates – fighting men and women of similar circumstances and situation, also exploited and from birth condemned, are but the latest in a long line of humans fighting the wars of the elite. From the beginning of time, in societies ruled by divisions, classes and castes, where there are segregations of poor and rich, it has always been the poor, those without power and control, who are the ones sacrificing life, mind and limb, not to mention wages, taxes, blood, sweat and tears, for the warmongering aspirations of the Establishment. It is usually the working and middle classes that must bear the sacrifice of the war effort, while the rich are content to live in their infallible bubble of supremacy, their lives neither altered nor molested by the realities and horrors befalling those at war and those faced with the necessity of burying their loved ones.
As has always been the case, the elite can circumvent having to serve in war, for many years able to bypass duties reserved for all others thanks to influence, power, connections and wealth, while the poor and middle class must be sacrificed, either through social engineering or conscription, because they lack the parameters that wealth and power spring forth. Through time and regardless of society or race or region, when divisions in socioeconomic status penetrate the core of human interaction, it is the children of wealth who escape the wickedness created by their fathers, whose actions condemn those born in the lower echelons of a caste system. Whether slave or serf or soldier, regardless of time or place, the corruption of humanity assures the lower classes will continue fighting for the so-called honor, the mistakes, the greed, the incompetence, the malice, the warmongering aspirations and the sought-after land, labor and resources of another. This has never ceased to be the case, and will most likely continue deep into the remaining years of humanity.
The story of war is the story of one side’s poor fighting another side’s poor, for the benefit of the Establishment and the detriment of those mothers and fathers who must do what no parent should have to do, bury their son or daughter. The exploitation of the masses functions thanks to the corruption of society, imposed by the implementation of control mechanisms designed to rob the people of power, knowledge, and of the will to fight a system which only acts to betray illusions and charades. Telling the troops they fight for freedom and democracy and against tyranny while providing nothing but pillaged profits to the corporate world and human hell to Iraqis is one such illusion told by the elite to their army of killing machines.
While 150,000 under funded, unarmored and undersupplied American troops do battle with an entire nation of 25 million Iraqis, for no other reason than to further expand the pockets of the Establishment and the power of the corporatist elite, the distinguished ladies and gentlemen attending the coronation of corruption, adorned with the fruits of our labor, our blood, sweat and tears, will wine and dine until the early hours of the morning, laughing, joking, conversing, living in their sheltered bubble of endowed wealth and inherited position, in one night wasting forty million dollars, enough money to save the lives of countless soldiers in need of armor and innocent Iraqi civilians in need of humanity. Is there any doubt ghetto soldiers born in concrete jungles and rural grunts living in isolated abandon are simply considered expendable cannon fodder doing the slave work of the elite when those that send them to war, based on lies, deceits and under false pretenses, celebrate fraudulent election triumphs and the pleasures endowed to privilege, at a cost of $40,000,000, while dozens of troops are killed and hundreds maimed for life on a weekly basis in Iraq? [...]
Into the Nest of Corruption
Remember, celebrating the coronation of corruption are members of the military-industrial complex, the oil oligarchy, the ruling elite, the corporate Leviathan and the political class. Chief Executive Officers and executives of Fortune 500 companies, Establishment patriarchs and their loving juniors believing themselves nobility by blood if not by high crimes and misdemeanors, greedy bankers and immoral corporatists always seeking more, energy magnates controlling the strings of the Puppet in Chief, media moguls and their army of journalist minions, those Likud-loving, Israel-first neocons, prostitute politicians and their lackey yes men and women, legions of defense contractors and corporate lobbyists trained in the fine art of buying politicians and writing laws, former military brass exchanging the uniform for an Armani, and the unmistakable lovers of revolving doors who always place the interests of their employers before those of the nation can be found cruising Washington in stretched limos and walking on red carpets.
Without corruption of humanity, this distinguished group has no serfs, no slaves and no control. It has no power, no profit, and no wealth. It has no war, no conquest and no soldiers or army to kill, destroy and devastate. It has no feudal domination of land and man, no control over daily lives. Without the degradation of millions in the United States and billions worldwide, the elite cannot maintain an imbalance that has existed for thousands of years, where the few at the top live lavishly through the fruits of our sweat and the exigencies of our toil while the rest subsist on the measly crumbs that like emaciated dogs we oftentimes find ourselves fighting over. [...]
The coronation of corruption shows us how a few at the top can control the vast majority of the people. It shows us that the same patterns emerge throughout history, without fail, thus allowing us to peer into the future. Warlike leaders create warlike people, immoral, arrogant and selfish elites create the same vices in the citizens they control. Their ideologies become our realities; their fictions become our truths. All they have to do to push society in a certain direction is use the tools at their disposal, orchestrating social and mental engineering by conducting various apparatuses at once, thereby shaping views and beliefs from a multitude of platforms. For example, if the people begin questioning the system that exploits them, overcoming purposely placed barriers and divisions, becoming blind and deaf to propaganda, becoming riled and questioning, new Pearl Harbors can always be concocted, new wars of aggression conjured up and new enemies created to distract us away from the real war taking place against us by the real enemy of the people. We are easily toyed with, for society is a matrix geniusly run by the Establishment, full of fantasy and brainwashing and mental conditioning to the dictates of those in power. [...]
No ideology or belief can be allowed to be birthed that may threaten the system now in place. No idea or rebellion or revolt that may change the balance of power will be tolerated, even if it may give rise to the salvation of humanity and the planet. The communal interests of the masses be damned, it is the power of the elite that must be retained, oftentimes using the citizenry itself to achieve these purposes. While the majority succumbs to the growing threats of perpetual war, biological plague, dwindling resources, overpopulation and global warming, it is the elite that prosper and remain protected. In order to achieve long sought goals, we have become, to those holding the reigns of power, quite literally, easily expendable entities. Whether the interests sought cost 3,000 lives, or 100,000 dead or 5,000 soldiers killed or one million lives extinguished, to the elite, the bottom line of profit and power over people rules and, in cost benefit analysis, we have become the means to an end.
Today, into the nest of corruption can the rest of humanity see into, watching as $40,000,000 is wasted to celebrate the triumphant victory over the American people. The coronation of corruption is upon us, full of splendor and arrogance and apathy. When nothing has changed for centuries, even millennia, when the elite possess the confidence that they will continue to rule today and into the future while we continue to drool in kneeling subservience, who can blame them for partying in resplendent accomplishment? To them the system works like magic, and if the best we can do is a few hundred full moon risings directed at their Puppet in Chief, then perhaps we deserve what our ancestors and ourselves are subjected to and our future generations will undoubtedly experience.
To do nothing is to live in denial and accept the lie of our existence. To sit in silent complacency is to welcome the domination over our lives. The failure to act is an act in failure, and a warm embrace to an unmitigated corruption befalling humankind.

