Saturday, January 24, 2009

DE’s New Home

Another Day in the Empire has a new home, a new look and feel, and expanded functionality, including comments and socialized bookmarks. Please follow this link to visit the new site. In the interim, this site will serve as an archive for older posts.

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More Details on the Wikipedia Propaganda Encyclopedia

Now that Wikipedia has found it appropriate to excise the error riddled entry slandering your humble blogger—who was, thanks to nameless dilettantes of unknown employ, chalked up as an antisemite and Holocaust denier—I am wishing for a pony, namely the demise of the online propaganda and slander database masquerading as an encyclopedia. As it turns out, and I reported here late last week, Wikipedia is a magnet for the CIA and FBI, tasked with revising history and, no doubt as well, slamming the opposition, an effort with a long and sordid history.

I failed to mention, however, that Wikipedia is not only a magnet for CIA and FBI hacks, but for multinational corporations as well. “Among those [Virgil Griffith, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology] alleges have been updating their entries are Wal-Mart, the world’s largest grocer, AstraZeneca, the drugs giant, Britain’s Labour Party, the CIA and the Vatican,” reports Times Online. “In one example he gives, a computer linked to an IP address registered to the Dow Chemical company is seen to have deleted a passage on the Bhopal chemical disaster of 1984, which occurred at a plant operated by Union Carbide, now a wholly-owned Dow subsidiary.”

Of course, Dow does not want you to know about this “disaster,” often characterized as the “Hiroshima of the Chemical Industry,” responsible for killing 20,000 people and inflicting an estimated 120,000 survivors with chronic and debilitating, multi-systemic gas related ailments. Not only has Dow expunged the facts on Wikipedia, but has “openly lied to shareholders about the company’s legal liabilities in Bhopal,” according to CorpWatch. “While babies in Bhopal are born with defects and drink breast milk laced with toxins, in the US a new generation has just begun to learn of the gas leak, the ongoing contamination, and their effects,” however, this information will not be gleaned from Wikipedia. It should be noted that Dow refuses to provide medical rehabilitation and economic reparations for the victims, a standard business practice for multinational corporations.

In addition, “ExxonMobil, the US oil giant, made sweeping changes to an entry on the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. A claim that the company ‘has not yet paid the $5 billion in spill damages it owes to the 32,000 Alaskan fishermen’ is deleted and replaced with references to the funds the company has paid out,” and does not intend to ever pay out, as environmental pollution is simply a by-product of doing business and the responsibility for cleaning up the mess, of course, falls to the American people. Don’t expect them to learn about ExxonMobil’s crimes on Wikipedia.

“A web surfer using a machine on Wal-Mart’s network has amended a passage on the rates that the retailer pays its employees—to the benefit of the world’s largest retailer” and a “computer registered to Disney, the media giant, was used to delete a reference to criticism of the use of Digital Rights Management software, used by the group to safeguard digital media from piracy.” AstraZeneca, the pharm giant, deleted a reference to Seroquel, a drug which allegedly made teenagers “more likely to think about harming or killing themselves,” and this deletion was attributed to “a user of a computer registered to the drug company” (consider the following “revision” posted at Wikipedia).

Not only have multinational corporations and the CIA and FBI jumped on the revisionist history bandwagon, but so have religious entities. “Individuals using computers registered to the Vatican have amended entries on Roman Catholic saints and Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein…. A computer linked to the Church of Scientology’s network was used to delete references to links between it and a group dubbed the ‘Cult Awareness Network,’” reports the Times Online.

“Massaging Wikipedia entries has become a well-established phenomenon as the reach of the world’s most popular online reference work has become apparent,” especially if there are official enemies to attack or crimes to be sanitized. “Last year the site was transformed into a political battleground in the US, with politicians’ aides accused of ‘vandalizing’ entries on opposition figures,” sort of a cyber version of dirty tricks, legendary behavior for both the FBI and CIA, long tasked with taking out the opposition. In a way, though, victims of such efforts may consider themselves lucky, as the CIA has dealt with official enemies in other countries more severely, viz., they are often assassinated. Of course, some claim the CIA and the FBI have engaged likewise tactics here, most notably in regard to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Finally, “in a signal of how tempting it can be for interested parties to amend articles, Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder, himself ran into controversy in 2005, when he admitted editing his own Wikipedia entry.”

Figures.

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Bloomberg to Manhattan Residents: Ignore Toxic Peril of Deutsche Bank Fire

Residents of Manhattan, beware of the flaccid reassurances of mayor Michael Bloomberg. In the wake of a fire in the abandoned Deutsche Bank office building near ground zero, “Mr. Bloomberg sought to reassure residents that the chemicals in the building likely did not present a significant health risk, saying air-quality tests so far showed no danger,” the Herald Sun reports. Moreover, Bloomberg indicated that the strange X-Files effect we are told went into effect on September 11, 2001—i.e., cave dwelling terrorists were able to defeat the laws of physics—no longer applies. “Officers were preventing nearby residents from returning to their homes, telling them authorities were concerned the former Deutsche Bank office building, vacant since the terrorist attacks six years ago turned it into a toxic nightmare, could fall. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that fear turned out to be unfounded.”

Let us recall the pronouncements of Christie Todd Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency on the day everything changed, including the laws of science. “EPA Administrator Christie Whitman announced today that results from the Agency’s air and drinking water monitoring near the World Trade Center and Pentagon disaster sites indicate that these vital resources are safe,” the EPA announced after the attacks. In February 2006, however, a federal judge found Whitman guilty of making “‘misleading statements of safety about the air quality near the World Trade Center in the days after the Sept. 11 attack.” The judge found Whitman “may have put the public in danger,” according to the New York Times (Julia Preston, “Public Misled on Air Quality After 9/11 Attack, Judge Says,” February 3, 2006).

“Ground zero workers, volunteers and firefighters have since suffered from lung diseases and cancers, many have died,” writes Steve Watson. “The New York Times reported earlier this year [2006] that the Fire Department tracked a startling increase in cases of a particular lung scarring disease, known as sarcoidosis, among firefighters, which rose to five times the expected rate in the two years after Sept. 11.”

“Nearly 70 percent of the rescue workers who toiled in the dust and fumes at Ground Zero after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks suffer breathing problems, said a study by the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan,” Xinhua News reported last September. “Following the attack, the air in lower Manhattan was polluted with toxic dust from the pulverized skyscrapers. Police, firefighters and others had high rates of lung abnormalities, and many such problems could last a lifetime, the study said.”

As for Whitman, it appears she is yet another garden variety sociopath of the sort rife in governmental positions. According to author and radio host Laura Flanders, there is a “conflict between Whitman’s responsibility to the public and her own family’s financial affairs” (see Flanders’ Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species). “As the former Governor of New Jersey, Whitman owned bonds worth between $15,000 and $50,000 in the New York/New Jersey Port Authority—the owner of the World Trade Center site and the major liable party in the affair. Her husband, John R. Whitman, formerly a Citigroup vice-president, manages hundreds of millions of dollars in the banking giant’s assets, and Travelers Insurance, a Citigroup subsidiary, stood to lose multiple millions in Manhattan medical claims.” In non-Bushzarro times, this would be considered a big time conflict of interest. As we are in the deep water of the Bushzarro era, however, it is business as usual.

Even though judge Deborah Batts denied Whitman immunity against a class action lawsuit on behalf of Whitman’s victims—subjected to the toxic effects of 2,000 tons of asbestos and more than 400,000 tons of concrete—chances are, as a darling and factotum of the ruling class, she will get off the hook. The case, Benzman v. Whitman, is currently on appeal and will likely be locked up in the courts for years to come. “Whitman’s deliberate and misleading statements made to the press, where she reassured the public that the air was safe to breathe around lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and that there would be no health risk presented to those returning to those areas, shock the conscience,” declared Batts at the time. Of course, as the corporate news media prefers to headline the mindless antics of Paris, Britney, and Beyoncé, chances are Whitman’s crimes will fall off the radar screen entirely.

“Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the fire ‘extended the sacrifice’ made by the city and its firefighters on 9/11,” reports CBS News 21 out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “It brought the stench of smoke and the screech of sirens back to an area still trying to recover from the attacks.” Indeed, it may, as well, extend the sacrifice of Manhattan’s hapless residents, caught up in the “new Pearl Harbor” launched by the Muslim-hating neocons and their neolib criminal collaborators, determined to reduce recalcitrant Arabs and Persians to groveling and sniveling vassals, as Zbigniew Brezinski would have it.

In fact, not a single American will escape this extended sacrifice, as the government hurriedly imposes its police state control grid—from airport and transport Gestapo zones to national ID schemes and massive NSA high-tech snooping—and decimate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, little more than “goddamned” pieces of paper, according to the decider and commander guy.

Of course, such sacrifice pales in comparison to that of the Iraqis, highlighted last week by the “suicide bombings” in the villages of al-Qataniyah and al-Adnaniyah, the deadliest yet in Iraq’s “sectarian violence.” Naturally, as the BBC tells it, the “US military blamed al-Qaeda for the … bombings, saying it fitted the profile of ’spectacular’ strikes expected by al-Qaeda during the ongoing US ’surge’ operation.” Never mind, as well, it fits the profile of strikes conducted by white guys in wigs and Arab garb.

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Meanness Has Nothing to Do With It

According to Forbes, Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton are the “meanest” presidential selectees, excuse me, candidates. Forbes tells us “meanness is not an attribute many people consider a positive for a president,” but then most people are sincerely and frighteningly clueless when it comes to the characteristics our rulers, who by and large are inbred sociopaths and psychopaths, find necessary and appealing.

“Politics, along with selling cars, television shows or any other product, has become a complex marketing process,” Forbes informs us. “The 46 attributes help define trends and key drivers of what moves a person to respond or react to the messaging and the messenger. In this case, the candidate’s name is given to the polled population, which is then asked to match whichever of the attributes it believes is appropriate for the candidate in question.”

Again, it is entirely irrelevant what “moves a person to respond or react to the messaging and the messenger,” as the “marketing process” is little more than smoke and mirrors, an expensive charade engaged in every four years to trick the commoners into thinking they actually participate in the “electoral process,” indeed nothing more than a selection process. If you doubt this is indeed the case, take a look at the exclusion process underway in regard to the campaign of Ron Paul, who will of course not be allowed to get anywhere near the White House, let alone the Republican nomination.

As the author William Blum once noted, if he was somehow elected to serve as president, on the fourth day he would be assassinated. It would undoubtedly be the fate suffered by any other person not selected by our rulers if he or she somehow against all odds happened to win an election, never mind the sickly persuasion of the corporate media, Diebold voting machines, and a Supreme Court of appointed reactionaries eager to throw elections.

However, as Wilhelm Reich declared before the government had their way with him, it is the average, the “little man” who is ultimately responsible for the spread of fascism. “You let men in power assume power ‘for the Little Man’. But you yourself remain silent. You give men in power or impotent people with evil intentions the power to represent you. Only too late do you realize that again and again you are being defrauded,” Reich wrote in 1948.

Indeed, we are defrauded on a regular basis. It does not matter that Gingrich or Clinton are mean, this is irrelevant to the point of absurdity. In fact, the entire system—cultural, economic, and political—we exist under is “mean” in the most severe sort of way, as it is run by a gaggle of psychopaths and their minions. Come November, 2008, people will vote for Hillary not because she is mean or kind or anything else, but because the coiffured talking heads on Fox and CNN, the “experts” and “analysts,” at the behest of a very small number of inbred royals and international bankers, tell them to do so.

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Gingrich and Clinton: Meanness Has Nothing to Do With It

According to Forbes, Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton are the “meanest” presidential selectees, excuse me, candidates. Forbes tells us “meanness is not an attribute many people consider a positive for a president,” but then most people are sincerely and frighteningly clueless when it comes to the characteristics our rulers, who by and large are inbred sociopaths and psychopaths, find appealing.

“Politics, along with selling cars, television shows or any other product, has become a complex marketing process,” Forbes informs us. “The 46 attributes help define trends and key drivers of what moves a person to respond or react to the messaging and the messenger. In this case, the candidate’s name is given to the polled population, which is then asked to match whichever of the attributes it believes is appropriate for the candidate in question.”

Again, it is entirely irrelevant what “moves a person to respond or react to the messaging and the messenger,” as the “marketing process” is little more than smoke and mirrors, an expensive charade engaged in every four years to trick the commoners into thinking they actually participate in the “electoral process,” indeed nothing more than a selection process. If you doubt this is indeed the case, take a look at the exclusion process underway in regard to the campaign of Ron Paul, who will of course not be allowed to get anywhere near the White House, let alone the Republican nomination.

As the author William Blum once noted, if he was somehow elected to serve as president, on the fourth day he would be assassinated. It will be the fate suffered by any other person not selected by our rulers if he or she somehow against all odds happened to win an election, never mind the sickly persuasion of the corporate media, Diebold voting machines, and a Supreme Court of appointed reactionaries eager to throw elections.

However, as Wilhelm Reich declared before the government had their way with him, it is the average, the “little man” who is ultimately responsible for the spread of fascism. “You let men in power assume power ‘for the Little Man’. But you yourself remain silent. You give men in power or impotent people with evil intentions the power to represent you. Only too late do you realize that again and again you are being defrauded,” Reich wrote in 1948.

Indeed, we are defrauded on a regular basis. It does not matter that Gingrich or Clinton are mean, this is irrelevant to the point of absurdity. In fact, the entire system—cultural, economic, and political—we exist under is “mean” in the most severe sort of way, as it is run by a gaggle of psychopaths and their minions. Come November, 2008, people will vote for Hillary not because she is mean or kind or anything else, but because the coiffured talking heads on Fox and CNN, the “experts” and “analysts,” at the behest of a very small number of inbred royals and international bankers, tell them to do so.

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FBI, CIA Scriveners Edit Wikipedia Entries

According to Reuters, “CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program.” No doubt, as well, the FBI and CIA have made other changes to “the world’s most important online encyclopaedia,” editorial changes not as grandiose as expanding former CIA chief William Colby’s entry, dumping a chart on Iraq casualties, or removing satellite images of the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. You can bet they edited scads of lesser entries as well.

“The changes may violate Wikipedia’s conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said Thursday,” although Wikipedia, of course, will do nothing about it, as they are not in the business of posting factual information, instead often serving as a platform for character assassination and slander, an area familiar to both the FBI and CIA, often tasked with neutralizing or at least harassing dissidents and those who believe the First Amendment means what it says.

“It violates Wikipedia’s neutrality guidelines for a person with close ties to an issue to contribute to an entry about it, said spokeswoman Sandy Ordonez of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent organization,” Reuters continues, feeding us a line of Wikipedia public relations nonsense. “However, she said, ‘Wikipedia is self-correcting,’ meaning that misleading entries can be quickly revised by another editor. She said Wikimedia welcomed the WikiScanner.”

So neutral is Wikipedia, the site insists I am an antisemite and Holocaust denier—two quite serious allegations in this day and age of highly polarized political correctness and corporate dominated political consensus—although they provide absolutely no evidence of this beyond a blog entry defending the free speech right of David Irving, convicted of not adhering to the official historical orthodoxy. Wikipedia allowed slanderous edits on my entry for months before “self-correction” kicked in.

“According to clues accumulated by ordinary citizens around the world, it could be that the CIA and other intelligence agencies are riding the information wave and planting disinformation on Wikipedia,” Ludwig De Braeckeleer wrote for OhmyNews last month. “If so, tens of thousands of innocent and unwitting citizens around the world are translating and propagating their lies, providing these agencies with a universal news network.”

Of course, this is nothing new, as the CIA has controlled the corporate and much of the so-called “alternative” media for decades, beginning with Operation Mockingbird in the late 40s. “Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the media is not only influenced by the CIA,” writes Mary Louise, “the media is the CIA. Many Americans think of their supposedly free press as a watchdog on government, mainly because the press itself shamelessly promotes that myth. One of the first tenets for the control of a population is to control all sources of information the population receives and mostly because of the pervasive CIA and Operation Mockingbird, the mainstream American Press is a controlled multi-national corporate/government megaphone.”

It would appear Wikipedia is not simply “populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects,” as John Seigenthaler Sr., former assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, would have it, but is indeed an intelligence front, yet another puzzle piece of a sprawling, comprehensive, long-term, and quite effective propaganda effort.

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Chertoff: You Will Submit to the Control Grid

On occasion, our rulers tip their hands a bit too much, especially when confronted with the recalcitrance of subjects in resistance to their best laid plans. “Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act,” reports CNN. “The Department of Homeland Security insists Real ID is an essential weapon in the war on terror, but privacy and civil liberties watchdogs are calling the initiative an overly intrusive measure that smacks of Big Brother.”