Bush's Grand Plan? Incite Civil War in Iraq

2005-01-19T16:01:00.000-05:00

The Bush Administration is intentionally steering Iraq towards civil war. The elections are merely the catalyst for igniting, what could be, a massive social upheaval. This explains the bizarre insistence on voting when security is nearly nonexistent and where a mere 7% of the people can even identify the candidates. (This figure gleaned from Allawi's Baghdad newspaper, Al-Sabah) Rumsfeld is using the elections as a springboard for aggravating tensions between Sunnis and Shiites and for diverting attention away from the troops. It's a foolhardy move that only magnifies the desperation of the present situation. The Pentagon brass expected a "cakewalk" and, instead, they've found themselves mired in a guerilla war.
Everyone from Brent Scowcroft to Tom Friedman has speculated on the likelihood of civil war. Their comments are more reflective of the hopes of American elites than they are of realities on the ground. Sure, Friedman would like to see Muslims killing Muslims, but it won't happen. Tom hasn't guessed right on the war yet, and that's not about to change. The same could be said for Rumsfeld. For a Sec-Def who regards "information as power", Rumsfeld seems woefully blinkered by the true nature of the fighting. He seems incapable of grasping even the most basic elements of the conflict or the psychology that fuels it. Whatever happened to the military mantra, "Know your enemy"?
When you destroy a man's home and kill and disgrace his friends, he'll fight back. And, when you rob a man of everything he has, including his dignity, you leave him with one, solitary passion rage. This rage is now animating the resistance in ways that no one had previously anticipated. The world's lone superpower is roped to the ground like Gulliver and the Pentagon high-command is getting increasingly agitated.
Civil war can be messy. Inciting religious and sectarian hatreds tends to disrupt the smooth execution of business; like the purging of potential enemies and the extracting of vital resources. Never the less, Rumsfeld is nearly out of options; "divide and conquer" may be all that's left. If we glance at the last 3 imperial projects; Kosovo, Haiti and Afghanistan, the very same strategy was applied. All three nations have been effectively carved up, delivered to US multi-national corporations, and reduced to warlordism or anarchy. Their outcome sets the precedent for similar results in Iraq.Will Iraq be Balkenized along ethnic and religious lines?
That's what the Generals are hoping, and their plan is already in full swing. The Marines deployed Shiite National Guards during the siege of Falluja with the obvious intention of exacerbating tensions between the two factions. The Kurdish Peshmerga was utilized in Mosul for the very same purpose. Also, there have been a number of suspicious bombings (particularly the attacks on Sunni clerics in Najaf and Kerbala) that are not at all consistent with the insurgent pattern, but suggest a clandestine (CIA?) operation to incite hostilities. Add to this the projected election results, which will tilt heavily towards the Shiites, and there's a real potential for internecine violence. It's easy to see how Pentagon planners might think that these provocations could auger a massive internal struggle. It won't happen, though.
Whatever we may think of the Iraqis at this point, one thing is certain; they know who their enemy is. The element of surprise or deception has evaporated like the plumes of smoke dispersing over Falluja. They know who we are, and they know they want us out.
Deteriorating Security
Rumsfeld finally seems to be grasping the seriousness of the predicament. The security situation has deteriorated so dramatically that even his support among elites is eroding. Last week foreign policy Gurus, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, fired off a salvo of criticism directed at the mishandling of the occupation. The normally circumspect Brzezinski was particularly savage, slamming the war as a sign of "moral decay"; a euphemism that will undoubtedly send shock waves through America's boardrooms and think-tanks.
James Dobbins of the conservative Rand Corporation was equally ferocious, stating bluntly that "The beginning of wisdom is to realize that the United States can't win."
"Can't win?"
Dobbins probably should have added, "Can't win, but won't leave," as the appropriate adjunct to his first observation. American elites may disparage the conduct of the occupation, but they've tied the nation's future to its success and won't give up easily.
Rumsfeld Shifts Gears
There are signs that the recalcitrant Rumsfeld is beginning to get the message. Last week he dispatched retired General Gary Luck to Iraq to produce a detailed breakdown of force strength and vulnerabilities. When Luck returns he will appear before Congress and make an energetic appeal for more troops and stiffer resolve. He can be expected to draw a dismal picture of a failed state that threatens to destabilize the entire region unless America makes a greater commitment. Both the Congress and the media will play a role in calling on the American people for steadfastness in the face of a very long and bloody occupation. Many believe that Luck's assessment will determine whether Bush will approach Congress to reinstate the draft.
Enlisting the skills of General Luck is an indication that Rumsfeld is giving ground to his critics; that he is no longer elevating his judgment above all others. His bungling of every aspect of the war has limited his ability to act unilaterally. He will either have to demonstrate some level of cooperation or step down. The war's two main debacles so far can be directly pinned on Rumsfeld. First, he went in "too light" (without sufficient manpower to secure the peace) and second, he dismissed the 400,000 strong Iraqi military, the majority of whom now comprise the resistance. The final outcome in Iraq will certainly rest heavily on those two foolish choices.
Leveling Falluja
The siege of a Falluja was a crossroads for the American occupation. The right-wing punditocracy insisted that the resistance in Falluja be crushed by any means possible; preferably overwhelming force. The Baghdad enclave of 250,000 was decimated by the relentless pounding of US aerial bombardment and a full-fledged ground assault that left over 700 civilians dead; 70% of whom were women and children.
In the first attack on Falluja Lt. Col. B. P. McCoy noted that, "We don't want to rubblize, the city. That will give the enemy more places to hide." McCoy's injunction was ignored during the second (Nov 8) siege. The city has been both "rubblized" and rendered "uninhabitable". (according to the Red Crescent)
The Bush administration applied the "nuclear option" to Falluja; leveling the city to send a message that future resistance would be dealt with accordingly. The message was faithfully rejected.
If anything, Falluja has only strengthened the resolve of the anti-American forces and increased recruitment for the resistance. The violence has spread and intensified throughout the Sunni Triangle, with the number of attacks skyrocketing to 75 per day. Falluja has removed any doubt from the minds of young Iraqi men that a nonviolent settlement is possible. The flattening of a city of 250,000 confirms, in stark terms, that the war will be decided by force of arms. Falluja has removed whatever "gray area" there may have been before.
The numbers of insurgents are steadily on the rise since the siege. The strength of the current rebellion was estimated last week by Iraq's Intelligence Chief, General Mohammed Shahwani. Shahwani told a Saudi newspaper that the "US was facing 40,000 hard-core fighters" and a support group of as "many as 150,000 to 200,000".
Predictably, the story was buried in the western press, but the implications are clear. The Pentagon has been intentionally misleading the American people about the size and strength of the insurgency. (previous estimates were between 5,000 to 20,000) These new figures, which are now supported by many independent defense analysts, point to an insurgency which is numerically larger than the occupation and fully prepared to fight a long and gory guerilla war. This brings us back to James Dobbins observation "The beginning of wisdom is to realize that the United States can't win."
Indeed.
Falluja's failure means that the prospect of destroying the rest of Iraq's cities is more remote. Rather, success will depend on increasing the number of US troops and developing a long term strategy for "incrementally" establishing security. The only other option is to deflect attention from the occupation forces by inciting widespread instability. A civil war may serve the short term interests of the administration, but it could also provoke region-wide turmoil. It's a risk that no sane person would consider. The determination to carry out the Jan 30 elections further proves that the administration has not veered from the reckless and delusional strategies that have thrust the mission to the brink of disaster.
Months ago, Baghdad correspondent, Patrick Cockburn warned that the United States was "in danger of losing the war" in Iraq. Since then the security situation has steadily worsened and vast swaths of the country have come under rebel control. Every promotional device the administration has used (the forming of the Coalition Provisional Authority; the transfer of sovereignty and, now, the elections) has backfired; bringing on larger attacks and stiffer resistance. Rumsfeld's "high-tech" warfare has degenerated into death squads and torture chambers; a pitiable return to medieval combat. The civilian leadership, drunk with hubris and greed, never noticed the wave of insurgency looming in the distance. Now, they,re facing daily trauma and death without a clear plan for success. The Iraq mission is like a 21st century Striker-vehicle buried up to its axels and lolling in the dessert sand. As the Jan 30 deadline approaches, there's little sign that things will improve.

The Slaughter of Iraqi Civilians by US Military

2005-01-18T11:28:00.000-05:00

A horrifying chart and map on the opinion page of Sunday's New York Times graphically displays the carnage caused by the ongoing U.S. war in Iraq. Over a 14-day period during the first two weeks of the new year, Brookings Institution senior research assistant Adriana Lins de Albuquerque shows that 202 people died "as a result of the insurgency."
But the chart is deceptive, leaving out at least as much as it puts in.
First of all, and most importantly, as Lins de Albuquerque notes in her brief explanation, the chart doesn't give any information about the number of Iraqi insurgents killed by U.S. forces over the same period, nor does it give figures for Iraqi civilians "accidentally killed by coalition forces."
As she explains, "because of the limits placed on reporters," such information is not available (she fails to mention that also left out are the numbers of people killed by Iraqi troops and police).
In fact, we know from reports by the U.S.-backed government in Iraq that the U.S. has been "accidentally" killing Iraqi civilians at a prodigious rate--a rate both higher than the rate they are being killed by insurgents and higher than the rate that the U.S. forces have been killing insurgents. If that report, released late last fall, is correct, then a chart displaying the victims of U.S.-led forces would be larger even than the one developed by Ms. Lins de Albuquerque.
If those ratios are correct, the U.S. is probably also killing more civilians on average than the 38 percent or total deaths (76 civilians in the first two weeks of January) caused by the insurgency. For all the media focus on the viciousness of the insurgents, it would appear that they are being much more effective and selective in their attacks--killing primarily Iraqi troops, Iraqi police, and U.S. and "coalition" troops--than is the U.S.
Of course, most of the civilians killed by U.S. and "coalition" forces are killed "accidentally" only by the most strained definition of the term. The truth is that American aircraft are dropping bombs, including anti-personnel weapons and, reportedly, napalm, as well as 500 and 1000 lb. explosives once known in the trade as "block busters," on urban targets all the time. Occasionally one of these weapons will be reported as having hit the wrong target, but even when they hit the right target, it's safe to say that the so-called "collateral damage" is widespread and horrific.
In addition, there are the helicopter and fixed-wing gunships, which are designed to completely saturate wide areas with deadly fire, killing every living thing in those "dead zones" with projectiles that penetrate even concrete walls. When civilians die at the hands of these genuine weapons of mass destruction, their demise can hardly be termed "accidental."
Little wonder that the Iraqi government report found that a third of U.S.-caused casualties are children under the age of 14.
Finally, U.S. ground troops themselves are popping off civilians at a scandalous rate, thanks to a "spray and pray" policy of firing off everything they've got in a 360-degree radius whenever they come under enemy fire. Little wonder that reporters in Iraq are at least as afraid of being killed "accidentally" by American forces as they are of being attacked by insurgents or of hitting an errant roadside bomb.
Little wonder also that U.S. military authorities have a policy of not reporting civilian or insurgent death totals. The grisly details of their campaign of slaughter would not be popular either in the Middle East or here at home.
Or at the New York Times, where printing such a chart would have taken up not just the entire opinion page, but the whole editorial page, too.