The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation warn “the IDs and supporting databases” mandated by Real ID legislation “will infringe on privacy.” The EFF “says on its Web site that the information in the databases will lay the groundwork for ‘a wide range of surveillance activities’ by government and businesses that ‘will be able to easily read your private information’ because of the bar code required on each card.” Of course, that would be simply the beginning, as our rulers plan to eventually use biometric technology and not simply a bar code. Moreover, the Real ID scheme will not be limited to the United States. Back in 2005, BlueBear Network International announced “it has extended its exclusive licensing of facial recognition and secure distributed search technology from Ottawa-based VisionSphere Technologies, to offer State motor vehicle agencies the ability to link driver’s license databases between all U.S. states, Canada and Mexico—as proposed by the sweeping REAL ID Act approved by Congress this month,” Prime Newswire reported at the time. “VisionSphere Technology has developed technology to securely search multiple biometric databases…. The unique technology uses secure internet connections to link and biometric databases maintained anywhere in the world. BlueBear, as the exclusive licensee, adapts that technology for law enforcement by building applications for forensic identification, background checks and the fight against child exploitation.”

Naturally, in order to protect the children, fight crime, and remain vigilant against “al-Qaeda,” we will need surrender our DNA at the door. “For terrorists, travel documents are like weapons,” said Ministry apparatchik, Michael Chertoff. “We do have a right and an obligation to see that those licenses reflect the identity of the person who’s presenting it.” In response to the impudence of at least some commoners, who managed to get a handful of states to pass laws opposing Real ID, Chertoff declared identification issued by our rulers will be mandatory for all “federal purposes,” which include boarding an airplane or walking into a federal building, nuclear facility or national park. In the not too distant future, no doubt, such an ID will be mandatory for the purchase of food.

Not mentioned in the CNN article is the fact Chertoff and the Ministry of Fatherland Security plan to merge the Real ID Act with proposals spelled out in documents issued by the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. In October, 2005, John MacDonald, president of the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators, wrote to the Ministry: the SPP “provides general direction on a number of security issues, although it does not specifically mention the use of driver licences as part of any security solution. Under the section headed ‘Securing North America from External Threats’ is the following statement. ‘We will develop standards for lower-cost secure proof of status and nationality documents to facilitate cross-border travel, and work to achieve optimal production before January 1, 2008.’” It is hardly coincidental this “optimal production” will be achieved a few months before the Real ID is mandated to take effect.

As representative Ron Paul noted in a speech delivered on the floor of the U.S. House, the “legislation gives authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security to expand required information on driver’s licenses, potentially including such biometric information as retina scans, finger prints, DNA information, and even Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) radio tracking technology. Including such technology as RFID would mean that the federal government, as well as the governments of Canada and Mexico, would know where Americans are at all time of the day and night.”

It has nothing to do with “al-Qaeda” and everything to do with a police state control grid.

Confronted with growing resistance, our rulers decided to trot out Chertoff to deliver a message—subjects of the evolving global order will submit, otherwise they will not be allowed to interact with the federal government, something most citizens are required to do on numerous occasions during their lives. “This is not a mandate,” Chertoff said. “A state doesn’t have to do this, but if the state doesn’t have—at the end of the day, at the end of the deadline—Real ID-compliant licenses then the state cannot expect that those licenses will be accepted for federal purposes.”

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Abdullah Azzam and the Omissions of Neocon Historians

In an “editorial” published in the Boston Herald, neocon propagandist—and jackleg historian—Jonah Goldberg gives us a running history lesson on “al-Qaeda,” specifically its purported ideological founder, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam. According to Goldberg, the late Azzam was “one of the founders of the jihadist movement that became al-Qaeda.” Indeed, this is true, although Mr. Goldberg, of course, does not bother to tell us the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey might have it.

Sheikh Abdullah Yusuf Azzam ran Maktab Khadamat al-Mujahidin al-Arab, the recruiting arm of the CIA-ISI operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan, responsible for organizing 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East, as veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has noted. “Even conventional sources regard Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK) as a CIA and ISI front organization. Moreover, MAK served as the offices of the World Muslim League and the Muslim Brotherhood in the northern Pakistan city of Peshawar,” I wrote in January, 2006. As I have explained elsewhere, Azzam’s connection to the Muslim Brotherhood is significant:

Azzam’s connection to the Muslim Brotherhood is a significant factor, considering the Muslim organization was long ago penetrated and made to jump through hoops for the sake of MI6 and later the CIA. “According to CIA agent Miles Copeland, the Americans began looking for a Muslim Billy Graham around 1955,” writes the Palestinian-born journalist and author Said K. Aburish. “When finding or creating a Muslim Billy Graham proved elusive, the CIA began to cooperate with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim mass organization founded in Egypt but with followers throughout the Arab Middle East.” In 1957, the CIA and MI6 collaborated to use the Muslim Brotherhood in an effort to destabilize Syria and assassinate its nationalist leaders (see Jean Shaoul, CIA-MI6 planned to assassinate Syrian leaders in 1957), a plan following the successful CIA-instigated overthrow of the popular and democratically elected Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh by a few years.

Azzam was simply one of a number of CIA-ISI operatives and patsies:

As is often the case with useful but ultimately disposable Muslim fanatics, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam was assassinated on November 24, 1989 and Osama bin Laden took his place. Indeed… “al-Qaeda” may be considered an outgrowth of MAK—or more precisely, an heir apparent as engineered by the CIA, ISI, and Saudi intelligence. MAK had served its purpose as a recruiter and proselytizer of Wahhabi fanaticism in Afghanistan and after the Soviets were ejected the services of Azzam were no longer required (and he was likely considered a danger to the next phase—the spawning and unleashing of “al-Qaeda” in the Balkans and Chechnya).

“MAK was a front for Pakistan’s CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate. The ISI was the first recipient of the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras. Bin Laden was one of three people who ran MAK. In 1989, he took overall charge of MAK,” writes Norm Dixon, an indisputable fact admitted by MSNBC in August, 1998, before everything changed, including history as recited by neocons. Hekmatyar, closely associated with bin Laden and Azzam, according to Asia Times, was “an ISI stooge and creation” (see above link).

Lisa Beyer, writing for Time Magazine as the pall of toxic fumes lingered over Ground Zero in New York, tells us: “At the King Abdel Aziz University in Jidda, bin Laden, according to associates, was greatly influenced by one of his teachers, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who was a major figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that has played a large role in the resurgence of Islamic religiosity. Bin Laden, who like most Saudis is a member of the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, had been pious from childhood, but his encounter with Azzam seemed to deepen his faith. What’s more, through Azzam he became steeped not in the then popular ideology of pan-Arabism, which stresses the unity of all Arabs, but in a more ambitious pan-Islamicism, which reaches out to all the world’s 1 billion Muslims.”

Beyer, of course, does not tell us that it was British intelligence and the CIA and their corrupt clients in the Middle East behind the rise of “pan-Islamicism” at the expense of Arab nationalism. “The CIA was following the example of British Intelligence and sought to use Islam to further its goals,” explains Peter Goodgame (The Globalists and the Islamists: Fomenting the “Clash of Civilizations” for a New World Order). “They wanted to find a charismatic religious leader that they could promote and control and they began to cooperate with groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. With the rise of Nasser the Brotherhood was also courted more seriously by the pro-Western Arab regimes of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They needed all the popular support that they could muster against the rise of Nasser-inspired Arab nationalism to keep their regimes intact.”

For Jonah Goldberg and the neocons, however, the instrumental beginnings of the Muslim Brotherhood, MAK, and “al-Qaeda,” a name gleaned from an Afghan mujahideen database, are not worthy of mention, as some people would get the idea that “Islamic terrorism”—hardly a concern before the Brits, Americans, and Israelis took up interest for the sake of their own agendas—is something other than what the corporate media tells us it is.

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Cheney Antsy to Kill Iranian Toddlers and Grandmothers

If the resistance in Iraq continues to kill U.S. occupation soldiers, the United States will attack Iran, so declared the decider and commander guy during a news conference yesterday. “President Bush charged Thursday that Iran continues to arm and train insurgents who are killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and he threatened action if that continues,” reports McClatchy. “At a news conference Thursday, Bush said Iran had been warned of unspecified consequences if it continued its alleged support for anti-American forces in Iraq. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had conveyed the warning in meetings with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad, the president said.”

Of course, the keyword here is “alleged,” as there is a complete lack of evidence Iran supports “anti-American forces in Iraq,” although support for just about anybody in the country may be viewed as anti-American, as the vast majority of Iraqis want the U.S. out of their country, or what remains of their decimated country.

“Behind the scenes, however, the president’s top aides have been engaged in an intensive internal debate over how to respond to Iran’s support for Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and its nuclear program. Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iraq run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy.”

As usual, a bit of translation is in order: Bush huddled with his coven of neocons and there was no debate to speak of, rather Bush was told what to tell the American people, or those bothering to pay attention. Quite naturally, Iran—or rather the Shia of Iran—support the Shia of Iraq, as they share not only a religion but important religious shrines in both countries, regardless of artificial borders established by the “British Mandate of Mesopotamia” in 1919 and later the so-called “Anglo-Iraqi Treaty,” that is to say Brits imposing a Sunni dominated monarchy on a Shia majority (including Turkomen, Faili Kurds, and other groups).

Neocons have a penchant for telling the same lies over and over, even though such lies are often roundly discredited. For instance, David Milliband, British foreign secretary, discounted the credibility of the claim that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force “is providing weapons as well as funding, training and arming Shiite and other resistance fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan,” as Stephen Lendman wrote last month, although this received scant attention in this U.S. corporate media.

Back in January, according to Muriel Mirak-Weissbach, the neocons planned to “to launch aerial strikes against a key Iranian Revolutionary Guard site in the suburbs of Tehran, the headquarters of the al-Quds Brigade. Such an insane option is reportedly being hotly debated in Administration circles, as some relatively sane elements recognize this would trigger a regional explosion.” Apparently the neocons backed off this proposal, as Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti Emir, told Condi Rice it made more sense to have a “dialogue with Syria, in particular, and with Iran in the interest of Gulf security in general,” lest the neighborhood blow up in his face. Now, instead, Cheney wants to bomb a suspected al-Quds site in Iraq proper, a more doable prospect and one likely not to freak out corrupt and decadent sheikhs worried about their titles and holdings.

“The debate has been accompanied by a growing drumbeat of allegations about Iranian meddling in Iraq from U.S. military officers, administration officials and administration allies outside government and in the news media,” McClatchy continues. “It isn’t clear whether the media campaign is intended to build support for limited military action against Iran, to pressure the Iranians to curb their support for Shiite groups in Iraq or both.”

Naturally, they take us for idiots. Of course the neocons want “military action against Iran” and if and when this occurs there will be nothing “limited” about it, although such moderation—or what passes for moderation in Bushzarro world—is a key selling point, sort of like a spanking new paint job on a rusted used car. All of this may not be “clear” to McClatchy and the corporate media—it is, of course, but then they take us for chumps and dupes, and most of us are—but for those paying attention this serves as yet another red flag on the path leading to the shock and awe of Iran, long in the cards.

“Nor is it clear from the evidence the administration has presented whether Iran, which has long-standing ties to several Iraqi Shiite groups, including the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr and the Badr Organization, which is allied with the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, is a major cause of the anti-American and sectarian violence in Iraq or merely one of many. At other times, administration officials have blamed the Sunni Muslim group al Qaida in Iraq for much of the violence.”

As we know, most of the violence in Iraq stems from the occupation and the resistance is primarily Sunni led and the neocons have labored mightily to portray this completely legitimate resistance as the dirty work of “al-Qaeda” and the usual suspects, that is to say the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI. As well, the case can be made that at least some of the “sectarian violence” in Iraq is the work of white guys in Arab garb and wigs, as briefly eluded to back in September, 2005, by the Washington Post Foreign Service and Reuters.

“Cheney, who’s long been skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran’s complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq; for example, catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran, one official said.”

Let’s cut to the chase: Cheney is not “skeptical of diplomacy with Iran,” but rather finds it abhorrent and anathema. As a neocon, Cheney wants to bomb Iran and kill untold numbers of Iranian toddlers and grandmothers—anything short of mass murder will be wholly insufficient. As for this purported “truckload of fighters or weapons,” Publisher & Editor notes: “It was reminiscent of the day in September 2002 when Cheney and other officials went on Sunday talk shows and touted the now-infamous Gordon-Judith Miller front-pager in the Times on the ‘aluminum tubes’ in Iraq and the possible ‘mushroom cloud’ on the horizon.” Of course, plenty of clueless and ill-informed Americans bought into this transparent scam and no doubt many will this time around as well.

“Lea Anne McBride, a Cheney spokeswoman, said only that ‘the vice president is right where the president is’ on Iran policy,” or rather Cheney has downloaded his psychotic proposal into Bush’s brain, not the other way around. “Bush left no doubt at his news conference that he intended to get tough with Iran,” i.e., he intends to send his killers to deal with the aforementioned toddlers and grandmothers. “My message to the Iranian people is, you can do better than this current government,” recited Bush. “You don’t have to be isolated. You don’t have to be in a position where you can’t realize your full economic potential.” In short, bend to the neocon will or face the consequences—bombed hospitals, schools, mosques, entire neighborhoods, water and sanitation plants, etc., essentially a repeat of the invasion of Iraq with its staggering mortality and disease, thanks to tons of depleted uranium spread liberally about by high-tech serial killers.

Meanwhile, not even Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki is onboard with the neocon plan, as should be expected of an obedient puppet. “Maliki is on a three-day visit to Tehran, during which he was photographed Wednesday hand in hand with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Unconfirmed media reports said Maliki had told Iranian officials they’d played a constructive role in the region.”

In response, Bush declared he will have “a heart-to-heart with my friend the prime minister, because I don’t believe they are constructive. I don’t think he in his heart of hearts thinks they’re constructive either.” Is it possible al-Maliki will suffer the fate of the “Winston Churchill of Asia,” Ngo Dinh Diem, the puppet president of South Vietnam, assassinated by the United States for his inability to follow orders as prescribed? For now, Bush tells us he will talk to his “friend,” but once the talking stops, as it did with Diem, al-Maliki may show up as a corpse. No doubt a dance with Ahmadinejad has consequences.

“Proposals to use force against Iran over its actions in Iraq mark a new phase in the Bush administration’s long internal war over Iran policy…. Until now, some hawks within the administration—including Cheney—are said to have favored military strikes to stop Iran from furthering its suspected ambitions for nuclear weapons.”

Iran does not possess nuclear weapons, or can it be demonstrated they are in the process of developing such, not that it matters to the “aluminum tubes” neocons who not long ago insisted weather balloon trucks were mobile biological weapons labs, an absurdity backed up by the CIA, as the spook and disinfo agency proclaimed the seized trailers were “the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program,” thus demonstrating the quality of information the average American receives for his ransom, er tax money.

Finally, “Patrick Clawson, an Iran specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said a strike on the Quds camps in Iran could make the nuclear diplomacy more difficult. Before launching such a strike, ‘We better be prepared to go public with very detailed and very convincing intelligence,’ Clawson said.”

As usual, the corporate media is infatuated with the “analysis” from pro-Likudite “think tanks” such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, preferring skewered propaganda over reality-based reporting, the latter in short supply these days. It should be noted that Patrick Clawson, formerly an economist with the reactionary Foreign Policy Research Institute as well as with the neolib loan shark operations at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, believes Iran needs to experience a few “industrial accidents” in the lead-up to a full scale attack, this demonstrating exactly what sort of “specialist” he is.

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Daily Kos: CIA Engineered Controlled Opposition?

Is it possible Markos Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga, leader of the “Kossaks,” that is to say followers and fawners of the Daily Kos, is a CIA operative? Francis Holland, posting on the My Left Wing messageboard, details Moulitsas’ relationship with the CIA:

“Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, owner of the DailyKos website, now admits that he spent six months in the employ of the US Central Intelligence Agency in 2001,” writes Holland. “In a one-hour interview on June 2, 2006 at the Commonwealth Club, Moulitsas, also known as ‘Kos,’ admitted that he was a CIA employee and would have ‘no problem working for them’ in the present.”

“I applied to the CIA and I went all the way to the end, I mean it was to the point where I was going to sign papers to become Clandestine Services,” Moulitsas admits in the interview. “And it was at that point that the Howard Dean campaign took off and I had to make a decision whether I was gonna kinda join the Howard Dean campaign, that whole process, or was I was going to become a spy. (Laughter in the audience.) It was going to be a tough decision at first, but then the CIA insisted that if, if I joined that, they’d want me to do the first duty assignment in Washington, DC, and I hate Washington, DC. Six years in Washington, DC [inaudible] that makes the decision a lot easier.”

Moulitsas considers the CIA “a very liberal institution,” never mind the agency, according to John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola (see my John Stockwell: The Third World War video), is responsible for killing more than six million people.

This is a very liberal institution. And in a lot of ways, it really does attract people who want to make a better, you know, want to make the world a better place…. Of course, they’ve got their Dirty Ops and this and that, right but as an institution itself the CIA is really interested in stable world. That’s what they’re interested in. And stable worlds aren’t created by destabilizing regimes and creating wars…. I don’t think it’s a very partisan thing to want a stable world. And even if you’re protecting American interests, I mean that can get ugly at times, but generally speaking I think their hearts in the right place. As an organization their heart is in the right place. I’ve never had any problem with the CIA. I’d have no problem working for them

Is it possible Mr. Moulitsas does not have a problem with the documented fact the CIA’s predecessor, the Overseas Secret Service, imported Nazis to work for the soon to be created CIA under General Reinhard Gehlen? “Gehlen was far from the only Nazi war criminal employed by the CIA. Others included Klaus Barbie (’the Butcher of Lyon’), Otto von Bolschwing (the Holocaust mastermind who worked closely with Eichmann) and, SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny (a great favorite of Hitler’s),” writes Mark Zepezauer (The CIA’s Greatest Hits, Odonian Press, 1994). “There’s even evidence that Martin Bormann, Hitler’s second-in-command at the end of the war, faked his own death and escaped to Latin America, where he worked with CIA-linked groups.

Or that the CIA financed the P-2 Masonic lodge, connected with the Vatican and the Mafia, and enthusiastically supported Operation Gladio, the “strategy of tension” terrorist “stay behind army” effort in Europe, responsible of train station bombings and assassinations, run by former SS Nazis? Is it possible Mr. Moulitsas supports the CIA effort to create shell banks such as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, accurately characterized by former CIA director and current Sec. Def. Robert Gates as “the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International”? Does Moulitsas support the idea of MK-ULTRA, a program designed to test “radiation, electric shocks, electrode implants, microwaves, ultrasound and a wide range of drugs on unwitting subjects, including hundreds of prisoners at California’s infamous Vacaville State Prison,” as Zepezauer notes? Or what about the CIA getting into the heroin business with the Corsican Mafia, paving the way for highly profitable drug importation operations in Central America and Afghanistan, money used not only to enrich the “investment” (in death and misery) bankers but also used for the CIA’s black budget? How liberal is it to engage in assassination, genocide, and plotting the overthrow of governments in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia (where more than 500,000 people were put to death, many of them due to CIA drafted “death lists”), and dozens of other countries?

Of course, the CIA long ago penetrated the “liberal” as well as the “conservative” corporate media in America. “Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, The Miami Herald, and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune. By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with The New York Times, CBS, and Time Inc.,” writes Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein (Rolling Stone, Oct. 20, 1977). “From the Agency’s perspective, there is nothing untoward in such relationships, and any ethical questions are a matter for the journalistic profession to resolve, not the intelligence community.”

Indeed, it would appear Markos Moulitsas finds nothing “untoward in such relationships,” if we are to believe his above quoted comments.

Finally, Moulitsas’ relationship with the CIA makes perfect sense, as Daily Kos appears to be yet another political front operation tasked with cracking the whip over “progressive” Democrats and marching them off to support the Bilderberger Queen Hillary Clinton and her probable running mate, Barack Obama, both on record as supporting the neocon plan to reduce the Muslim world to a smoldering wasteland, albeit with stylistic policy changes. It is no secret the CIA has long stage managed the controlled opposition and Moulitsas’ admitted relationship with the agency should be considered a coup de grâce, an effort designed to reduce the “progressive” Democrat opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the impending attack to be leveled against Iran as little more than an empty and absurd rhetorical slogan.

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WSJ Online: Snoop Nation is All Good

Now that Rupert Murdoch has snarfed up the Wall Street Journal for a cool five billion, we can only hope the newspaper will go the way of the brontosaurus, although it will likely end up closer to the New York Post. In the meantime, we can expect more of the same from the Journal, that is to say more neocon nonsense from its “editorial” staff.

For instance, according to the WSJ Online, a Stasi-like state snooping on its citizens is a good thing, lest Osama and his dour Muslim cave dwellers get us again. “The good news is that the new law will at least allow the National Security Agency to monitor terrorist communications again. That ability has been severely limited since January, when Mr. Bush agreed to put the wiretap program under the supervision of a special court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The new law provides a six-month fix to the outdated FISA provision that had defined even foreign-to-foreign calls as subject to a U.S. judicial warrant.”

The NSA, of course, has snooped on Americans since it was established by pen flourish in 1952. In fact, government cryptologists set the precedent well before the creation of the NSA with the Shamrock program, an idea spawned by military censorship during WWII. “Copies of foreign telegraph traffic had been turned over to military intelligence during the war, and, when the war ended, the Army Security Agency sought to have this continue. All the big international carriers were involved,” Dr. Louis Tordella, a former deputy director at the NSA, told Brett Snider.

Shamrock begat Project MINARET, or maybe it was the other way around, not that it matters. MINARET, coordinated by the NSA, CIA, and FBI, used “watch lists” to snoop and follow around American “subversives” such as Malcolm X, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, and Martin Luther King. NSA Director Lew Allen testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975 that the NSA had issued over 3,900 reports on watch-listed Americans and the NSA Office of Security Services cranked out reports on at least 75,000 Americans between 1952 and 1974. It is said MINARET was put to sleep by Attorney General Elliot Richardson. If you believe this, I have a bridge for sale.

“The Senate Select Committee that investigated government domestic spying in 1976 pried open a tiny public window into the scope of NSA spying,” writes Earl Ofari Hutchinson. “But the agency slammed the window shut fast when it refused to cough up documents to the committee that would tell more about its surveillance of Americans. The NSA claimed that disclosure would compromise national security. The few feeble Congressional attempts over the years to probe NSA domestic spying have gone nowhere. Even though rumors swirled that NSA eyes were riveted on more than a few Americans, Congressional investigators showed no stomach to fight the NSA’s entrenched code of silence,” or its entrenched habit of slamming the Fourth Amendment, now more or less comatose.

“The first duty of Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell is to prevent the next terrorist attack, and it’s disgraceful that some have vilified him for trying to revive our intelligence ability in that cause,” the WSJ continues.

It is apparently also disgraceful we have a Constitution and Bill of Rights, or at least once had such rights, never mind they were betrayed early on when Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, authorizing the president to deport aliens “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States” during peacetime, that is to say get rid of Americans who disagree with the government. It is quite normal for government to consider “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” as treason and a high misdemeanor, punishable by fine and imprisonment. In order to demonstrate its sincerity, the government of president Adams had twenty-five men arrested, most of them Republican editors, and their newspapers were forced out of business. One such high misdemeanor criminal was none other than Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Philadelphia Democrat-Republican Aurora, and grandson of Benjamin Franklin.

According to WSJ Online op-ed writers, opposition to the NSA blank check to snoop is all about the “Democratic left” going after “a weak President near the end of his term,” never mind this supposedly weak president has granted himself near dictatorial powers by way of a National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, signed on May 9, 2007. “This directive, completely unnoticed by the media, and given no scrutiny by Congress, literally gives the White House unprecedented dictatorial power over the government and the country, bypassing the US Congress and obliterating the separation of powers. The directive also placed the Secretary of Homeland Security in charge of domestic ’security,’” writes Larry Chin. Of course, when the “Democratic left” rolls into the White House in early 2009, such directives will come in mighty handy. It should be remember that the “liberal” New York Times, now considered treasonous for reporting on Bush’s NSA program, characterized Bill Clinton’s use of Echelon—a global spy system said to be capable of snooping virtually every phone call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world—as a “necessity.” Government perfidy is always a “necessity,” irrespective of what party the decider hails from.

“The only reason [Clinton’s use of Echelon came] to light is because of concerns raised by high-level sources within federal law-enforcement and intelligence circles that the operation was compromised by politicians—including mid- and senior-level White House aides—either on behalf of or in support of President Clinton and major donor-friends who helped him and the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, raise money,” Insight Magazine reported in 1997. As well, a 1993 conference of Asian and Pacific world leaders hosted by Clinton in Seattle had been spied on by U.S. intelligence agencies, according to Insight.

Imagine my surprise.

“Goaded by the ACLU and much of the press corps, many Democrats want to use the courts and lawsuits to restrict Mr. Bush and future Presidents in their ability to gather intelligence in the war on terror,” the WSJ Online continues, never mind the next “future president” will likely be Hillary Clinton, wife of Bill, who had no problem using Echelon against his enemies or foreign leaders he mistrusted, apparently a legion. As usual, we are expected to buy into this partisan political nonsense when in fact you can stand both parties on their heads and not notice any difference.

“The weekend law expires in six months, and it would be nice to think enough Democrats would put aside this ideological obsession to work with Mr. Bush on a more permanent wiretap statute. Given the current state of Beltway rationality, we aren’t optimistic,” the WSJ Online concludes. “As negotiations unfold, we hope the President resists any deal that compromises the ability of his successors to defend the country. In 18 months, Mr. Bush will be leaving office, but the terrorist threat will continue. The stakes are too large for any President to accept new judicial limitations on his ability to track terrorists at home or abroad. Rather than accept such limits, Mr. Bush could use Congressional recalcitrance as an opportunity to withdraw the terrorist surveillance program from FISA authority, and thus toss the issue squarely in the middle of the 2008 Presidential campaign.”

It is simply astounding how effortlessly the WSJ Online trounces the Constitution and Bill of Rights—again, not that it particularly matters, as we have endured generations without protection and the illusion of rights in name only, easily withdrawn at the drop of a hat, or should I say turban?

Our global elite and transnational corporate rulers will certainly not accept “judicial limitations” in their drive to convert America to a sprawling slave plantation, a plan unfolding under the rubric of fighting “terrorism,” soon enough under one to save the planet from the carbon emissions of selfish and obese consumers who were, after all, trained well in their mindless consumption, once quite profitable, now a scurrilous eco-crime.

But never mind. Most Americans have precious little comprehension of their once cherished rights, even if in practice such rights were more or less an illusion, the stuff of high school history class lessons and Fourth of July parades. No, the average American will not miss the Fourth Amendment—that is until the day the cops, outrigged in SWAT black, bust down his door in search of “contraband” shipped into the country by their bosses, and at a none too modest mark-up.

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Giuliani’s Neocons

Rudolph Giuliani will not be the next decider and commander guy. Even so, at least to make a good appearance, Giuliani has stacked his campaign deck with insiders and neocons. As we know, Giuliani’s chief foreign policy adviser is Charles Hill, a George Shultz flunky, and the team led by Hill includes Martin Kramer, a “scholar” at the Middle East at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Shalem Center, and the Olin Institute, that is to say at the very core of the neocon movement to destroy America and kill Muslims. Now we are told Giuliani will hire the grand daddy of the neocon cabal, Norman Podhoretz. “In addition to being an unwavering supporter of the war against Iraq, Podhoretz, a former editor of Commentary magazine, has grabbed headlines in recent months as one of most vocal proponents of American military action against Iran,” notes InFocus.

“The naming of leading neoconservative Norman Podhoretz as one of Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani’s senior foreign policy advisers is disconcerting to those Americans who have hoped that the current disagreements with Iran might be resolved short of war,” laments Philip Giraldi for National Interest Online. “Giuliani—together with Mitt Romney and John McCain—has publicly advocated a military strike against Iran to keep it from acquiring nuclear weapons. He has also not ruled out the use of America’s own nuclear weapons if that should prove necessary to deter Tehran.” In other words, the neocon agenda is alive and well amidst the Republican hopefuls, or at least those billed as front-runners by the corporate media (the real front-runner, Ron Paul, assiduously ignored by the corporate media, is strenuously opposed to the neocon mass murder project).

Giraldi continues:

Podhoretz has recently called on the United States to bomb Iran and he describes the current situation—pitting Washington against what he describes as “the Islamofascist threat”—as World War IV. Podhoretz basically advocates a world-wide conflict not unlike World War II to defeat Islamists everywhere they are to be found. Giuliani is already the U.S. presidential hopeful who is perceived most favorably in Israel because of his uncompromising stance on issues like the Iranian threat and terrorism, and the addition of Podhoretz will certainly be viewed favorably by many influential neoconservatives. Podhoretz is himself an uncompromising advocate of what he sees as Israeli national security imperatives very much in the mold of the right-wing Likud party….

Podhoretz’s definition of the enemy as Islamofascism is itself a borrowing from right-wing Israeli think tanks that prefer to see an enemy in unitary terms that can be conflated with international terrorism. Most experts on Islam and on the many countries that have majority Muslim populations would reject that Islamofascism or anything like it really exists, just as the “global war on terrorism” is essentially a misleading simplification that has little meaning. The basically false depiction of a hostile and menacing global entity is done deliberately to help formulate a policy which perforce makes Israel’s enemies also the enemies of the United States, even when they are not.

Chances are slim to none Giuliani, with Podhoretz and any number of neocons in tow, will occupy the White House. Even the neocon Newt Gingrich admits as much. “The odds are fairly significant that that the left will win next year. My personal bet is that it’ll be a Clinton-Obama ticket. I think they have a very high likelihood of winning,” Gingrich told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Six months ago in the polling numbers, Giuliani was ahead of Clinton. He is now behind. He’s the strongest Republican in terms of popular vote, whether you’re for him or against him.” In fact, it was decided some time ago the Clinton-Obama team would “win” the “election” come November, 2008.

Of course, the “left,” headed up by the decider gal Hillary Clinton, will pick up the neocon baton and go after Iran, as planned.

In 2005, during a Hanukkah dinner speech hosted by Yeshiva University, Clinton said: “I held a series of meetings with Israeli officials, including the prime minister and the foreign minister and the head of the [Israeli Defense Force] to discuss such challenges we confront. In each of these meetings, we talked at length about the dire threat posed by the potential of a nuclear-armed Iran, not only to Israel, but also to Europe and Russia. Just this week, the new president of Iran made further outrageous comments that attacked Israel’s right to exist that are simply beyond the pale of international discourse and acceptability. During my meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, I was reminded vividly of the threats that Israel faces every hour of every day … It became even more clear how important it is for the United States to stand with Israel,” that is to say the Likudites.

Clinton will “continue to support AIPAC’s mission to occupy the whole of the occupied territories, as well as a war on Iran in the future,” writes Joshua Frank. Earlier this year, Clinton declared during an AIPAC dinner, “no option can be taken off the table” when dealing with Iran. “We need to use every tool at our disposal, including diplomatic and economic in addition to the threat and use of military force,” the latter naturally the preferred course, as the neocons and their friends on the Democrat “left” are determined to shock and awe Iran, not divest it of illusory nukes.

Although we can assume Hillary Clinton will not court the likes of Norman Podhoretz and the over-the-top neocons, once “elected” her foreign policy will be a neocon mirror image. As Joshua Frank notes, Richard Holbrooke, fondly known as the “Balkans bulldozer,” may “be asked to serve as Secretary of State if she is to win the presidential campaign next year. Holbrooke, a Democratic adaptation of Henry Kissinger, loves her approach to foreign policy.” Frank reminds us that Holbrooke has a special place in his heart for the neocon way of doing things, that is say the neocon way of killing Muslims. “In an unguarded moment just before the 2000 election, Richard Holbrooke opened a foreign policy speech with a fawning tribute to his host, Paul Wolfowitz, who was then the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington,” Frank quotes First of the Month.

Holbrooke, a senior adviser to Al Gore, was acutely aware that either he or Wolfowitz would be playing important roles in next administration. Looking perhaps to assure the world of the continuity of US foreign policy, he told his audience that Wolfowitz’s ‘recent activities illustrate something that’s very important about American foreign policy in an election year, and that is the degree to which there are still common themes between the parties.’ The example he chose to illustrate his point was East Timor, which was invaded and occupied in 1975 by Indonesia with US weapons—a security policy backed and partly shaped by Holbrooke and Wolfowitz. ‘Paul and I,’ he said, ‘have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep [East Timor] out of the presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests.’

It helps, as well, that Holbrooke is a regular at CFR and Bilderberg meetings, thus demonstrating his globalist pedigree (in fact, Holbrooke is not simply your garden variety member, but rather sits on the board of directors). Other CFR members include Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Irving Kristol, and a smattering of other neocons and like-minded, including the butcher of Honduras, John Negroponte. Richard N. Haass, current president of the CFR and former State Department director of policy planning under Colin Powell, while not strictly a neocon, paralleled the release of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the neocon plan of attack issued by the Project for the New American Century, with his own “Imperial America,” a paper “that urged the United State to fashion an ‘imperial foreign policy’ that makes use of its ’surplus of power’ to ‘extend its control’ across the face of the globe. While still denying that lasting hegemony was possible, Haass declared that the United States should use the exceptional opportunity that it now enjoyed to reshape the world in order to enhance its global strategic assets. This meant military interventions around the world,” John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney explain in Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire (Monthly Review Press, 2004, p. 170).

In short, be the next president Clinton or Giuliani, and it will likely be the former, foreign policy will remain virtually the same, no doubt with a few stylistic differences.

Of course, not only will the neocons be satisfied with this change, as their policies will continue, albeit without their direct participation, but “progressive” Democrats, as exemplified by the Kos cadre embracing Clinton last week, will be happy as pigs in a certain disagreeable substance come November, 2008, and will blissfully ignore the “common themes between the parties,” namely more bodies piled up in their name, same as they dutifully ignored Bill Clinton’s mass murder spree in Serbia and his intermittent attacks against Iraqi civilians, including the renown Iraqi artist Layla al-Attar.

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Kos Faithful Line Up Behind Clinton

It is quite the spectacle, witnessing the Bilderberger Queen, Hillary Clinton, and the CFR habitué, John Edwards, sucking up to Markos Moulitsas and the “liberal” bloggers, an easily hoodwinked gaggle the possible selectees will bamboozle next year.