Setting Up Iran

2005-01-18T06:30:00.000-05:00

So here we are, facing ourselves wearily into another new year of what is likely to be increasing global turmoil and bloodshed. It would be nice to think that, for once, someone, somewhere in the echelons of power would see sense and decide that enough is enough. Sadly, the likelihood of that happening seems as remote as the likelihood that Jesus will soon be appearing on a white cloud to "rapture" the world's Christians up to heavenly bliss with their "lord and savior".
No indeed, there is no land of milk and honey on the horizon. This year we can expect the opening of more fronts in the phony "war on terror" and further requests from our dear leaders for 'we the people' to relinquish more civil rights and believe the unbelievable. How many more will succumb this year? Time will tell we suppose. But for now, the natives in the Pentagon are getting restless again. The drums of holy war are sounding once more, drawing our collective gaze towards Iran and its soon-to-be-drastically-reduced population.
Special forces 'on the ground' in Iran
Ian TraynorMonday January 17, 2005The Guardian
American special forces have been on the ground inside Iran scouting for US air strike targets for suspected nuclear weapons sites, according to the renowned US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
In an article in the latest edition of the New Yorker, Hersh, who was the first to uncover US human rights abuses against Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison last year, reports that Pakistan, under a deal with Washington, has been supplying information on Iranian military sites and on its nuclear programme, enabling the US to conduct covert ground and air reconnaissance of Iranian targets, should the escalating row over Iran's nuclear ambitions come to a head.
Acting on information from Pakistani scientists knowledgeable about Iran's nuclear programme, Hersh reported, US commandos have penetrated territory in eastern Iran seeking to pinpoint underground installations suspected of being nuclear weapons sites.
Hersh told CNN yesterday: "I think they really think there's a chance to do something in Iran, perhaps by summer, to get the intelligence on the sites.
"The last thing this government wants to do is to bomb or strafe, or missile attack, the wrong targets again. We don't want another WMD flap. We want to be sure we have the right information."
Here we have a problem. What are the definitions, in this context, of the words "wrong" and "right". Is Hersh implying that the bombing of Baghdad is understood as a genuine "mistake" by the Bush administration? If they could take it back, would they? Clearly, from the point of view of Bush and Co, the only thing "wrong" about the lead up to and actual invasion of Iraq was that they were unable to pass off the childish "evidence" for Saddam's WMDs on the UN and that, as a result, some members of the public also became aware that the US government was deliberately lying to them.
Hersh continues by saying that, in regard to bombing and invading Iran, "we want to be sure we have the right information". Clearly by "right information" Hersh does NOT mean actual REAL proof that Iran is developing WMDs with a view to attacking America, but rather information that will successfully convince the world that this is the case, even when in reality it is not.
The New Yorker report said the Americans have been conducting secret reconnaissance missions over and inside Iran since last summer with a view to identifying up to 40 possible targets for strikes should the dispute over Iran turn violent.
There's that word again, "should". Synonyms are: "if", "in the off chance that", "in the event that", all conveying the idea that the dispute with Iran may or may not turn violent, and most importantly, if it does, it will be the result of some external factor over which no one has any control.
The reality, of course, is that there is a 100% likelihood that Iran will be attacked, regardless of the existence or otherwise of any WMDs.
Why?
Because the Neocons and Israel desire it. The only thing left to decide is how best to convince the public that the upcoming attack on Iran is NOT about American and Israeli state terrorism and an illegal land and resource grab, but rather because Iran really is a threat to the whole world.
We sincerely hope that everyone is by now aware that we are witnessing the initial stages of a repeat of the Iraq debacle, where the American and British government openly LIED TO THE WORLD about the threat that Saddam posed, and then attacked and killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians FOR NO GOOD REASON, other than to satiate their own greed and power lust.
"This is a war against terrorism and Iraq is just one campaign," Hersh quotes one former US intelligence official as saying. "The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next we're going to have the Iranian campaign."
Another unnamed source described as a consultant close to the Pentagon said: "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible."
That appeared to be a reference to noted "neocons" in Washington, such as the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and others.
Arguments about Iran's suspected nuclear programme have raged for 20 months since it was revealed that Tehran had been conducting secret nuclear activities for 18 years in violation of treaty obligations.
The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna has had inspectors in the country throughout the period. While finding much that is suspect, the inspectors have not found any proof of a clandestine nuclear bomb programme.
The IAEA chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, has infuriated the Bush administration over his even-handed dealings with Iran, while the Europeans have been pursuing a parallel diplomatic track that has won grudging agreement from Tehran to freeze its uranium enrichment activities.
Notice what "infuriates" Bush (and his handlers) these days: even-handedness, diplomacy, dialogue, all anathema to the policies of a dictatorship.
Hersh reported that the US campaign against Iran is being assisted by Pakistan under a deal that sees Islamabad provide information in return for reducing the pressure on Abdul Qadeer Khan, the disgraced metallurgist who is the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb and who was revealed last year to be the head of the biggest international nuclear smuggling racket uncovered.
Since confessing his activities and being placed under house arrest almost a year ago, Mr Khan has been incommunicado.
After months of failure to get permission, IAEA inspectors last week gained access to the Parchin military facilities outside Tehran, which the Americans contend has been a centre for Iranian attempts to refine missile technology for nuclear purposes, although experts agree that Iran does not yet have a nuclear capability.
Now here's where it gets REALLY interesting. For those that believe that the current war on terror just came "out of the blue" - think again. The "end times" in which we seem to find ourselves have been in the planning for many, many years and there is no lack of evidence to prove it.
By now it should be obvious to everyone with two functioning neurons that the Washington Neocons were determined to invade Iraq regardless of the lack of evidence to support their claims that Saddam posed a threat to America. It is also very clear that, for many years prior to the invasion, Saddam had been falsely portrayed as "evil incarnate" in order to convince the public that a war in Iraq was needed. It is not unreasonable therefore to assume that these same Necons have developed equally deceptive plans to justify their next stage in the bogus war on terror - Iran.
As it happens, while we were all fixated on the Iraq quagmire at the beginning of last year, this "evidence" was quietly released, but naturally, it was not what it seemed.