“Gone are the days when candidates and political parties could talk to passive voters through mass media, largely controlling what messages were distributed, how the messages went out and who heard them. The Internet has helped create millions of media outlets and given anyone the power to express an opinion or disseminate information in a global forum, and connect with others who have similar interests,” News for Yahoos would have us believe. “Clinton is viewed skeptically by the blogging community, mainly for her history of hawkish views on Iraq. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of Daily Kos and spiritual leader of the convention, said Clinton still might be able to mitigate her problems.”

Mr. Moulitsas, however, gave no clue how Clinton would “mitigate” the ruling class who, after all, own her, same as they owned and ran her husband. “We may decide she’s not our first choice, but she’s not a bad choice,” said the blogger.

In other words, Moulitsas, a former Republican, now a “progressive,” will persuade his loyal followers to vote for Hillary. Of course, only the seriously blinkered can’t see that next time around, in the perennially rigged game of “mainstream” political musical chairs, a Democrat will be selected to “serve” as our president. Moulitsas will lead the lib blogosphere dog and pony show and demonstrate the efficacy of the internet in cheerleading and grandstanding Bilderberger and CFR candidates.

“Plunging headlong into the Internet era, all seven candidates fought for the support of the powerful and polarizing liberal blogosphere by promising universal health care, aggressive government spending and dramatic change from the Bush era,” News for Yahoos proclaims.

How effortlessly these libs are fooled. Of course, there will be no “universal health care,” as our rulers are not interested in the health and welfare of commoners, who are considered by and large expendable, if not useless eaters. As for “aggressive government spending,” we had this for the last seven years, as the federal budget under Bush stands at nearly 3 trillion, double that of Bill Clinton, who was no slouch when it came to spending the money of other people, or rather socking their kids and grand kids into perpetual debt. Bush and crew like to claim the national debt stands at $8.3 trillion. In fact, when the fuzzy math is chucked, the actual debt is $49 trillion—$156,000 for every citizen, or $375,000 for every working American. In 2005, we paid $327 billion on interest alone, and that is of course the point, to pay the bankers their exacted due, a habit Moulitsas would have the Dems continue.

In short, our “netroots” future will look pretty much like the recent past, only worse, although the lib bloggers will feel a whole lot better with the Bilderberger Queen in there, even if they have reservations, as they always do and then go out and vote as told. Libs may stand up and boo Hillary, as they did at the Yearly Kos Convention’s Presidential Leadership Forum in Chicago over the weekend, but when push comes to shove the “progressives” will vote for Clinton, never mind she is virtually indistinguishable from the neocons, as she is in the pocket of AIPAC—as are all of the Dem selectees—and wants to starve Iran into submission, if not bomb it outright, and proffers a “centrist” stance on Iraq, that is to say she will keep the troops there killing locals for the indeterminable future.

Finally, as the following video demonstrates, Clinton will continue the reprehensible tradition of selling Washington to multinational corporations like a well-worn call girl at a set rate. It will be business as usual, thanks to the operator Moulitsas and his trained lib monkeys who embarrassingly show off their split personalities, at one moment booing Hillary and the next accepting her as the next selected president of the United States.


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Congress Critters Move to “Proactively Protect” Children from Internet Hobgoblins

Now that the Senate Commerce Committee has “passed a bill that would require the review, within one year of enactment, technology that can help parents manage the vast volume of video and other content on television or the Internet,” it will be interesting to see what sort of solution the government proposes to deal with the fact far too many parents fail and fail miserably at monitoring the online behavior of their children. “It’s an uphill battle for parents trying to protect their kids from viewing inappropriate programming. I believe there is a whole new generation of technology that can provide an additional layer of help for these parents,” the bill’s sponsor Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AK) said, reports Press Esc. “Given the increasingly important role of the Internet in education and commerce, it differs from other media like TV and cable because parents cannot prevent their children from using the Internet altogether,” added senator Ted Stevens, who believes the internet is a “series of tubes.”

Of course they can, Mr. Stevens. It is called the on-off switch. Short of that, if parents sincerely cared about protecting their children instead of expecting the government to take over the job of parenting, they would purchase and install K9 Web Protection, Net Nanny, CyberPatrol, or any number of other software packages designed to filter internet content. However, as the Texas ISP Association points out, “buying and installing software on a computer cannot be an adequate substitute for spending quality time parenting your child. Many experts and successful parents who have survived the Internet experience agree that Internet-connected computers cannot be safely used as electronic baby-sitters.”

“In a meeting where civil liberties groups were not invited, Democrats and Republicans said that the web needed to be censored to protect children,” the Inquirer reported late last month. “Commerce Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye and Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee Vice Chairman Ted ‘The Internet is made out of tubes” Stevens argued that Internet was a dangerous place where parents alone could not protect their children,” so naturally the government will be required to do the job. “Stevens, who has also been arguing for phone companies to charge Internet customers twice for the same service, said that Congress has an important role to play to ensure that the protection available in other parts of society find their way onto the Interweb…. The FCC would have to come up with a way to identify filtering technologies and identify what could be done to improve the process and better enable parents to ‘proactively protect’ children online.”

It is not difficult to figure out where all this proactive protection business is going. First and foremost, the government does not care about sheltering children from objectionable content, unless of course that content is of the wrong political coloration, never mind vague bills passed by the Senate Commerce Committee. Ted Stevens, for instance, is far too busy handing out government contracts to his business buddies to give a whit about the children of mere commoners, behavior so egregious the FBI and IRS were sent to raid his home in Alaska, prompting Ted Lang to comment: “So there you have it. More secret government operations, abuse of power, and lobbying arrangements depriving the American people of both representative government and justice. Yet these holier-than-you-and-me ‘honorables’ feel qualified to write laws to govern our behavior, what we see, what we read, and what we think.”

“Both sides of the aisle hate the Internet for its honesty and truth,” Lang continues. “The Hillaroid has already indicated that when AIPAC appoints her as America’s first Queen, she’ll make damn sure that two-party system ‘gatekeepers’ are in place to ensure professionalism. And that in all likelihood is precisely the same line of reasoning which motivated Republican Senator Ted Stevens from the State of Alaska to express his fear of the Internet as well. And who knows more about the Internet than the schnook of the north?…. The Internet must be ‘filtered,’ meaning it needs a Hillaroid-approved government stooge to monitor what is allowable for public consumption and what is not. And just like Hillaroid’s false front, it is, of course, ‘for the children.’ That authorizes deprivation of truth and fact to adults that wish to think as opposed to turning in their belly buttons.”

China, of course, is the model for internet censorship, same as it is the emerging business model, or slave plantation model. “Internet censorship is not new in communist China but, because of the technical difficulties presented by complete censorship, the regime has never been able to successfully regulate the Bulletin Board System (BBS). According to a recent article circulated on the BBS in mainland China, new measures are being devised to ‘take care’ of the ‘BBS problem,’” reports the Epoch Times. “The article said that new BBS restrictions will be implemented nationwide in China, and will start in Guangdong Province, as it has the most websites and surfers in China. All unregistered internet forums will be shut down after October 1…. The article also revealed some of the specific requirements include an independent server, and only one BBS site per server. Also, the owner of the BBS site will be required to provide personal and contact information so that he can be reached 24/7, and all participants will have to use their real names. BBS websites will have to ask users to register in advance, and to provide such personal information as name, telephone number, and ID number.”

But such behavior is not limited to China. “Slowly, but steadily, the Internet is ceasing to be the open network of people that exchanged information freely. According to a Reuters report, state restrictions on use of the Internet have spread to more than 20 countries. In the fear of rising political opposition, these states have more than 20 countries in the world have been using contradictory rules to help keep people offline,” writes Raju Shanbhag for TMCnet. “According to the report, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) presented case studies of Web censorship in Kazakhstan and Georgia in ‘Governing the Internet’ and it referred to similar findings in nations from China to Iran, Sudan and Belarus. The report by the 56-nation OSCE said that the recent moves against free speech on the Internet in a number of countries have provided a bitter reminder of the ease with which some regimes, democracies and dictatorships alike, seek to suppress speech that they disapprove of, dislike, or simply fear.”

As Wayne Madsen noted in 2005, large corporations are taking the lead in the United States. “Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco Systems have honed their skills at Internet censorship for years in places like China, Jordan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, and other countries. They have learned well. They will be the last to admit they have imported their censorship skills into the United States at the behest of the Bush regime…. Only those in the Federal bureaucracy and the companies involved are in a position to know what deals have been made and how extensive Internet censorship has become. They owe full disclosure to their customers and their fellow citizens.”

Full disclosure will only come after Hell freezes over.

In the meantime, we can count on Ted “Tubes” Stevens to protect the kids, same way the kids are protected in China.

Addendum

It is only a bit of an exaggeration to say the United States will eventually implement the sort of in-your-face internet censorship currently at work in China. Here in America, where until recently we were inculcated in the fairy tale of democracy, manipulation of information deemed inappropriate for the commoners is dealt with a bit more stealthily.

According to an anonymous post on the San Francisco Indymedia site, marketing companies engage in “black PR,” a “covert type of marketing campaign designed to influence and sway public opinion through covert means,” including attacking free discussion that criticizes government.

“Members of the agency were concerned about community forums like Craigslist which are read by millions of people. Our job at Tomkins and Scott, my job specifically, was to monitor Craigslist and summarily flag all postings which reflected negatively upon the city in any way. I am going public with this because, after 3 years of being a censor for Craigslist, I believe what we are doing is totally wrong,” explains the anonymous post, which mysterious found its way to the memory hole on the Craiglist site. “I can tell you that the agency of the city of San Francisco which contracted us is not the only government agency to be engaging in black PR operations. If you knew the full list of agencies hired by us and sister firms you would be absolutely shocked. If the average citizen understood the extent to which the information being presented to him or her is being filtered and skewed they would be up in arms immediately.”

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What Montebello NAU Meeting?

On page one of Fox News, we learn that “ubermodel” Heidi Klum is working with Victoria Secret’s to promote a “new breast booster: Body By Victoria Full Coverage Uplift,” and yet not a word about Bush’s plan to sell the country down the river next month at the Security and Prosperity Partnership summit in Quebec. All the news fit to print, I guess, or rather post. Of course, it is no secret the corporate media is ignoring this story—not breasts, mind you, but treason.

Open your browser and enter “Security and Prosperity Partnership” in Google News search. Google returns recent articles from the National Ledger, Infoshop News, Bay Area Indymedia, the Free Market News Network, the Hindustan Times, and a bevy of Canadian news sources, including the Ottawa Citizen and the Nova News Now, but nary a trace of any reportage from the likes of the New York Times or the Washington Post. You’d think Bush trekking off the Canada would be news, but no. Instead, we get Full Coverage Uplift news.

“If you don’t know what the Security and Prosperity Partnership is, welcome to the crowd. Most people have never heard of it, even though it is clearly the framework by which three countries—the United States, Mexico and Canada—could give up their sovereignty in order to band together in some kind of new North American Union,” writes Frank Miele for the Daily Interlake, a newspaper reaching a whopping 17,500 people out in the boonies of northwest Montana. “I was one of those people who used to laugh at the idea of a North American Union…. And if you are foolish enough to talk about it in public, you are dismissed as a paranoid kook or a right-wing goon.”

As Jerome R. Corsi notes on the usually stock and trade neocon World Net Daily, despite “evidence to the contrary, Vice President Dick Cheney says there is no ’secret plan’ to create a continent-crossing superhighway to help facilitate a merger of the United States, Mexico and Canada.” Cheney told a “constituent” the “administration is not engaged in a secret plan to create a ‘NAFTA super highway.’” Indeed, it may be said Cheney is pulling a George Washington “never told a lie” routine, because the plan to criss-cross the United States with NAFTA super corridors glutted with Mexican semi trucks ferrying cheap goods manufactured by Chinese slaves is not a secret, it is simply that the corporate media is not reporting it, thus people like Mr. Miele feel foolish talking about it in public. If you don’t want to be relegated to the tinfoil hat brigade, stick to Full Coverage Uplift.

“Bush Quebec” entered in Google returns nada, or almost nothing. Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, makes mention of the summit to sell out the United States, Canada, and Mexico in the National Ledger, otherwise we confront silence. The London Free Press (Ontario, Canada) reports “Prime Minister Stephen Harper phoned U.S. President George W. Bush yesterday as the two leaders prepare for the North American leaders’ summit” next month in Montebello, Quebec. No mention of the SPP or the plan to merge nations, although a recent Harper trip to Latin America is billed as “free-trade negotiations,” as in the freedom to pillage, rob, swindle, and hold fire sales with the property of Latin Americans, a long accepted—at least by mobster heads of state and “investment” bankers—policy under the rubric of “globalism,” now touted as an inevitability and irreversible by the corporate media.

It seems Corsi is tireless when it comes to warning folks of the SPP agenda. “A multinational business agenda is driving the upcoming summit meeting of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, according to a document obtained through an Access to Information Act request in Canada,” Corsi reported last month. “The memo shows a secondary focus of the leaders’ meeting in Montebello, Quebec, Aug. 20-21, will be to prepare for a continental avian flu or human pandemic and establish a permanent continental emergency management coordinating body to deal not only with health emergencies but other unspecified emergencies as well.”

Is it possible our rulers will use an avian flu epidemic to stampede us into a North American Union scheme, sort of the same way they stampeded us into disemboweling the Constitution and Bill of Rights after nine eleven?

Maybe. But then, of course, I am a “paranoid kook” and “a right-wing goon,” although I am hardly “foolish enough to talk about it in public.”

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Tancredo Again Calls for Bombing Mecca, Medina

After presidential selectee hopeful and neocon psychopath Tom Tancredo once again suggested bombing Mecca and Medina as “the best way he can think of to deter a nuclear terrorist attack on the US,” according to the International News, a Washington-based Islamic civil rights and advocacy group declared his threat “unworthy of anyone seeking public office in the United States.” In fact, as a psychopath, Tancredo has the required skillset for office, although as a one percenter at the bottom of the potential selectee heap he won’t be taking up residency at the White House.

“If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina,” Tancredo said at a Family Table restaurant in Osceola, Iowa. “Because that’s the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do,” the Denver Post reports.

Tancredo would have us believe “al-Qaeda,” the database, has nukes and is itching to use them, and thus we should be ready to bomb and destroy religious sites and kill thousands of people, all of them quite innocent of any crime against Tancredo or the United States. Of course, “al-Qaeda,” the legend of scary campfire stories, does not have nukes and will not pull off a terrorist attack, nuclear or otherwise, unless it is politically advantageous for the neocons.

If we are to use Tancredo’s deranged logic, the Iraqis have the right to bomb Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, as the United States in essence has nuked Iraq. According to the World Uranium Weapons Conference held in Hamburg in October 2003, the “amount of DU used in Iraq in 2003 is equivalent to nearly 250,000 Nagasaki bombs,” as Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, former Chief of the Naval Staff, India, explained in 2004. As well, the people of Kosovo and Afghanistan have a right to indiscriminately slaughter Americans, following Tancredo’s murderous logic. “A British scientist says the Americans’ use of depleted uranium weapons in the war with Serbia is likely to cause 10,000 extra deaths from cancer,” the BBC reported in 1999, after Clinton attacked the former Yugoslavia. “Bulgarian researchers reported finding levels eight times higher than usual within Bulgaria itself, and up to 30 times higher in Yugoslavia.”

Leuren Moret, a former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist, writes:

Extensive carpet bombing, grid bombing, and the frequent use of missiles and depleted uranium bullets on buildings in densely populated areas has occurred in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. The discovery that bomb craters in Yugoslavia in 1999 were radioactive, and that an unexploded missile in 1999 contained a depleted uranium warhead, implies that the total amount of depleted uranium used since 1991 has been greatly underestimated. Of even greater concern, is that 100 per cent of the depleted uranium in bombs and missiles is aerosolized upon impact and immediately released into the atmosphere. This amount can be as much as 1.5 tons in the large bombs. In bullets and cannon shells, the amount aerosolized is 40-70 per cent, leaving pieces and unexploded shells in the environment, to provide new sources of radioactive dust and contamination of the groundwater from dissolved depleted uranium metal long after the battles are over, as reported in a 2003 report by the UN Environmental Program on Yugoslavia. Considering that the US has admitted using 34 tons of depleted uranium from bullets and cannon shells in Yugoslavia, and the fact that 35,000 NATO bombing missions occurred there in 1999, potentially the amount of depleted uranium contaminating Yugoslavia and transboundary drift into surrounding countries is staggering.

In short, millions of people, poisoned by the cancerous “transboundary drift” of DU, have the right to attack the 6th Congressional District of Colorado, where Tancredo “serves” as a neocon in the United States House of Corporate Whores, er Representatives.

Of course, Tancredo’s hate speech delivered at a Family Table restaurant in Osceola, Iowa, is part and parcel of the ongoing “clash of civilizations” agenda, although, as usual, Democrats and libs are clueless. “We. Are Not. At War. With Islam,” writes Bruce Feiler, New York Times-bestselling author, over at the Huffington Post. “Even George Bush has repeatedly stressed this distinction in our struggle with Islamic extremists. So here’s a challenge: How about every Republican candidate for president get asked in the coming days whether he agrees with Tom Tancredo: Should we consider bombing Muslim holy sites in response to an Islamic terrorist’s attack against us?”

Au contraire, Sparky. We. Are. At. War. With Islam, or rather the neocons are at “war” with Islam, although “war” is hardly a sufficient noun, as it is defined as a “state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary. Islam and Islamic nations are not at war with Tancredo and his troupe of neocon psychopaths, although the neocons are at “war” with Islam, or more accurately the neocons are killing large numbers of Muslims, either directly in Iraq or elsewhere by proxy, and this is more akin to shooting fish in a barrel than a conventional war.

Libs need to get with it if we are going to stop this homicidal madness. Our “struggle” is not with “Islamic extremists,” in large created and unleashed by the CIA, ISI, and a potpourri of associated intelligence agencies and black ops, but rather with our psychotic rulers and their hired guns, determined to make way for a global slave plantation.

In the meantime, as the “election,” or decidership selection process dog and pony show, approaches, we can expect more such bloodthirsty proclamations, especially now that Barack Obama has offered himself up as rhetorical springboard, declaring Pakistan must be invaded, that is short of nuking captive populations. The Bilderberger Queen Clinton, on the other hand, has not refused “to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against Osama bin Laden or other terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” according to the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post. Naturally, all of this is considered normal political discourse, hardly worth excoriation by the corporate media, never mind the flat-out criminal insanity of such a proposal, not long ago considered inconceivable but now a mainstream response to manufactured problems.

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Obama Follows the Neocon Mass Murder Script

It is a race to see who can kill more people. “As President, Barack Obama would order attacks on terrorist camps in Pakistan even if its president, Gen. Pervais Musharraf, refused to give permission and would link American aid on Pakistan’s progress in rooting out its terrorist havens,” writes Marc Ambinder for Atlantic Online. “That stance, one part of the multifacted counterrorrism strategy Obama unveils this morning, is tougher than the more considered approach of the Bush Administration, which has generally avoided antagonizing its ally in public.” In other words, Obama’s selection strategy consists of outdoing the neocons and he really harbors no reservations when it comes to mass murder and adding to the horrific total exacted in human life (nearly a million Iraqis) since the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

“I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans,” declared Obama. “They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

Indeed, there are “terrorists holed up in those mountains,” never mind the United States set-up this enclave. “Ironically, rather than arresting Al Qaeda ‘foreign fighters’ who were combating alongside the Taliban [in Afghanistan], the US military actually facilitated their evacuation in military planes to Northwestern Pakistan,” notes Michel Chossudovsky, who cites Seymour Hersh:

The Bush Administration ordered US Central Command to set up a special air corridor to help insure the safety of the Pakistani rescue flights from Kunduz to the northwest corner of Pakistan …

[Pakistan President] Musharraf won American support for the airlift by warning that the humiliation of losing hundreds—and perhaps thousands—of Pakistani Army men and intelligence operatives would jeopardize his political survival. “Clearly, there is a great willingness to help Musharraf,” an American intelligence official told me [Seymour Hersh]. A CIA analyst said that it was his understanding that the decision to permit the airlift was made by the White House and was indeed driven by a desire to protect the Pakistani leader. The airlift ‘made sense at the time,’ the CIA. analyst said. ‘Many of the people they spirited away were the Taliban leadership’—who Pakistan hoped could play a role in a postwar Afghan government. According to this person, “Musharraf wanted to have these people to put another card on the table” in future political negotiations. “We were supposed to have access to them,’ he said, but ‘it didn’t happen,'’ and the rescued Taliban remain unavailable to American intelligence.

According to a former high-level American defense official, the airlift was approved because of representations by the Pakistanis that “there were guys—intelligence agents and underground guys—who needed to get out.

Now Obama wants to bomb them. Of course, this is simply political grandstanding, as the president is not really the decider guy but rather a factotum who takes orders from on-high. If our rulers want to kill “al-Qaeda”—that is to say, dirt farmers and peasants in Pakistan’s Federal Administered Tribal Areas—that is precisely what will happen, no matter if the commander guy is a Republican neocon or a Democrat neolib.

“As President, I would make the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional, and I would make our conditions clear: Pakistan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters, and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan,” said Obama, who is slated to be Hillary’s running mate, never mind all the hoopla and jive indicating otherwise. “The day the Clinton-Obama ticket is announced would really be one for the history books,” averred Anna Quindlen for Newsweek a few days ago.

Finally, as if to make sure the Pashtuns—in neocon-speak, Taliban militants—of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province are correctly singled out and targeted, we learn that an “Islamic alliance” in the province “bordering Afghanistan has proposed changing the region’s name to ‘Afghania’, a provincial minister said on Wednesday…. Pashtun nationalists have long demanded the old colonial name [created during the days of the British Raj in pre-partition India] be changed as it only indicates a geographical location rather than the ethnicity of its inhabitants, as in the other three Pakistan provinces—Punjab for Punjabis, Sindh for Sindhis and Baluchistan for Baluchis,” according to Reuters.

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Cartoon of the Day

Ron Cobb, a former Disney “inbetweener” animation artist, was an influential political cartoonist in the 1960s and 1970s. He drew the above illustration in the late 60s, thus demonstrating his prescience of things to come.

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Congress Critters: P2P a Threat to National Security

It is understandable Congress critters are concerned about the existence of peer-to-peer networks as Congress by and large is owned and operated by transnational corporations and the very idea of non-centralized peers operating as equals sans central servers and routers is anathema to them. It should come as no surprise Congress has declared peer-to-peer networks to be a threat to “national security,” that is to say the very concept runs counter to the idea of “public-private partnering in homeland security,” i.e., corporations mandating threats—usually defined as the inability to dominate markets and enforce monopolies—and unleashing federal dogs on “terrorists,” that is to say those who either refuse to accept or resist their dominance.

“According to recent studies by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and private researchers,” TMCnet reports, federal employees are wont “to share sensitive or classified documents accidentally from their computers,” including “confidential corporate-accounting documents, localized terrorist threat assessments, classified government military orders, as well as personal information such as federal workers’ credit card numbers, bank statements, tax returns and medical records,” and thus there ought to be a law. “Although politicians believed that there are benefits to peer-to-peer technology, they felt that if proper restrictions are not imposed, it will compromise national security, intrude on personal privacy and violate copyright law. Both [Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman] and Rep. Paul Hodes called P2P networks ongoing national security threats.”

In other words, the IT folks working for the feds are idiots, since they allow peer-to-peer software on their machines. But never mind. It is not about what software is installed or how bandwidth is used but rather it is about crushing “darknets” far and wide, as they cannot by their nature be controlled. “It is illegal for government employees to leak certain types of classified documents without approval, either electronically or through traditional paper means,” but instead of tracking down the perps and prosecuting them, Congress is determined to wipe out the very existence of peer-to-peer networks.

Dare I suggest Sandy Berger stuffing classified documents down his pants is more of a threat to “national security” than P2P networks sharing files?

“Mr. Waxman hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about and this new round of political grandstanding is absurd,” complains George Ou, writing for ZDNet. “The Federal Government should clean up their own security act because year after year they get failing or near failing grades. Mr. Waxman is slamming Lime Wire for producing software that may circumvent Federal Government security, but the real question is why are Federal Government IT departments allowing Federal employees to install Lime Wire or any other piece of software on Government computers? The mere fact that Government Employees have administrative access to install software on their computers let alone computers with access to sensitive information is absurd. If you can’t even keep employees from installing Lime Wire, you’re sure as hell not going to prevent them from installing root kits which are infinitely more destructive.”

Good point. But then installing Lime Wire or even installing rootkits—a rootkit is a set of software tools intended to conceal running processes, files or system data from the operating system—is not the point.

“One of the arguments that is increasingly being made is that P2P technology is a threat to national security,” writes Ernest Miller, a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. “The argument is weak (it hurts our economy, so it must hurt our national defense), but it is the rhetorical equivalent of a bomb used to silence opposition…. One could easily note that most pro-copyright maximalist bills will do more damage to our consumer electronics and computer industries than benefit the copyright industries.”

Of course, the only “electronics and computer industries” that matter, as far as the corporate whorehouse known as Congress is concerned, are behemoths such as Microsoft and the telecoms, already in bed with the government in the name of “national security,” that is to say snooping on your telephony traffic, just in case you are a terrorist, in other words you are actively opposed to the government. After all, the Ministry of Homeland Security didn’t hire former Stasi chief Markus Wolfe and former head of the KGB General Yevgeni Primakov for nothing. It has less to do with kids sharing Fergie and Shop Boyz MP3s and more to do with control, as we are ruled by control freaks, although the “entertainment industry,” control freaks in the name of every last dime to be squeezed out of teenagers, are collaborating—or maybe that should be purchased like a call girl—with Congress for their own selfish reasons.

In the Borg Hive society envisioned by our rulers, all communication not methodically snooped by our very own Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi) and approved by a sprawling bureaucracy no different than the Main Administration for Safeguarding State Secrets in the Press of the USSR Council of Ministers will not only be impermissible but impossible.

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Neocons Salivate Over Hillary

It should come as no surprise prominent neocons are gushing over Hillary Clinton, as noted by the Seattle Times. Fred Barnes of the neocon house organ, the Weekly Standard, couldn’t contain his admiration for the Bilderberger Queen. Ditto for Rich Lowry of National Review, David Brooks, and the Joseph Goebbels of the neocon movement, Charles Krauthammer.

“She excels,” Lory praised. “Clinton has run a nearly flawless campaign and has done more than any other Democrat to show she’s ready to be president,” that is to say any other neocon, or neolib, not that there is a whole heck of a lot of difference, as the neocons understand. Clinton has repeatedly indicated her desire to “confront” Iran, that is to say bomb the country, or at least starve it into submission, and that naturally warms the cockles of psychopathic neocon hearts, or lack thereof.

“All this from a crowd that has spent the better part of two decades demonizing Clinton and her husband, former President Clinton,” writes a clueless Matt Stearns, corporate scribe for McClatchy Newspapers. “Is the conservative chattering class just hedging its bets, wary that Clinton might win the White House and banish them all?”

No, Matt. Point is, demonstrated well enough here, there is little difference between mainstream Democrats and neocon “conservatives,” who take their pedigree from Trotskyites and Jabotinskyite, Arab-killing terrorists. Some of them are fond of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist, who wrote about dictatorship and the “death machine” of the state, while others admire Niccolò Machiavelli and the idea of principe nuovo, a pragmatic and ruthless dictator. A few of them gathered at the foot of Leo Strauss, who advocated the concept of Plato’s “noble lie,” that is to say brazen deception, a common enough practice in government these days. Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky were students of Strauss, while Andrew Sullivan, Elliott Abrams, Alan Keyes, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, and Irving Kristol studied under the Straussian Harvey C. Mansfield, who advocates a “strong executive,” that is to say the sort of decidership Schmitt wrote about. Democrats, while not explicit Straussians or stark raving fascists along the lines sketched out by Carl Schmitt, are indeed authoritarians, more socialist in a classical sense but despots nonetheless.

Hillary Clinton was selected by the ruling elite to be the next president, so it makes sense the neocons, who have made a career out of attacking and slandering Democrats, as part of the false left-right political paradigm, are enthusiastically onboard, praising the Bilderberger selectee Clinton now, same as the old communist politburo praised without hesitation the leader appointed by the Central Committee. If serious neocons understand anything it is that power from on-high must be respected and obeyed, lest they are led to the political wilderness, a dreaded prospect worse than death for most of the neocon megalomaniacs.

“Hillary Clinton is our best shot to win the White House. That’s pretty much consensus by Republican insiders,” the Seattle Times reports “a Republican strategist with a top-tier GOP candidate” as admitting. In other words, none of the Republicans currently strutting, preening, and bloviating have a chance, as the elite want a Democrat this time around, not that there is a lick of difference between Democrats and Republicans. It is interesting this admission comes from a “strategist” for a “top-tier GOP candidate.”

But then not so interesting or surprising, as little of substance will change under Queen Hillary. Of course, the masses will be fooled again, as usual, and that’s why the corporate media is now trotting out letters Hillary Rodham wrote to high school friend John Peavoy while attending Wellesley College back in the day. “The letters were written during a period when the future Mrs. Clinton was undergoing a period of profound political transformation, from the ‘Goldwater girl’ who shared her father’s conservative outlook to a liberal antiwar activist,” reports the Boston Globe. In other words, lib Dems need not be concerned, as deep down inside Hillary remains “a liberal antiwar activist.” Meanwhile, Republicans may rest easy knowing Hillary got her start supporting Goldwater, not that the neocon Republicans of today follow the principles of Barry Goldwater, indeed a real conservative.

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Decider Guy Demands Further Erosion of the Fourth

If Bush and the neocons have their way, your cell phone will be an official government surveillance device. Of course, your cell phone and computer connected to the internet are already surveillance devices, it is just that Bush and the neocons want to enshrine this fact in law.

“President Bush used his weekly radio address Saturday to urge Congress to modernize a law that governs the interception of communications between suspected terrorists abroad,” reports Voice of America, the official propaganda organ of the U.S. government. In other words, the NSA, CIA, and the Pentagon, through so-called modernization, will be able to legally monitor all “terrorist” communications, that is to say anybody who opposes the government. As we know, the NSA has done this for decades. Bush is simply advertising to make it all this incessant snooping legal and above board.

“Mr. Bush said the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is badly out of date and needs to be updated to include new communication technologies including cell phones and the Internet…. The president said his administration is recommending changes to the law that will allow the government to collect intelligence about foreign targets in foreign locations without obtaining court orders…. He said the changes will facilitate intelligence efforts while protecting American civil liberties.”

FISA already provides the ability to “collect intelligence about foreign targets in foreign locations,” so this statement is, to say the least, disingenuous. Fact of the matter is, Bush—read: the neocons and their kissing cousins, the neoliberals—want to legalize snooping millions of Americans “without obtaining court orders,” that is to say Bush and crew want to further erode the Fourth Amendment. Naturally, in the parlance of Bushzarro world, this is considered “protecting American civil liberties,” when in fact it is the exact opposite.

Here is an excerpt from the commander and decider guy’s radio address earlier today:

To fix this problem, my Administration has proposed a bill that would modernize the FISA statute. This legislation is the product of months of discussion with members of both parties in the House and the Senate—and it includes four key reforms: First, it brings FISA up to date with the changes in communications technology that have taken place over the past three decades. Second, it seeks to restore FISA to its original focus on protecting the privacy interests of people inside the United States, so we don’t have to obtain court orders to effectively collect foreign intelligence about foreign targets located in foreign locations. Third, it allows the government to work more efficiently with private-sector entities like communications providers, whose help is essential. And fourth, it will streamline administrative processes so our intelligence community can gather foreign intelligence more quickly and more effectively, while protecting civil liberties.

Translation: future generations of cell phones will be outfitted with snoop technology, thus making it easy for the government to listen in on your next conversation with Osama, or rather the ghost of Osama—or maybe listen in on a conversation with your brother-in-law who complains a lot about the government. Changing FISA, itself a violation of the Fourth Amendment, assigning it the role of “protecting the privacy interests of people inside the United States,” is simply an effort to sweep the “FISA court” (when a normal court will not do) aside, as this will allow “the government to work more efficiently with private-sector entities like communications providers,” for instance the cozy relationship the government shares with AT&T, which is nothing new (the NSA has collaborated with AT&T and other carriers since the early 1950s to violate the civil liberties of Americans). Bush, or rather his puppet masters, simply want to codify all of this in law and slap a sticker on the package declaring it protects the privacy of all Americans.

Meanwhile, in a radio address Nancy Pelosi declared the “threat of terrorist violence against the United States is growing. al-Qaeda is gaining strength, and Osama bin Laden continues to elude capture. There is not a moment to spare to take the steps necessary to keep the American people safe,” or continue the destruction of the Bill of Rights, long ago put on the endangered list, as there is no “al-Qaeda” threat to the “homeland,” or maybe it should be das Vaterland, but simply a drumbeat marching us to tyranny and ultimately slavery, as our rulers are determined to reduce America to slave plantation based on the China model. In order to make that process more efficient, a Stasi- or KGB-like snoop state apparatus is mandatory.

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Cops Molest Woman for Questioning Non-Candidate Thompson

In Texas, the First Amendment is illegal. Hell, in most of America the First Amendment is moribund, so this should not be surprising. Of course, you can have your free speech, so long as you ask the right questions or keep your mouth shut.

“A woman screaming ‘you’re not a real conservative, sir’ was removed by police from a welcoming reception for likely GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson Wednesday morning. A second protester was also taken from the room,” reports CNN (follow link to see video), neglecting to mention the woman “screamed” after the cops leaned on her for the crime of politely asking fake presidential selectee Fred Thompson about his membership in the CFR, a question he did not answer, although he admitted being a member of the “conservative,” as in criminal neocon, American Enterprise Institute, responsible for plotting the invasion of Iraq and also responsible for killing over 750,000 people.

According to the Stop the American Union website, Fred Thompson is indeed a CFR member, and his name appears on an annotated membership roster.