Signs Economic Commentary

2005-01-17T16:04:00.000-05:00

The US dollar fell slightly last week against the euro, closing Friday at 1.3106 euros to the dollar, down a little less than half a percent. Gold closed at 422.50 dollars an ounce, up less than a tenth of a percent. Gold closed at 322.37 euros, down from last week’s 323.53. Oil rose 6% last week, closing at $48.38 Friday, up from the $45.43 close the previous Friday, putting it at 36.91 euros per barrel, up from last week’s 34.81 close. The Dow Jones closed at 10,558 down from 10,604 last week, or about four tenths of a percent and the NASDAQ closed at 2088 compared to last week’s close of 2089. The ten-year US Treasury bond closed at 4.21% compared to last week’s 4.27%. Nothing too dramatic in these numbers except perhaps the four consecutive days’ increase in the price of oil.
I thought we might step back a bit and look at some social and political factors contributing to the decline in the US economy, specifically, how fascism and religious fundamentalism can cause serious economic decline. Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, has shown that at this point in historical time, economic development is best incubated by a culture of creativity and tolerance. Technical infrastructure, by itself, is not enough to attract talented, creative people. In earlier time, when large, bureaucratic corporations made location decisions, base infrastructure and tax breaks were crucial. Now, according to Florida, things like a community’s openness to gay couples, its level of racial integration and other factors in his “tolerance index” play a larger role in encouraging growth . Here is an excerpt from the preface to the new paperback edition:
I’m not suggesting that gays and bohemians literally cause regions to grow. Rather, their presence in large numbers is an indicator of an underlying culture that’s open-minded and diverse—and thus conducive to creativity. My interviews and focus groups all over this country have confirmed this. I’ve had straight people, especially straight single women, tell me they look for cities with lots of gay people when they are hunting for a place to live and work. The presence of gays signals an exciting place, where people can fit in and be themselves, and in the eyes of many single woman, it’s also a sign that a city or neighborhood is relatively safe. (p.xvii) …
Technology—measured by innovation and high-tech industry concentration—figures into my model as one of the “3 Ts” needed for growth. Talent is the second T—not “human capital” as usually measured (by numbers of people holding higher education credentials) but creative capital, which is talent measured functionally, by the numbers of people actually in creative occupations. The third T is tolerance. Places that are open and tolerant have an edge in attracting different kinds of people and generating new ideas. Economic growth is a complex process. For most of human history, wealth came from a place’s endowment of natural resources, like fertile soil or raw materials. But today, the key resource, creative people, is highly mobile. The key dimension of economic competitiveness is the ability to attract, cultivate and mobilize this resource. My research tries to uncover the underlying conditions—the ecosystem characteristics—that enable certain places to attract and mobilize them more than others. Tolerance and openness—or what I like to call “low entry barriers for people”—are a critical element. To capture this, I have worked with Kevin Stolarick to build a broader all-around measure of tolerance.
Our new Tolerance Index is based on four measures: the Gay Index, the Bohemian Index, the Melting Pot Index (the concentration of foreign-born people), and a measure of racial integration, used to capture how integrated rather than separated a community is throughout its internal geography. Places that score high on this Tolerance Index (see Table 2)— places where gays, immigrants and bohemians all feel at home and where racial groups tend to live mixed together, not in distinct enclaves—are very likely to have a culture of tolerance.
The research here is ongoing and much more needs to be done. For now, our measures should be looked at as leading indicators of creative ecosystems—habitats open to new people and ideas, where people network easily and offbeat ideas are not stifled but are turned into new projects, companies and growth. Regions and nations that have such ecosystems are likely to do the best job of tapping the diverse creative talents of the most people, and thus gain competitive advantage. (p.xx)
Clearly, from Florida’s work, we can see that nowadays the Republican agenda is a recipe for economic failure, even if they didn’t impoverish the middle class, run up massive deficits and engage in disastrous wars. Florida addresses this explicitly in an article last year in Washington Monthly ):
Last March, I had the opportunity to meet Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, at his film complex in lush, green, otherworldly-looking Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson has done something unlikely in Wellington, an exciting, cosmopolitan city of 900,000, but not one previously considered a world cultural capital. He has built a permanent facility there, perhaps the world's most sophisticated filmmaking complex. He did it in New Zealand concertedly and by design. Jackson, a Wellington native, realized what many American cities discovered during the '90s: Paradigm-busting creative industries could single-handedly change the ways cities flourish and drive dynamic, widespread economic change. It took Jackson and his partners a while to raise the resources, but they purchased an abandoned paint factory that, in a singular example of adaptive reuse, emerged as the studio responsible for the most breathtaking trilogy of films ever made. He realized, he told me, that with the allure of the Rings trilogy, he could attract a diversely creative array of talent from all over the world to New Zealand; the best cinematographers, costume designers, sound technicians, computer graphic artists, model builders, editors, and animators.
When I visited, I met dozens of Americans from places like Berkeley and MIT working alongside talented filmmakers from Europe and Asia, the Americans asserting that they were ready to relinquish their citizenship. Many had begun the process of establishing residency in New Zealand.
Think about this. In the industry most symbolic of America's international economic and cultural might, film, the greatest single project in recent cinematic history was internationally funded and crafted by the best filmmakers from around the world, but not in Hollywood. When Hollywood produces movies of this magnitude, it creates jobs for directors, actors, and key grips in California. Because of the astounding level of technical innovation which a project of this size requires, in such areas as computer graphics, sound design, and animation, it can also germinate whole new companies and even new industries nationwide, just as George Lucas's Star Wars films fed the development of everything from video games to product tie-in marketing. But the lion's share of benefits from The Lord of the Rings is likely to accrue not to the United States but to New Zealand. Next, with a rather devastating symbolism, Jackson will remake King Kong in Wellington, with a budget running upwards of $150 million.
He concludes:
As other nations become more attractive to mobile immigrant talent, America is becoming less so. A recent study by the National Science Board found that the U.S. government issued 74,000 visas for immigrants to work in science and technology in 2002, down from 166,000 in 2001--an astonishing drop of 55 percent. This is matched by similar, though smaller-scale, declines in other categories of talented immigrants, from finance experts to entertainers. Part of this contraction is derived from what we hope are short-term security concerns--as federal agencies have restricted visas from certain countries after September 11. More disturbingly, we find indications that fewer educated foreigners are choosing to come to the United States. For instance, most of the decline in science and technology immigrants in the National Science Board study was due to a drop in applications.
Why would talented foreigners avoid us? In part, because other countries are simply doing a better, more aggressive job of recruiting them. The technology bust also plays a role. There are fewer jobs for computer engineers, and even top foreign scientists who might still have their pick of great cutting-edge research positions are less likely than they were a few years ago to make millions through tech-industry partnerships.
But having talked to hundreds of talented professionals in a half dozen countries over the past year, I'm convinced that the biggest reason has to do with the changed political and policy landscape in Washington. In the 1990s, the federal government focused on expanding America's human capital and interconnectedness to the world--crafting international trade agreements, investing in cutting edge R&D, subsidizing higher education and public access to the Internet, and encouraging immigration. But in the last three years, the government's attention and resources have shifted to older sectors of the economy, with tariff protection and subsidies to extractive industries.
Meanwhile, Washington has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views when those views conflict with the interests of favored sectors (as has been the case with the issue of global climate change). Most of all, in the wake of 9/11, Washington has inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we're saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, "You don't belong here."
Obviously, this shift has come about with the changing of the political guard in Washington, from the internationalist Bill Clinton to the aggressively unilateralist George W. Bush. But its roots go much deeper, to a tectonic change in the country's political-economic demographics. As many have noted, America is becoming more geographically polarized, with the culturally more traditionalist, rural, small-town, and exurban "red" parts of the country increasingly voting Republican, and the culturally more progressive urban and suburban "blue" areas going ever more Democratic.
Less noted is the degree to which these lines demarcate a growing economic divide, with "blue" patches representing the talent-laden, immigrant-rich creative centers that have largely propelled economic growth, and the "red" parts representing the economically lagging hinterlands.
The migrations that feed creative-center economies are also exacerbating the contrasts. As talented individuals, eager for better career opportunities and more adventurous, diverse lifestyles, move to the innovative cities, the hinterlands become even more culturally conservative. Now, the demographic dynamic which propelled America's creative economy has produced a political dynamic that could choke that economy off. Though none of the candidates for president has quite framed it that way, it's what's really at stake in the 2004 elections.
That was written before last November’s US election. The die seems to be cast now. One question we might ask ourselves now is, will economic impoverishment resulting from an increasingly intolerant culture have time to play itself out? Or will military defeats work much faster?
As one commentator, Marshall Auerback,puts it:
Just as a haystack soaked in kerosene will appear relatively benign until somebody strikes a match, so too it is worth noting that although America’s longstanding economic problems have not yet engendered financial Armageddon does not invalidate the threat they ultimately pose. But the key is finding out which event (or combination of them) represents the match that could set this “haystack” alight.
Could that event be military setback? A desperate reaction to a military setback? If, as we have speculated, Russia, China and perhaps Europe may be using the dollar’s weakness to restrain the American Empire, what will US policymakers do in response to a catastrophic collapse of the dollar? To answer that question, we need to be more specific about what that empire is. Who better to do that than one of its “hit men?” A book appeared last year, Confessions of an Economic Hit Men by John Perkins. According to Perkins in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! (), the American Empire works this way:
Well, really, over the past 30 to 40 years, we economic hit men have created the largest global empire in the history of the world. And we do this, typically -- well, there are many ways to do it, but a typical one is that we identify a third-world country that has resources, which we covet. And often these days that's oil, or might be the canal in the case of Panama. In any case, we go to that third-world country and we arrange a huge loan from the international lending community; usually the World Bank leads that process. So, let's say we give this third-world country a loan of $1 billion.
One of the conditions of that loan is that the majority of it, roughly 90%, comes back to the United States to one of our big corporations, the ones we've all heard of recently, the Bechtels, the Halliburtons. And those corporations build in this third-world country large power plants, highways, ports, or industrial parks -- big infrastructure projects that basically serve the very rich in those countries.
The poor people in those countries and the middle class suffer; they don't benefit from these loans, they don't benefit from the projects. In fact, often their social services have to be severely curtailed in the process of paying off the debt.
Now what also happens is that this third-world country then is saddled with a huge debt that it can't possibly repay.
For example, today, Ecuador. Ecuador's foreign debt, as a result of the economic hit man, is equal to roughly 50% of its national budget. It cannot possibly repay this debt, as is the case with so many third-world countries. So, now we go back to those countries and say, look, you borrowed all this money from us, and you owe us this money, you can't repay your debts, so give our oil companies your oil at very cheap costs. And in the case of many of these countries, Ecuador is a good example here, that means destroying their rain forests and destroying their indigenous cultures. That's what we're doing today around the world, and we've been doing it -- it began shortly after the end of World War II. It has been building up over time until today where it's really reached mammoth proportions where we control most of the resources of the world.
I find it interesting that the empire has been using the same technique of lending more money than can be repaid to its individual consumers as well. In both cases, dependence is created.
What happens to countries that don’t accept the loans or terms from the Economic Hit Men?
After our tremendous success in Saudi Arabia, we decided we should do the same thing in Iraq. And we figured that Saddam Hussein was corruptible. And, of course, we had been involved with Saddam Hussein anyway for some time. And so the economic hit men went in and tried to bring Saddam Hussein around, tried to get him to agree to a deal like the royal House of Saud had agreed to.
And he didn't.
So, we sent in the jackals to try to overthrow him or to assassinate him. They couldn't.
His Republican Guard was too loyal and he had all these doubles. We couldn't do it. So, when the economic hit men and the jackals both failed, then the last line of defense that the United States, the empire, uses these days, is the military. We send in our young men and women to die and to kill, and we did that in Iraq in 1990. We thought Saddam Hussein at that point was sufficiently chastised that now he would come around, so the economic hit men went back in in the 1990s, failed once again. The jackals went back in, failed once again, and so once again the military went in -- the story we all know -- because we couldn't bring him around any other way.
What will the United States do when Perkins’s option three, sending in the troops, doesn’t work? Is there an option four? Or is the game over? As Marshall Auerback wrote in the piece quoted earlier, the deals negotiated by China with resource suppliers and the military cooperation between China and Russia as well as the recently announced agreement of Russia to sell military equipment to Syria represent
…pretty brazen behavior by all concerned, but is symptomatic of the growing perception of the US as a declining giant, albeit one with the capacity to strike out lethally when wounded. American military and economic dominance may still be the central fact of world affairs today, but the limits of this primacy (which dates back to the fall of the Berlin Wall) are becoming increasingly evident, just as dollar’s fall reflects this in economic terms. It all makes for a very challenging backdrop in 2005. This could therefore be the year when longstanding problems for the US finally do matter. Do not expect Washington to accept the dispersal of its economic and military power lightly.