“The ‘lamestream’ news media treats the CFR as merely some advisory think tank. But, the Council on Foreign Relations is much more than that. Going back almost a hundred years, the CFR mission is to establish a one-world government,” writes Tom Kovach for World Net Daily. “CFR members must work—some openly, and some secretly—to steadily undermine American sovereignty. The recent news about the North American Union is only one phase of an unrelenting effort toward global government.

CFR member Lamar Alexander used to work for CFR member Howard Baker, who mentored CFR member Fred Thompson. And, Thompson was elected to the Senate in 1994, the same year CFR member Bill Frist was elected to the United States Senate from Tennessee. Both Frist and Thompson joined the CFR in 2002. So, with several years of experience on Capitol Hill at the time they both joined, there is no way either of them could reasonably deny knowledge of the agenda and influence of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations….

There is no doubt Thompson has a globalist pedigree. And, if he becomes a candidate for the White House, the pattern is already established for Thompson and his CFR-elite cronies to continue weakening the security of America’s borders, turning a blind eye toward terrorist threats, and giving away America’s strategic advantages. Regardless of his amiable personal qualities, can the United States really afford to elect a “Bush-button” globalist president such as Fred Thompson?

Of course, Thompson will get nowhere near the White House, as that spot is reserved for a Democrat, either Hillary or Obama, as the game of musical chairs must continue and the globalist agenda move forward. Some peg Thompson as a Ron Paul spoiler.

So, why didn’t Thompson answer the woman’s question, and why did the cops body press her? Because, CFR members don’t want you to know who they are and what they have in mind for America, that is to sell it down the river to transnational corporations and turn you into a slave, no different than a slave in a Chinese sweatshop.

How dare this woman ask Thompson a question.

After all, he is of globalist pedigree.

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Commander Guy Delivers Another Scary “al-Qaeda in Iraq” Campfire Story

As Bush, reading once again from a neocon script, this time at the Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina, insists “al-Qaeda in Iraq” is a threat not only to the occupation of Iraq but grade schoolers at home, it is useful to revisit Nick Possum. “Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a real Zarqawi. Nobody is willing to tell what really happened to him, but at some point before the invasion of Iraq he vanished from the real world and entered the twilight zone of black operations to become a symbol of evil and a master of disguise. Nowadays he hides out in the CIA complex at Langley, Virginia, a basement in Baghdad’s Green Zone, an office in Kuwait … or maybe all three,” Possum wrote on June 1, 2005.

“In a half-hour speech clearly aimed at his Democratic critics,” and anybody else who dares question the murder of more than 750,000 Iraqis since March, 2003, “Mr. Bush said that those who argued that the affiliated group, called Al Qaeda in Iraq or AQI, was a local group with local objectives, and not a serious threat to Americans at home, were seriously misinformed,” reports the New York Times. “It’s hard to argue that Al Qaeda in Iraq is separate from bin Laden’s Al Qaeda when the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq took an oath of allegiance to Osama bin Laden,” the commander guy declared, referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the supposedly dead leader of “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” now AQI for short.

It appears this nonsense is working—at least a little. According to “recent opinion polls, the president has had some recent success in making a case to voters for continuing the war in Iraq. He has insisted both that success is possible and that failure would be catastrophic, in part because Al Qaeda in Iraq might then turn its attentions elsewhere,” for instance a day care in Killdeer, North Dakota.

Chalk it up to an incessant barrage of propaganda—characterized as a “surge of facts,” according to White House communications director Kevin Sullivan—entering the corporate media news cycle and competing with the arrest of yet another drunken and drug addicted Hollywood starlet. The decider and commander guy’s speech before a captive audience of soldiers, Sullivan insisted, “was devised as a ’surge of facts’ meant to push back against critics who say Bush is trying rebuild support for the war by drawing links between the Iraq group and the one led by bin Laden. But Democratic lawmakers quickly accused Bush of overstating those links to provide a rationale for the continued American presence in Iraq.” Of course, the neocons and their slavish handmaiden, the corporate media, cannot prove the existence of “al-Qaeda” in Iraq or anywhere else. “In his speech, Bush did not try to debunk the fact—repeated by Reid—that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia did not exist until after the U.S. invasion in 2003 and had flourished since.” It is as likely the public relations facade of “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” was created by the Pentagon.

Back in early 2006, Reuters carried a report indicating the “Zarqawi threat” was “magnified” in order to “leverage [a] xenophobia response,” not only on the part of the Iraqi resistance but here at home. “Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will—made him more important than he really is, in some ways,” Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq, told a U.S. Army meeting in the summer of 2005.

The military’s propaganda program, according to the Washington Post, was “largely been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. ’strategic communications’ in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the ‘home audience’ as one of six major targets of the American side of the war…. An internal document produced by U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, states that ‘the Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date,’” Michel Chossudovsky notes. “Counterterrorism and war propaganda are intertwined. The propaganda apparatus feeds disinformation into the news chain. The objective is to present the terror groups as “enemies of America.” responsible for countless atrocities in Iraq and around the World. The underlying objective is to galvanize public opinion in support of America’s Middle East war agenda.”

US military-intelligence has created it own terrorist organizations. In turn, it has developed a cohesive multibillion dollar counterterrorism program “to go after” these terrorist organizations. To reach its foreign policy objectives, the images of terrorism in the Iraqi war theater must remain vivid in the minds of the citizens, who are constantly reminded of the terrorist threat. The Iraqi resistance movement is described as terrorists led by Zarqawi.

The propaganda campaign using the Western media, presents the portraits of the leaders behind the terror network. In other words, at the level of what constitutes an “advertising” campaign, “it gives a face to terror.”

The “war on terrorism” rests on the creation of one or more evil bogeymen, the terror leaders, Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, et al, whose names and photos are presented ad nauseam in daily news reports. Without Zarqawi and bin Laden, the “war on terrorism” would loose its raison d’être. The main casus belli is to wage a ” war on terrorism”.

Indeed, the latest neocon effort to frighten the public with yet another fallacious “advertising campaign” is a half-baked effort riddled with obvious holes. “Current and former intelligence officials say the Bush Administration’s National Intelligence Estimate regarding terrorist threats to the United States does not provide evidence to support its assertions and may have inflated the domestic threat posed by the Lebanese political and military group Hezbollah, perhaps because it receives financial support from Iran,” reports Larisa Alexandrovna. “An individual close to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research told Raw Story the document’s assertions are not backed up by empirical or external evidence even in the classified version. In addition, this official explained, the information lacks context and does not prioritize threats.” Intelligence officers “asserted that the report was sloppy and lacked supporting evidence” and was “fiddled” with, a neocon trademark.

But never mind. Our commander guy is reading from a neocon script and if you question it you “don’t know shit,” as Bill Gallagher reported a previous Bush exclamation, citing Capitol Hill Blue.

Bush refers to those who protest his war as “motherf—king traitors” and he was so enraged when he heard reports about the “bullshit protectors” [worn by VFW members at a speech] that he screamed at his aides, “Tell those VFW assholes that I’ll never speak to them again if they can’t keep their members under control.”

Capitol Hill Blue has long dealt with a topic that the corporate media won’t touch—Bush’s mental fitness for the presidency and the behavior patterns associated with his addiction-damaged personality. The journal reports Bush’s doctors are trying to control his dark moods with anti-depressant drugs.

While the Busheviks have sold the myth that their man is an affable “nice guy,” the reality is that he is often vile and profane. His explosive temper is increasingly displayed. At a recent strategy session, discussing polls showing most Americans are now against the war and don’t believe Bush, he reportedly bellowed to his staff, “I’m the president and I’ll do whatever I goddamned please. They don’t know shit.”

As we know, our “addiction-damaged” commander guy recently slammed through yet another executive order—entitled Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization (or unending destruction and misery) Efforts in Iraq—this time threatening the Fifth Amendment rights of Americans. Bush’s latest executive order “is a stunning assertion of executive power that creates a Sword of Damocles over anyone opposed to the war or otherwise who might come under the umbrage of the president,” constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein told WorldNetDaily. Fein insists the executive order is “so sweeping and broad that it permits the president to threaten virtually anybody who opposes our policy in Iraq.”

Maybe even wishy-washy Democrats.

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Syria to Employ Hezbollah Strategy

Back in October, 2005, the Mossad’s favorite propaganda source, DEBKAfile, fretted over the sale of advanced Russian Iskander SS-26 missiles to Syria. According to DEBKAfile, Putin reneged on a deal not to sell the hardware to Syria, a lamentable situation for the Israelis as NATO and the United States “have nothing in their missile arsenal to match its unique attributes,” in other words, Israel is helpless to stop the Iskander if Syria decided to use it. So impressive is the missile “that in 2004, the Americans sought to include it in various treaties signed with Russia for precluding the manufacture and sale of certain weapons. Moscow balked. A Western missile expert says: ‘Even a small quantity of these missiles is capable of radically changing the balance of strength in local conflicts.’ It is a strategic weapon for countries with a small area like Syria.”

Strategic, indeed. Fast-forward to July, 2007, and witness Israel bemoaning the Iskander once again. “Syria sees the next war with Israel as involving missile attacks on civilian infrastructure and front-line guerilla warfare, an anonymous senior official in the Syrian Ministry of Defense told Defense News Weekly, in an interview appearing Monday. Syria prefers to avoid a direct, ‘classic’ confrontation with Israel, he said. Instead, the next war will involve Katyusha rocket and ballistic missiles that will target strategic points in Israel, especially civilian infrastructure,” reports Arutz Sheva. “According to Arab affairs expert Dr. Guy Bechor, the Syrian assessment is a result of the Second Lebanon War. After that war the Syrians understood that they do not need a large ground force to defeat Israel, but rather missiles aimed at dense Israeli population centers. For the past two years the Syrians have been engaged in massive acquisitions from Russia, after an $11 billion debt was partially forgiven by Russia in 2005, and partially covered by Iran…. The London-based daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat recently reported that Syria has deployed Chinese C-802 cruise missiles, which it acquired from Iran. In addition, Russia has expressed its willingness to sell the Syrians its Iskander missile, which has a range of 280 kilometers, more than enough to strike at any destination in Israel. The missile features an optical GPS navigational system that allows operators to guide it to their targets.”

Call it the Hezbollah Strategy. It makes certain sense Syria, with its puny military—when stacked up against Israel, armed to the teeth by the United States—and its out-moded Russian tanks and planes, would eventually adopt Hezbollah’s winning strategy, as there is simply no way it can go up against Israel on the battlefield. Naturally, this new development pokes a big hole in the Likudnik and neocon agenda to take out all of Israel’s enemies in turn. Not even the United States, with its faltering Patriot missiles, can protect Israel against the mighty Iskander, also known as the “Stone.”

Recall, after Israel invaded Lebanon last summer, the neocons demanded Israel attack Syria. “George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah as an opportunity to expand the conflict into Syria and possibly achieve a long-sought ‘regime change’ in Damascus, but Israel’s leadership balked at the scheme, according to Israeli sources,” Robert Parry wrote at the time for Consortium News. “One Israeli source said Bush’s interest in spreading the war to Syria was considered ‘nuts’ by some senior Israeli officials, although Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has generally shared Bush’s hard-line strategy against Islamic militants.”

Nuts, indeed, as Israel was likely not fond of the prospect of Syrian missiles raining down on Tel Aviv, a feat Hezbollah was not able to accomplish with its short-range and highly inaccurate rockets.

“After rebuffing Bush’s suggestion about attacking Syria, the Israeli government settled on a strategy of mounting a major assault in southern Lebanon aimed at rooting out Hezbollah guerrillas who have been firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel.” As we know, this strategy turned out to be a dismal failure, although Lebanese civilians paid a high price for Hezbollah’s reluctance to surrender.

“According to the neocon strategy, ‘regime change’ in Syria and Iran, in turn, would undermine Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that controls much of southern Lebanon, and would strengthen Israel’s hand in dictating peace terms to the Palestinians,” writes Parry.

Of course, this is nonsense, as the Israelis have no desire to enter into “peace terms” with the Palestinians, dictated or otherwise. Moreover, the neocons are not particularly concerned with undermining Hezbollah per se, as Hezbollah controls, or rather protects, only part of Lebanon. In fact, the neocons, often more Zionist than the fanatical Likudnik Jabotinskyites in Israel, want to sweep the entire board and render all Arab and Muslims nations in the region into politically ineffectual vassal states, unable to contest Israel’s hegemony and helpless to resist Greater Israel, from the Nile to the Euphrates, as Rabbi Fischmann, member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared in his testimony to the U.N. Special Committee of Enquiry in July of 1947.

Now that Syria has declared the Hezbollah Strategy, all of this will be much more difficult for the Likudniks and the neocons. It is, as well, reassuring to note that the promise made to Israeli officials by former U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton will be far more difficult to deliver, i.e., Bolton and the neocons had little doubt America would attack Iraq, and that it would be necessary to deal with Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards, although Iraq was regrettably invaded, occupied, and pitched into massive ruination and incalculable human suffering. Hopefully, Syria and Iran will now be spared a likewise fate.

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Neocons Press Pakistan Endgame

Ah, yes, another clueless political hack, this one who works for a dictator. “It would be ‘completely counterproductive’ for the United States to launch military strikes in the Pakistani tribal regions where al Qaeda and Taliban militants have created safe havens, Pakistan’s foreign minister said Sunday,” reports CNN.

It is “completely counterproductive” because Pakistan’s ISI has spent a lot of time and money reconstituting the Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or FATA of Pakistan. “The ISI quietly allowed free passage within the Waziristans to Afghan Taliban commanders Jalaluddin Haqqani and Mullah Dadallah. These leaders’ task was to marshal the different tribal Taliban chieftains into a movement coherent enough to abide by a truce. But the price for peace was Talibanization. It was pronounced in a communiqué issued by Haqqani in May 2006,” writes Graham Usher for the Middle East Report. Of course, as we know, the process of talibanization was a collaborative effort between the CIA and the ISI. CNN, of course, does not bother to inform us of this crucial fact.

Usher fills in the egregious memory holes left behind by CNN:

For the last 30 years, FATA’s isolation has served another purpose: The state has used the region as the launching pad for Pakistan-inspired insurgencies in Afghanistan, with the first coming after the communist coup in Kabul in 1978. Fueled by CIA and Saudi money, but engineered by Pakistan’s premier Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) directorate, the militias incubated in the tribal areas became national, regional and ultimately global Islamist movements, of which al-Qaeda is only the most notorious. Amidst penury grew a war economy driven by opium, guns and God, while jihad was first taught, then waged, by generations of young men, dislocated and orphaned in Afghan refugee camps, but schooled in madrassas allied to one or another of Pakistan’s Islamist parties or sponsored by states like Saudi Arabia.

According to the estimate of Pashtun nationalist politician Afrasiab Khattak, as many as 500,000 young men were thus socialized during the Afghan wars. Overwhelmingly Pashtun, they were bound by tribal codes of honor, loyalty and revenge. But, uprooted from their villages, they were also susceptible to new idioms of Islam, whether the Deobandi strain peddled by the Pakistani madrassas or the austere Wahhabism of the Saudi Arabians and other “Afghan Arabs” who had come to fight the Soviets. In many cases, faith became a demotic cocktail of the two.

It is precisely this “demotic cocktail,” engineered by the CIA and boasted to be its most successful operation, we are now told threatens our way of life. “Job No. 1 is to protect the American people. There are no options off the table,” declared Frances Townsend, the neocon Homeland Security advisor.

As should be expected, the neocons don’t give a whit about Pakistan’s dictator, Pervez Musharraf, who has served more or less as an obedient vassal for his back-stabbing boss and his clash of civilization minions. If indeed there “are no options off the table,” i.e., the Pentagon attacks FATA, there is a good chance Musharraf will be toast.

“A strong action in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan by beleaguered Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf could lead to a spilt in the army, a media report said on Saturday,” reports the Times of India. “Detailing a multitude of troubles that Musharraf faces at home, Time magazine quoting a former head of the powerful intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence said many foreign observers believe that his days are numbered as leader of Pakistan…. in an interview … Hamid Gul, former head of ISI, has warned that if Musharraf does take both gloves off in tribal areas, it would just increase the likelihood of a split in army.”

According to Gul, the “officer cadres are liberal, secular, they come from the elite classes. But the rank and file of the army were never secular, they were always religious. If there is a face-off between the army and people, the leadership may lose control of the army. The army does not feel happy. They are from the same streets, the same villages, the same bazaars of the lower and middle classes, and they want the same thing (Islamic law) for their country.”

Thus, considering Musharraf’s precarious situation, it is quite natural for Khurshid Kasuri, Pakistan’s foreign minister, to publicly bristle over the neocon plan to strike “actionable targets” in Pakistan. Kasuri and Islamabad have characterized the neocon threats as “irresponsible and dangerous.” Pakistani Foreign Office spokeswoman Tasneem Aslam added: “…we have stated in the clearest terms that any attack inside our territory would be unacceptable” and any “such action would be deeply resented in the tribal areas and generally in Pakistan.”

Kasuria and Aslam, however, are missing the point, or at least are not admitting it during press conferences.