Bush Speaks - The World Scratches Its Head

2005-01-16T18:28:00.000-05:00

Last Friday two Washington Post reporters were given the privilege of not only looking the President in the eye, but speaking directly to him on board his favorite Presidential toy - Air Force One. As the massive hulk of Bush's airborne office ploughed the direct flight path from Washington to Jacksonville Florida, the interview took a more circuitous route, stopping off now and again for Bush to ask "what were we talking about again?" or words to that effect.

While the topics discussed were described as "wide ranging" and the president at times expounded incoherently on subjects like the war in Iraq, finding Osama and Social Security, as with most of his previous speeches the abiding feeling we are left with is that the American Commander in Chief lacks the intelligence required to lead a troop of monkeys, much less an entire nation. That is not to say, however, that Bush did not sound confident, he did, and always does, but the fact that he is unaware that he is an idiot and indeed believes that he is a genius, simply gives us all the more cause for concern.

In order to best summarise the interview, we have separated the content into three categories: Obvious Lies, evidence of Bush's ineptitude, and evidence of Bush's self-deluded Messiah complex

The Lies

The Post: Can you be sure that by the end of your second term, that there will be a significant reduction (in troops in Iraq)?

THE PRESIDENT: I'm still on the, as quick as possible.

The Post: Do you disagree with Colin Powell's assessment, then, that he thinks it can be done?

THE PRESIDENT: My assessment is, is that we will -- one of the reasons why the military sent an assessment team to Iraq recently was to assess our training mission, because success in Iraq will depend upon the Iraqis defeating the enemy. And so we're constantly assessing to see whether -- where we can improve training, how we can do things better, and what the Iraqis think they need, in order to do their job.
And so the troops have been helping to provide as much security as possible for the elections. The political process is going on. And at the same time, doing their job and training these Iraqis. So we're constantly assessing, and that's what this is. The panel will report back to determine how best to train the Iraqis. My answer to your question is, as soon as possible, based upon fulfilling the mission.
The elections -- I am pleased that the elections are going forward. I recognize that there are a group of terrorists trying to stop the election process. I have been amazed by the spirit of the Iraqi people. There's a big front-page story; I'm sure you read that. Please don't tell me you haven't.

The main lie here is contained within the idea that those opposing the US occupation are terrorists - that they are not ordinary Iraqis attempting to defend their homeland from an occupying power. The idea that "success in Iraq depends on Iraqis defeating the terrorists" is therefore a blatant lie. "Success", as in real freedom for Iraq, depends upon the removal of US troops and the US proxy government headed by CIA asset Allawi. This, however, will never happen because the Iraq war was waged for the purposes of invasion and conquest.
As for the Iraq elections; there will be no democratic elections in Iraq because if there were, the vast majority of Iraqis would obviously vote for candidates who oppose the US presence in Iraq. The US will not allow this to happen and the fact that known CIA asset and current "interim" Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi is running for election is proof of this. The reality is that the plan to bring elections to Iraq is a deliberate ploy to ultimately foment civil war in Iraq which will of course necessitate a US troop presence for many years to come. How convenient for Israel.

The Post: In Iraq, there's been a steady stream of surprises. We weren't welcomed as liberators, as Vice President Cheney had talked about. We haven't found the weapons of mass destruction as predicted. The postwar process hasn't gone as well as some had hoped. Why hasn't anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election. And the American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me, for which I'm grateful.

Blatant lie number 2. The majority of those that voted for Bush were fundamentalist Christians who voted for him because of his stance on "moral issues" such as same sex marriage. In any case, the election was very likely stolen, as evidenced by the many reports of irregularities with the electronic voting machines that were used widely throughout the country during the 2004 election. The idea that Americans voted for Bush as an endorsement of his and his cabinet's criminal record over Iraq is therefore laughable and evidence of the deep state of delusion into which Bush has sunk. We say "delusion" because psychological profiles of Bush suggest that he actually genuinely believes his own lies. Of course, Bush is simply a puppet, a figurehead who is being used by others who are well aware that they are lying to the public.

The President: Listen, in times of war, things don't go exactly as planned. Some were saying there was no way that Saddam Hussein would be toppled as quickly as we toppled him. Some were saying there would be mass refugee flows and starvation, which didn't happen. My only point is, is that, on a complicated matter such as removing a dictator from power and trying to help achieve democracy, sometimes the unexpected will happen, both good and bad.

Blatant Lie Number 3. Saddam was not captured. He was flown out of Iraq in April 2003, probably to Belarus. The man that was planted and then captured was one of Saddam's infamous body doubles. A close examination of pictures of the two men will prove this point. While the Iraq war may not have provoked a refugee crisis, the Iraqi infrastructure and economy are in tatters. Starvation may be just around the corner.

The Post: Why do you think [Osama] bin Laden has not been caught?

THE PRESIDENT: Because he's hiding.

The Post: Our allies have done all they can do to help catch him?

THE PRESIDENT: We're on the hunt.

The Post: Do you think others are on the hunt, too? Are you happy, content with what other countries are doing in that hunt?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

The Post: Anyone you're not happy with? (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Look, bin Laden is elusive, and he is in a remote part of the world. And we are -- I am -- I can't think of anybody in the world who is our ally who isn't willing to do what is necessary to try to find him. And so I am pleased about the hunt, and I am pleased that he's isolated. I will be more pleased when he's brought to justice, and I think he will be.

Blatant lie number 4. Osama is a CIA asset since the time of the Afghan-Russo war when he was used by the CIA to funnel funds and weapons to the Afghan fighters. The Bush administration needs a bogeyman to scare the American people into accepting restrictions on their civil liberties and to justify the continued bogus "war on terror" which is a war of global conquest. The US has consistently avoided capturing Osama and has on many occasions deliberately let him escape. He also made an appearance in the US elections when a video appeared just days before the vote.
Coincidence? We think not.

The Post: How concerned are you about the enormously high levels of anti-Americanism, particularly in the Muslim world? And is that an indication that somehow the terrorists are winning the hearts and minds of those people?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, you know, it's interesting. The people of Afghanistan, which is a part of the Muslim world, are really happy that the government of the United States, along with others, liberated them from the Taliban. I suspect that people in the Muslim world, as we speak, are thrilled that supplies are being delivered by U.S. servicemen and women. The Iranians -- the reformers in Iran are, I suspect, very hopeful that the United States government is firm in our belief that democracy ought to spread. In other words, there are some places we're not popular, and other places where we're liked.

In essence Bush's answer about the enormously high levels of anti-Americanism is that he doesn't really care. He does not care about the fact that extortion, corruption and poverty are everywhere in 'liberated' Afghanistan. Nor does he care about the fact that Afghanistan opium production has leaped with the overthrow of Taleban. He does not care that vast numbers of people around the world now see American for the brutal imperialist regime that it always was.

The Post: Only two-thirds of the beneficiaries of Social Security, as you know, are retired people. The rest are disabled and people collecting survivor's benefits. Do you think that the rising costs of disability and survivor's insurance is causing the overall Social Security problem, and can you promise that the benefits will not be touched under your reform plan?

THE PRESIDENT: We will look at all aspects of Social Security, of course, but the main focus I have been on, focusing on -- the main issue I have been focusing on is the retirement system aspect of Social Security, because it is a pay-as-you-go system. The number of payers is declining quite rapidly relative to the number of retirees. And that, thus far, has been our focus, because that is the part where the Congress needs to focus.
And to answer the disability insurance, we have no plans of cutting benefits at all for people with disabilities.

The Post: So they'll definitely remain untouched?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, as I said, we have no plans for cutting benefits.

The Post: Is that just for disability, or for survivors, as well?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we're --

The Post: It's a different benefit for --

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, you're right. Frankly, our discussions in terms of reform have not centered on the survivor/disability aspect of Social Security. We're talking about the retirement system of Social Security. I think that's an accurate statement.

MR. McCLELLAN [Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary]: You're talking about at or near retirees, right?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, they're talking about survivor and disability benefits, and we have had no discussions of that, thus far. The best way to put it -- the answer is, we have no discussions of that, so far, in terms of changing them, I think is the best way to describe it.