Earlier this month, the boy wonder of the neocons, Bill Kristol, told Fox News the neocons will “take military action [against Pakistan] … over the next few weeks or months…. Bush has to disrupt that sanctuary.” In fact, according to Kristol, “we won’t even tell Musharraf…. We’ll do what we have to do in Western Pakistan and Musharraf can say, ‘Hey, they didn’t tell me.’”

In other words, Kristol and the neocons will not lose any sleep over the Pakistani military deposing Musharraf or the fact hundreds, possibly thousands of Pakistanis will be slaughtered, the latter just another day in the neocon neighborhood.

Kristol’s bright idea “would lead to major riots throughout Pakistan and the Arab world, and it would lead to certainly a major insurgency against US forces,” Seth Jones, a South Asia specialist at the RAND Institute, told Australian Broadcasting Corporation last week, according to Jim Lobe.

It would be another egg in the basket for the neocons, as they are determined to agitate Muslims across the board and force them to confront the United States, preferably at home through some terrorist attack, either real of contrived by the CIA or the neocon infested side of the Pentagon. Kristol and the neocons understand all too well the heat must be turned up if they are going to realize their objectives before the commander and decider guy leaves office next year.

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Neocons Set Stage for Pakistan Attack

Like a Frankenstein monster that escapes the castle and preys on innocent villagers, “militants” of the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan, itself a creation of the doctor Frankenstein relationship between Pakistan’s ISI and the CIA, are out of control, thus prompting the U.S. to threaten invasion.

“The U.S. would consider military force if necessary to stem Al Qaeda’s growing ability to use its hideout in Pakistan to launch terrorist attacks, a White House aide said Sunday,” reports the neocon Ministry of Disinformation and Parlor Card Tricks, otherwise known as Fox News. “The president’s homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend, said the U.S. was committed first and foremost to working with Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, in his efforts to control militants in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. But she indicated the U.S. was ready to take additional measures,” that is to say kill a lot of people and call the dead bodies either “al-Qaeda” terrorists or collateral damage.

“The national intelligence director, Mike McConnell, said he believed that Usama bin Laden was living in the tribal, border region of Pakistan. Bin Laden is the leader of the Al Qaeda network and mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States,” Fox continues. “McConnell said Musharraf’s attempt at a political solution to peace in the region had backfired by giving Al Qaeda a place and time to regroup.” Of course, the word “al-Qaeda,” when used by Fox News and the corporate media, is code for Islamic fundamentalism.

Back in the day, when the CIA and ISI collaborated to create a large cadre of strident and murderous militants, this fundamentalism was fine and dandy. But now that it threatens to escape the castle and prey on villagers, the “U.S. would consider military force if necessary to stem Al Qaeda’s growing ability to use its hideout in Pakistan to launch terrorist attacks,” in other words attack the militants, the Frankenstein, ready to depose the U.S. supported dictator Musharraf, quite naturally expendable.

Such behavior was acceptable when General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq seized power in Pakistan in a 1977 coup and declared himself president. Soon after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, that is to say they were tricked into invading by Zbigniew Brzezinski (see Brzezinski’s interview with Le Nouvel Observateur), Zia forced through pro-Islamic legislation, introduced Islamic banking systems, created Islamic courts, and imposed a religious tax used to create tens of thousands of madrassas or religious schools, primarily out of Peshawar, and basically set-up to act as “jehadi” recruiting centers funded lavishly by the CIA. “One of his most fateful decisions was to turn many of the country’s madrasas, or religious colleges, into factories of jihad,” the BBC notes. In addition to creating both the Taliban and “al-Qaeda,” Zia’s “Islamization” effort spawned “a ‘culture of jihad’ within Pakistan itself—a culture the current military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, is struggling to uproot.”

“During the Cold War, but also in its aftermath, the CIA using Pakistan’s Military Intelligence apparatus as a go-between played a key role in training the Mujahideen. In turn, the CIA-sponsored guerrilla training was integrated with the teachings of Islam,” writes Michel Chossudovsky. “Every single US administration since Jimmy Carter has consistently supported the so-called ‘Militant Islamic Base’, including Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, as part of their foreign policy agenda.” It makes perfect sense this agenda has resulted in the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan, Frankenstein’s castle, and has led to the talbanization of Pakistan, now said to be threatening the tin-horn dictator Musharraf, who takes his marching orders from the neocons. Such directives, engineered to stir up the Muslim world and perpetuate the “clash of civilizations” agenda, resulted in the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) slaughter in Islamabad, responsible for killing hundreds of people, including women and children. As the Kavkaz Center points out, “ISI officials have in the past been closely connected with the [Lal Masjid] seminary, links that were forged during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.”

Naturally, Musharraf’s bloody raid has stirred up the locals in Waziristan, who are in open revolt, thus prompting factotum Mike McConnell to set the stage for an attack of Pakistan. As Faryal Leghari, writing for the Daily Star of Lebanon explains, “the Red Mosque hosted many foreign militants, including Uzbeks as well as Taliban from the tribal areas. It is widely known that Maulana Masood Azhar, a founding member of the JeM [Jaish-e-Mohammed], had also visited the seminary in the past. It has also been brought to light, though inconclusively, that Al-Qaeda’s number-two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been in close contact with the seminary leaders.”

Pakistani cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi, killed in the Lal Masjid attack, was connected to the ISI, according to no shortage of Pakistani observers. “What a lot of people are saying and rightly so is that Abdul Rashid Ghazi and his brother were monsters created by the security agencies themselves who went out of control and then had to be eliminated. The connection between the agencies and the two brothers is possibly what explains the bunkers inside the mosque and the arsenal,” writes Ayesha Siddiqa for Rediff News. “The operation against the Lal Masjid is significant in terms of the military’s decision to eliminate the terrorists it had created itself. It is another significant point in the nation’s history in which the army tried not only to establish the writ of the State but sent a firm message to all sorts of militants that any action against the will of the State will not be tolerated,” especially when that state receives a large boondoggle from the United States, a pay-off in the “war on terrorism.”

Of course, the United States cannot be trusted, as it invariably turns on its friends of convenience. Musharraf will be sacrificed for the larger plan—the clash of civilizations, the neocon agenda to agitate the CIA spawned and nurtured “Militant Islamic Base” in P2OG fashion, essentially a GWOT psyop designed to get the ball rolling for the next few generations, as promised. Soon enough, Pakistan, or the artificially created Islamic Emirate of Waziristan, will be visited by C-130 gunships, as “suspected al-Qaida operatives” in southern Somalia were visited and subsequently killed, along with no shortage of villagers, the inevitable collateral damage of neocon policies.

Any collaboration with Pervez Musharraf is out of the question, as he is slated to go. “The U.S. would consider military force if necessary to stem al-Qaida’s growing ability to use its hideout in Pakistan to launch terrorist attacks, a White House aide said Sunday,” reports the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post. “The president’s homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend, said the U.S. was committed first and foremost to working with Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, in his efforts to control militants in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. But she indicated the U.S. was ready to take additional measures.”

According to Townsend, “Job No. 1 is to protect the American people.” Of course, the American people are not threatened by “al-Qaeda” in Pakistan, never mind the absurd “findings” of the neocon National Intelligence Estimate, warning of a “persistent” threat to the United States from “al-Qaeda,” supposedly ensconced in Pakistan.

As we know, “Job No. 1″ is to further the neocon agenda, the “clash of civilizations” plan to frontally assault Islam, no matter its stripe, particularly in the Middle East. Iraq, with its “sectarian violence” working toward the country’s ultimate balkanization, is the template to be imposed on Pakistan, the former collaborator. “The country is going to break up in the years to come and everyone who can, should pack up their bags and leave,” Ardeshir Cowasjee, the renowned newspaper columnist from Karachi, told the Daily Times.

If the neocons have their way, no Muslim nation will remain standing. Question is, however, will the American people get tired of this agenda, again promised to last for decades, or will they do something to put an end to the madness? Maybe. If enough of their children are fed into the military maw, now quite hungry as Iraq has created a sharp appetite.

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Newt Gingrich’s Snake Oil Show

Remember when Newt Gingrich was House Speaker and he made sure the death merchant Lockheed Martin got everything it requested, including contracts for armaments the government didn’t need? It was the halcyon days for the so-called “military industrial complex,” as on the other side of the fence House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt was busy feeding taxpayer money like cranberries to the stuffed pig McDonnell Douglas, a division of Boeing.

In fact, it has been the halcyon days for the death merchants since World War 2, and Gingrich and Gephardt were employed, sort of the same way a whore is employed, to keep the gravy train moving along. At the time, there was no enemy to speak of, as the Soviet Union had fallen, or rather was pushed over by a gaggle of bankers, and so there was no reason to spend billions and billions of worthless weapons systems. And yet Gingrich, Gephardt, Trent Lott, John Murtha, Daniel Inouye, Ted Stevens, and others were employed as used car salesmen for the likes of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Ratheon, TRW, General Dynamics, and a constellation of lesser players. Instead of real, tangible wars on the ground, the United States had “star wars” and a host of small, insignificant others such as Saddam Hussein, who Clinton and Congress were attempting to starve in submission, or rather they were starving the people of Iraq into submission, as leaders never go hungry or face serious threat.

Now we are told the Muslims are going to get us, so we have to fight them there, namely fight them in Iraq. In order to do this, we will need to spend billions and billions on new weapons and restock old. Gingrich, as a “conservative” consultant who spends most of his time at the American Enterprise Institute, where Bush gets his minds, as in psychopathic minds, is put front and center on this effort to sell the snake oil of the Muslim threat to America.

Killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with the Lockheed Martin and Boeing product line is not “about Israel,” it is about Muslims who want to “impose their dictatorship on us,” Gingrich told the Boys & Girls Club of Easton and Life Academy of Allentown last week. ‘’If you want to be able to drive, to have a job, to have a checkbook,” Gingrich warned the women in attendance, “if you don’t want to have to wear a veil; if you want to be able to appear in public without a man, you’d better hope our team wins.” In other words, the women in the audience will be required to donate their children to the neocon effort, promised to last decades, if not a century or more.

Naturally, the effort will need to be extended in Iran, as the Muslims there are numerous, proud, and pretentious. “An Iranian nuclear strike on the United States could be more devastating than the Japanese attack in 1941, Gingrich told Project Israel, a non-profit organization established to provide the American media with information on Israel,” reports Yedioth Internet. “The stakes for Israel are even graver…. The use of one or more nuclear weapons against Israel would constitute a second genocide of the Jewish people,” never mind that Iran does not have a single nuclear weapon and is having big problems developing nuclear energy, something it has a right to do under the terms of the NPT. Meanwhile, Israel has around 200 nuclear bombs and it likes to use them to blackmail America.

“We thought the Israeli Bomb was aimed at the Americans, not to launch it at the Americans, but to say, ‘If you don’t want to help us in a critical situation we will require you to help us; otherwise we will use our nuclear bombs,’” Francis Perrin, head of the French A-bomb project, wrote back in 1956. According to namebase, the title of Seymour Hersh’s Samson Option “comes from Israel’s notion that once they have the Bomb, they are in a position to bring it all down on everyone if ever they feel cornered. It’s the ultimate in Israeli security as a nation-state, if not for the security of humankind. Israel used nuclear blackmail to force Kissinger and Nixon to airlift supplies during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, and they passed U.S. secrets collected by Jonathan Pollard to the USSR when it served their interests. The Bomb has been a hidden factor in U.S.-Israeli relations ever since the Eisenhower administration, but this is the first book to deal with Israeli relations from this perspective.”

“Indeed, the Iranian President does not even require us to read a book like Mein Kampf to understand how serious he is. He enthusiastically makes speeches proclaiming to the world his commitment to genocidal annihilation of another nation,” said Gingrich, repeating the useful lie that Iran hankers to drop a nuke or two on Israel. “The senator responded firmly to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement that Israel should be ‘wiped off the map,’ saying, ‘We must not tolerate threats to the existence of Israel.’”

As should be expected, no shortage of Democrats lined up to support the neocon effort to attack Iran. “The leading Democratic candidates told Project Israel that Iran can be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons through economic and diplomatic channels… ‘All nations need to understand that, while Iran’s most explicit an intolerable threats are aimed at Israel, its conduct threatens all of us,’ Obama said,” making good use of the lie. “Democratic candidates John Edwards, Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd also said sanctions on Ahmadinejad’s regime should be boosted,” in other words, the Iranian people must be made to pay for MEMRI’s deliberate mistranslation of Ahmadinejad, who said political Zionism will pass from the pages of history. He did not say Israel should be “wiped off the map.” But never mind. Most American, or those who bother to pay attention, believe Iran wants to nuke Israel, thanks to incessant lies told on Fox News, where Gingrich is a consultant and occasional program host.

Gingrich wants to war and he wants it now, not only for Israel but for his friends in the death merchant business. “Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich charges that the United States has been waging a weak and ‘phony war since 9/11′ and continues to lose ground to radical Islam,” NewsMax reports. “Comparing that to the attempted appeasement of Nazi Germany at Munich before World War Two, Gingrich said, ‘We don’t have a peace process. We have a surrender process.’ Gingrich said the United States and Western civilization are in a global conflict with radical Islam, and must choose between victory and surrender.”

So phony is the “war since 9/11,” nearly a million Iraqis are dead, never mind precious few wanted to prevent American women from driving their cars. Gingrich and crew, that is to say the neocons who plotted the invasion and destruction of Iraq—now on tap for Iran—are determined to realize not only the slaughter of millions more, but they are in the process of polluting the planet with deadly depleted uranium. If anything, Newt Gingrich should be doing the perp walk in an orange jumpsuit.

But it won’t happen. Instead, we will get Gingrich’s wars, not on the fast track he, the neocons, and the Israelis want, but eventually. Gingrich, who is vacillating on his “presidential bid,” that it to say he has yet to be selected, will share the comfortable fate of Henry Kissinger, “elder statesman,” who walks around unmolested so long as he does not venture to visit a half a dozen or more countries where he is wanted as a war criminal.

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Bush Pens Torture Executive Order

In Bushzarro world, up is down, black is white, and abducting people and subjecting them to waterboarding is compliance with the Geneva Conventions. “Five years after he exempted al Qaeda and Taliban members from the Geneva provisions, Bush signed an executive order requiring the CIA to comply with prohibitions against ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ as set down in the conventions’ Common Article 3,” reports the Boston Globe. “”The executive order resolves any ambiguity by setting specific requirements that, when met, represent full compliance with Article 3. Any CIA terrorist detention and interrogation effort will, of course, meet those requirements,” vowed CIA Director Michael Hayden.

Of course, all of this is simply for public consumption, as the CIA has a long and sordid history of “information extraction,” that is to say torture, more recently of the “no touch,” variety. Clinton may have ratified the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture in 1994, but since nine eleven a number of pain advocates have crawled out of the woodwork, most notably the scurrilous Alan M. Dershowitz, blot on the Harvard academic community. In fact, the contrived “war on terrorism” has provided a class of psychotics, sadists, and pathocrats with an excuse to inflict suffering.

“Despite torture’s appeal as a ‘lesser evil,’ a necessary expedient in dangerous times, those who favor it ignore its recent, problematic history in America,” writes historian Alfred W. McCoy. “They also seem ignorant of a perverse pathology that allows the practice of torture, once begun, to spread uncontrollably in crisis situations, destroying the legitimacy of the perpetrator nation. As past perpetrators could have told today’s pundits, torture plumbs the recesses of human consciousness, unleashing an unfathomable capacity for cruelty as well as seductive illusions of potency. Even as pundits and professors fantasized about ‘limited, surgical torture,’ the Bush administration, following the President’s orders to ‘kick some ass,’ was testing and disproving their theories by secretly sanctioning brutal interrogation that spread quickly from use against a few ‘high target value’ Al Qaeda suspects to scores of ordinary Afghans and then hundreds of innocent Iraqis.”

As the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post, tells us, “interrogators for countries that pride themselves on adhering to the rule of law, such as Britain, the United States and Israel, operate in a moral war zone. They are on the front lines in fighting terrorism, crucial for intelligence-gathering. Yet they use methods that conflict with their societies’ values,” indeed with human values. Left unstated here is the fact the United States, Britain, and Israel manufacture much of what passes for “terrorism,” an assertion easily evinced with a five minute Google search of “mainstream” news articles, not that we should expect the Washington Post to point out such things. As for the “rule of law,” former “interrogator,” Tony Lagouranis, who “served” in the 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion, used Viktor E. Frankel’s Holocaust memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning, for inspiration. Mr. Lagouranis admits a fondness for using dogs on prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

In fact, the Nazi connection is hardly a stretch, as Andrew Sullivan notes. Sullivan points out “the fact that the Bush administration’s term ‘enhanced interrogation’ was coined in 1937 to describe exactly the same techniques authorized by Bush, Cheney, Tenet, and Rumsfeld. The term was coined by the Gestapo.” Nazis called it “Verschärfte Vernehmung” and it was described by Heinrich Müller, chief of Geheime Staatspolizei, or the Gestapo. “It’s a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court,” Sullivan continues. “The methods … are indistinguishable from those described as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ by the president.” Making reference to this memo, Sullivan tells us “the Nazis were adamant that their ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner.”