An expert piece of filibustering - Bush style. The truth is that Social Security is being siphoned off to support the "war against terrorism". The whole idea that Social Security is bankrupt is false, at least according to the records available to the public, as much of a lie as the story that there were WMD in Iraq. That Bush may wish to bankrupt it to finance his military adventures is, of course, a possibility or even a likelihood. But this would come from a refusal or inability of the US government to pay back the Treasury bonds the government owes Social Security, not because there are more retirees than contributors -- the oficial story. This spike was foreseen twenty years ago and measures were taken to prepare for it. However, if the money has been embezzeled since Spetember 11, they need to find another reason, blame someone else. The government cannot admit this of course, so the plan is to privatise Social Security, hand it over to Wall Street and wait for the impending collapse of the US economy, at which point the blame for there being no SS funds will be laid at someone else's door.

The Ineptitude

THE PRESIDENT: I called Abu Amas the other day, and I told him I'm looking forward to seeing him again and working with him.
Here we see evidence of just how unaware Bush is of current world events. The name is was trying to enunciate was "Abu Mazen", the "nickname" of new Palestinian President Abbas.

The Post: A parochial question for The Post in D.C.

THE PRESIDENT: I'm trying to stay concentrated.

The Post: What's that?

THE PRESIDENT: I'm just trying to stay concentrated. You've got a whole --

The Post: . . . I've got to ask you at least a couple domestic questions. Your answers are short, though.

THE PRESIDENT: A lot shorter than usual.

We are not sure what was going through Bush's mind in the first part of the above quote, what is very interesting however is the comment from the Post reporter: "I've got to ask you at least a couple domestic questions. Your answers are short, though." How could the post reporter know that Bush's answers were short to questions that had not yet been asked? Ok, we realise that very often reporters are given questions to ask the President, but are they given the answers also? And if so, who wrote the questions and answers? Certainly, we suspect that it was NOT Bush. Here again we have evidence for the complete incompetence of Bush as any kind of "leader".

The Post: When you talk about Social Security, you talk about the crisis being now, given the demographic inevitabilities of the system and the financial strains. Is Medicare in crisis, given that it has the same exact demographic strains?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the difference, of course, is that in Medicare, we began a reform system that hopefully will take some of the pressures off the unfunded liabilities, and that is providing, for example, a drug benefit, that will, hopefully, in cases, replace the need for surgery. I used to tell people a lot on the campaign trail that Medicare would pay for the heart surgery but not for the medicine that would prevent the heart surgery from being needed in the first place. Heart surgery costs nearly $100,000, and the medicine could be $1,000. And that's a reform that not only reflects the new nature of medicine, but it's a reform, hopefully, that has cost benefits for the long run.

Notice that in the above Bush ends up saying the exact opposite of what we suppose he means, saying that Medicare would pay for the more expensive heart surgery and not for the drugs that would prevent it in the first place.

In the following extract we have further evidence that Bush has little or no idea about the concepts behind the words that are scripted for him to say.

The Post: Will you talk to Senate Democrats about your privatization plan?

THE PRESIDENT: You mean, the personal savings accounts?

The Post: Yes, exactly. Scott has been --

THE PRESIDENT: We don't want to be editorializing, at least in the questions.

The Post: You used partial privatization yourself last year, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes?

The Post: Yes, three times in one sentence. We had to figure this out, because we're in an argument with the RNC [Republican National Committee] about how we should actually word this. [Post staff writer] Mike Allen, the industrious Mike Allen, found it.

THE PRESIDENT: Allen did what now?

The Post: You used partial privatization.

THE PRESIDENT: I did, personally?

The Post: Right.

THE PRESIDENT: When?

The Post: To describe it.

THE PRESIDENT: When, when was it?

The Post: Mike said it was right around the election.

THE PRESIDENT: Seriously?

The Post: It was right around the election. We'll send it over.

THE PRESIDENT: I'm surprised. Maybe I did. It's amazing what happens when you're tired. Anyway, your question was? I'm sorry for interrupting.

If you are not shocked by the fact that the "Commander in Chief", the "President of the United States of America", the "leader of the free world" has just stated that he was totally unaware that, just a few months before, he himself had told the nation that he was planning to "partially privatize" the Social Security system. To make matters worse, he puts his amnesia down to the fact that he was "tired". We wonder what else Bush has rubber stamped in a state of semi-consciousness. But wait, there's more to come...

The Post: So have you talked to Senate Democrats about this?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I have talked to Senate Democrats, and I will continue to talk to Senate Democrats. And I'll continue --

The Post: Did you --

THE PRESIDENT: We had a meeting with -- I think before Christmas we had the leadership in, didn't we?

MS. DEVENISH [Nicolle Devenish, the White House communications director]: That was Republicans.

How ironic. Not only can Bush not remember what meetings he was at, he can't tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats either. But then again, there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Notice also that Bush has two aides sitting in on the interview and listening carefully in case Bush needs to prompted to say the right thing or quickly censored.

The Messiah Complex

The Post: But you haven't reached out personally to [Senate Democrats] Ben Nelson or Mary Landrieu or [Joseph] Lieberman, people that seem open, at least to the idea, because so many Democrats say, no way.

THE PRESIDENT: I will. First step is to make sure people address -- are willing to address the problem. In other words -- in the campaign, you might remember, in going to one of the debates -- Senator [John] Kerry said -- I don't want to put words in his mouth, but basically said, this is something that we can grow the economy and Social Security will be okay. I think he said that. It's not fair for me -- I don't like when people put words in my mouth, and I try not to put in theirs.
But my point is, is that to me, that points at part of the challenge of getting the issue moving forward. That's why I love when you all put it in the front page of your newspaper, the different aspects of Social Security; so and so says this, and so and so says that -- because it means people are at least talking about it. And my view is, the more it's talked about and the more it's debated, the more likely it is people will recognize that we have a problem that we need to address.
And I meant what I said in some of the big speeches I gave, and oftentimes on the campaign trail, where the job of the president is to confront problems, not to pass them on. Plus, I enjoy confronting problems. I enjoy it when hot shot political reports say, can you believe -- sitting around the coffee table -- can you believe old Bush is trying to take this on?

Bush really seems to think that he can take on the world and win, despite the fact that he cannot get the names of high profile political leaders right and fails to remember the content of his speeches on important issues concerning the American people and their future. Not that any further evidence was needed to conclude that "old Bush", is nothing more than a useful idiot. The future does indeed seem bleak when a man like Bush can rise to the top of a society that is touted to the world as an example of freedom and democracy.