Sullivan’s article is worth reading in whole, as he makes an excellent case there is little difference between Nazi and neocon “interrogation,” in fact in many ways the two are indistinguishable. “Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler,” Sullivan concludes. “I’m not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture—’enhanced interrogation techniques’—is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.”

Here I part ways with Mr. Sullivan. Indeed, there is a distinct and frightening “comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007,” a fact pointed out on numerous occasions by no shortage of commentators. It should be an obvious comparison after reading Laurence W. Britt’s Fascism Anyone?, where he lists the “common threads” linking fascist regimes. In addition to nationalism, “supremacy of the military/avid militarism,” cronyism and corruption, and control of the mass media, Britt lists “disdain for the importance of human rights” as a hallmark of fascism:

The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

Bush’s executive order, ABC News reports, “is the White House’s first public effort to reach into the CIA’s five-year-old terror detention program, which has been in limbo since a Supreme Court decision last year called its legal foundation into question…. Officials would not provide any details on specific interrogation techniques that the CIA may use under the new order.”

In other words, more of the same, although “clever … propaganda” will once again be used to get the “population… to accept these human rights abuses,” not that the public is paying attention to such things, as far too many of them have bought into the patently absurd demonization of the victims, never mind, upon closer examination, we learn that most of the victims are Afghan dirt farmers and largely innocent Iraqis.

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iPhone: NSA iSnoop Device?

According to a Russian hacker team called “web-hack,” Apple’s much heralded and overly hyped iPhone contains “a built-in function which sends all data from an iPhone to a specified web-server. Contacts from a phonebook, SMS, recent calls, history of Safari browser” can be hijacked, as the VS iPhone blog reports.

In a white paper, according to the blog, the Russians indicate a possible “debug feature or a built-in backdoor module for some governmental structures,” i.e., the National Security Agency, the lead governmental structure responsible for violating en masse the constitutional rights of Americans.

Of course, it helps that “Apple has chosen AT&T, the best and most popular carrier in the US with over 62 million subscribers, to be Apple’s exclusive carrier partner for iPhone in the United States,” as the AT&T website boasts. As we know, the telecom leviathan illegally collaborated with the NSA to break the law.

“AT&T violated the law, and the rights of its customers, by allowing and assisting with the illegal wiretapping and data-mining. The government’s spying program on ordinary Americans would not be possible without AT&T collaborating in violating your privacy,” explains an Electronic Frontier Foundation FAQ. “EFF alleges that under the NSA domestic spying program, major telecommunications companies—and AT&T specifically—gave the NSA direct access to their vast databases of communications records, including information about whom their customers have phoned or emailed with in the past. EFF alleges that AT&T, in addition to allowing the NSA direct access to the phone and Internet communications passing over its network, and gave the government unfettered access to its over 300 terabyte ‘Daytona’ database of caller information—one of the largest databases in the world.”

“The essential hardware elements of a (Total Information Awareness)-type spy program are being surreptitiously slipped into ‘real world’ telecommunications offices,” Wired News reported former AT&T technician Mark Klein as writing. According to Klein and a report published by the New York Times, the NSA-AT&T “Orwellian project… is vastly bigger” than previously figured “and was directly authorized by President Bush, as he himself has now admitted, in flagrant violation of specific statutes and constitutional protections for civil liberties.” In the meantime, Bush has signed a number of executive orders essentially granting himself the power of a Roman Magister Populi, a dictatorial master over the commoners.

Considering all of this, it makes perfect sense for the Apple iPhone to double as an NSA iSnoop device.

“Last year, it was discovered that AT&T has been secretly spying on Americans for the government,” notes Adam Frucci for the Gizmodo blog. “Maybe it still is. Then, just recently, it announced that it planned to spy on Internet surfers yet again, looking for pirated media files, presumably to the delight of the RIAA and MPAA. If you don’t want to get spied on and want to switch ISPs, guess what? Depending on where you live, you might not have any other options. And if AT&T snoops on all data passing through its network, most US Internet users will be affected, not just AT&T customers. It runs a significant amount of the backbone infrastructure of the Internet, leaving little traffic outside its grasp.”

But never mind. Apple’s iPhone is so cool and trendy a lot of buyers and potential buyers will shrug off the fact the device is—if the Russian hackers who reverse engineered the gadget are correct—a custom-made snoop device that routes your personal data right to an NSA Cray super computer.

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Another al-Zawahiri Goose Chase Ensues

Mossad is at it again, using one of its favored propaganda outlets, DEBKAfile. “Until the middle of last week, Zuwahiri [Ayman al-Zawahiri] sheltered with the local Pashtun tribes in Bannu, a town in the northwest Pakistan tribal federation of North Waziristan. The approach of Pakistani and US intelligence and special forces caused him to switch hiding places and move to Tank or Tang, a town 120 km south of Bannu,” Mossad would have us believe. “His former sanctuary of Bannu is situated 150 km as the crow flies from the South Afghan town of Gardiz which is a hub of al Qaeda-Taliban activity. The connection between the two towns is a twisting road of 400 km through Parachinar in Pashtun tribal land. According to DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources, al Qaeda and Taliban leaders do not travel from place to place by road or vehicle but on horseback by night piloted by local guides.”

In other words, either “Pakistani and US intelligence and special forces” are so inept they stupidly announce their arrival, thus frightening off their prey, or somebody told Zawahiri of their arrival up front. Is it possible this warning caught up with al-Zawahiri by way of Pakistan’s ISI? Or is it possible al-Zawahiri is nowhere near North Waziristan?

Earlier this month, the Turkish Weekly reported: On July 5, 2007, al-Sahab, the Final Cut Pro division of “al-Qaeda,” no doubt run out of a basement in Langley, Virginia, posted a 95 minute video message by al-Zawahiri entitled “The Advice of One Concerned.” It contained a “desperate call for Muslims to support the ISI,” a call that makes certain sense as the “al-Qaeda” brand is indebted to Pakistan’s ISI (and the CIA).

The first part of Al-Zawahiri’s message is an urgent call for Muslims to support the ISI and a desperate attempt to establish the ISI’s legitimacy. In this part, Al-Zawahiri attacks Muslim scholars around the Islamic world for their persistent refusal to issue fatwas that support the ISI and, worse, for the harsh criticism they aim at the ISI and its jihad endeavor. According to him, these same scholars have endorsed with their silence political entities such as the Hamas government despite the fact that it lacks important qualifications which the ISI possesses. He stresses, for example, that while the Hamas government in Gaza “connects to its other half [government] in Ramallah [only] through television circuits and while the head of the government… can move between the two parts [of his government] only after the IDF permits him and searches him,” the ISI has a coherent government and its ministers can move freely in the ISI’s self-governed territory. Yet, Muslim scholars who criticized the ISI have never questioned the Hamas government’s legitimacy.

It is perfectly understandable al-Zawahiri supports the ISI, as he was recruited by the organization and helped Osama bin Laden run Maktab al-Khidamar, an ISI-CIA front organization in the 1980s. Not unlike the vicious Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden were useful idiots, or as Marc Erikson characterized Hekmatyar, they were ISI stooges and creations. In fact, as Gerald Posner claims, citing CIA officials, Osama (and likely his inseparable sidekick, Ayman) met with Gen. Akhtar Abdul Rahman, Pakistani ISI’s head from 1980 to 1987, in Peshawar. Indeed, so successful was the ISI-Osama, later deemed “al-Qaeda,” working relationship that then CIA director William Casey and MI6 (and no doubt Mossad as a junior partner) gave their blessing to a massive recruitment effort of “jihadists” (then, as Reagan deemed it, “freedom fighters”) from around the world. On September 20, 2003, John Pilger wrote for the Guardian:

CIA director William Casey had given his backing to a plan put forward by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6, with the SAS training future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone and continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn in 1989.

It should be noted that at this time the CIA launched a joint program with the ISI to export “militant Islam” beyond the backwaters of Afghanistan, as Ahmed Rashid notes in his book, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. It makes absolutely no sense to believe the ISI suddenly dismantled this edifice in order to simply and simple-mindedly get Osama, a goal we are told is at the top of Musharraf’s to-do list. In fact, the ISI runs Musharraf, not the other way around. Last September, the Defense Academy, a British Ministry of Defense think-tank, released a scathing report claiming “Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had supported al-Qaeda and the Taleban and aided the Madrid and London bombers,” according to the Times Online. “We don’t like anybody advising us to dismantle ISI, least of all the [British] Ministry of Defense,” an angry Musharraf responded, understanding well who runs things in Pakistan and understanding also the ISI proclivity of snuffing out those who rub it the wrong way. At any rate, Tony Blair rushed in to play kissy face and patch things up.

“DEBKAfile’s sources disclose that the US Senate’s decision to double the bounty for bin Laden’s capture, killing or information leading to his death or capture to $50 million, was recommended by President George W. Bush after he received an urgent message from Musharraf. The Pakistani president reported his people had picked up the trail of bin Laden’s trail in their pursuit of his deputy, but the tribal chiefs with knowledge of where the elusive al Qaeda leader was hiding were holding out for an exorbitant sum for their collaboration.”

Of course, all of this is pure nonsense, as Bush, or rather the neocons behind Bush, have no interest in capturing Osama or “Zuwahiri,” the former long dead and buried and the latter probably not anywhere near North Waziristan or even Afghanistan for that matter. However, the neocons have a vested interest in running the terrorism swindle for as long as possible, maybe for another hundred years, as promised. DEBAKfile and the Mossad have their assigned role, making up Brothers Grimm stories about colorful tribal chiefs and VIP “al-Qaeda” villains on horseback in the dead of night, once again escaping justice by the whiskers of their Wahhabish beards.

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Absurd Terrorism Theories Invade the Homeland

It is a busy news day, with the absurd propaganda coming fast and furious. Consider:

“CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reports that while the northern area of Pakistan, much of which is controlled by local tribes, has always been a stronghold of the Taliban, it’s now also home to a resurgent al Qaeda,” reports CBS News. “Even after five years of operations, what has been achieved? Osama bin Laden is still there, al Qaeda is still there, in fact it is spreading,” CBS reports Lt. General Ali Jan Mohammed Aurakzai as declaring earlier this year.

As usual, CBS’ “reporters,” actually Pentagon script readers, have not bothered to study history—not obscure history, mind you, but the sort of stuff revealed with a ten second Google search.

In October, 2001, Jane’s reported Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) “openly backs the Taliban and fuels the 12-year-old insurgency in northern India’s disputed Kashmir province by ‘sponsoring’ Muslim militant groups and ministering its policy of ‘death by a thousand cuts’ that so effectively drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan and led to their political demise…. The CIA has well-established links with the ISI, having trained it in the 1980s to ‘run’ Afghan mujahideen (holy Muslim warriors), Islamic fundamentalists from Pakistan as well as Arab volunteers by providing them with arms and logistic support to evict the Soviet occupation of Kabul.”

For some reason we are expected to believe Pakistan suddenly changed its tune and now wants to destroy the monster it created. Moreover, we are expected to believe Pakistan is unable to control the Taliban and “al-Qaeda,” the database, in its northern areas, as Lt. General Ali Jan Mohammed Aurakzai would have us believe, never mind former “Pakistani president General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, who was ultimately assassinated along with his ISI chief, expanded the agency’s internal charter by tasking it with collecting information on local religious and political groups opposed to his military regime. Under Gen Zia the ISI’s Internal Political Division reportedly assassinated Shah Nawaz Bhutto, one of the two brothers of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, by poisoning him on the French Riviera in 1985.”

How curious—the ISI’s Internal Political Division is capable of collating thousands of dossiers and even assassinating opponents on the French Riviera but it is entirely helpless when it comes to controlling the Taliban in a primitive backwater of its own nation. In fact, the Taliban and, yes indeed, “al-Qaeda” are ISI-CIA assets and will not be eradicated as they are so eminently useful. George Crile, a veteran producer for the CBS television news show 60 Minutes, described as “an exuberant Tom Clancy-type enthusiast for the Afghan caper” by Chalmers Johnson, characterizes “the U.S. clandestine involvement in Afghanistan” (i.e., creating, financing, and nurturing both the mujahideen and the Taliban) as “the largest and most successful CIA operation in history.” For some reason CBS News would have us believe the CIA decided to chuck its most successful operation. In other words, CBS is staffed with morons and cretins… well, high-paid bootlickers and sycophants, anyway.

Next up, CNN. Due to an unimpeded “radicalization process” straight out of Iraq—where, of course, “al-Qaeda” runs free, sort of like in Pakistan’s wild northern area, and where the dead Osama walks about free, never mind his very late stage renal failure—the CIA-ISI created terror group will “launch an attack in the U.S., according to domestic intelligence agencies,” using “tactics honed in Iraq,” no doubt tactics honed with the help of white guys in Arab garb and wigs.

In a report cobbled together by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, we learn “that the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment” and “we” (meaning the neocons and their fellow travelers in Congress) “should have concentrated our efforts on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan from the beginning… We must responsibly redeploy our troops out of Iraq'’ and “concentrate our efforts on Afghanistan and the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11,” never mind a complete paucity of evidence “al-Qaeda” attacked the country on nine eleven or mysteriously and remarkably changed the laws of physics or used voodoo to make NORAD stand down.

“The report says al-Qaeda is gaining strength in the ’safe haven’ it has established in tribal areas in western Pakistan along the Afghan border and is putting in place a stable leadership with top lieutenants,” a “safe haven” especially carved out, as it makes precious little sense to believe the most successful covert CIA operation in history, costing billions of dollars and spanning at least three U.S. administrations, would be stupidly tossed on the junk heap, never mind what Fox News tells you.

Naturally, all of this translates into a threat poised against the homeland. Fran Townsend, White House homeland security adviser, “predicted that al-Qaeda would intensify efforts to achieve the fourth element needed for an attack: the placing of operatives inside the US. Because of this risk, the US was currently in a ‘heightened threat environment,’” even though, of course, the neocons “have no credible information pointing to a specific imminent attack,” in other words, it is safe to venture out and shop. Townsend’s “warning” follows up nicely on the heels of Chertoff’s “gut feeling” that “al-Qaeda was preparing an attack,” as MSNBC reports, or rather script reads.

As should be expected, Congress critters “were quick to look for partisan advantage Tuesday in a new intelligence report describing a ‘persistent and evolving’ terrorist threat to the United States,” according to the New York Times. “Both parties sought to employ the report as a club in their fight over the Iraq War. Democrats said the report underscored the need to shift U.S. resources from the conflict in Iraq toward fighting al Qaeda and its affiliates worldwide. Republicans said the report underscored the importance of remaining steadfast in Iraq and beyond,” in other words, neocons fancy the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) summary as rallying call to invade a growing list of countries and slaughter more Arab and Muslim grandmothers and toddlers. One such threat, according to the NIE, is the “Lebanese militant group Hezbollah,” determined to attack “the homeland over the next three years,” never mind Hezbollah was organized to resist Israeli occupation and check Israel’s habitual desire to kill Lebanese, as it killed no shortage last summer.

As if to remind us the Democrats are on cue, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he believes it is a “travesty that Osama bin Laden remains at large nearly six years after the 9/11 attacks, and that the Bush administration and most congressional Republicans remain stubbornly wedded to a flawed strategy in Iraq.” Reid is wrong on both counts: Osama bin Laden is dead, so he obviously is not “at large,” and the neocon strategy in Iraq is not “flawed,” but rather a great success, as it has destroyed the country and killed around a million Iraqis since early 2003.

But then Iraq and Osama are trick ponies, brought to the gate repeatedly, not that most Americans are aware of this threadbare ploy. Millions to this day, regardless of methodical evidence to the contrary, believe Saddam was in cahoots with Osama.

“The NIE provides an urgent public reminder that our nation faces a persistent and ongoing threat from al Qaeda and other radical jihadist groups,” declared the neocon fellow traveler, Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. As well, according to Hoekstra, the bogus threat of a resurgent “al-Qaeda” and Taliban provides a customized excuse to “change FISA to grant broader leeway for electronic snooping,” no doubt because Osama and Omar are placing so many telephone calls to their deep-freeze sleeper cells in Des Moines, Twin Falls, and other hot beds of imminent terrorism.

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Neocon “Vision” for a Palestinian State: More Mass Murder, Thievery, and Unending Duplicity

According to Einstein’s observation, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In regard to Israel and the Palestinians, however, doing the same thing over and over is not insanity but rather a calculated act on the part of Israel designed to produce a predictable and long sought after result, namely to submerge the Palestinians in formaldehyde. Recall Dov Weisglass, former Ariel Sharon chief of staff and now “point man in the US,” declaring that “disengagement” from Gaza supplied “the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians,” as the Israelis have no intention of allowing a Palestinian state, let alone obeying international law and various United Nations resolutions calling for an end to the occupation of Palestinian land.

Note Bush’s call “for a Middle East peace conference bringing together Israel, the Palestinians and some Arab neighbors and led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,” supposedly “to pave the way to a Palestinian state alongside Israel,” according to Reuters.

“Bush reaffirmed his vision of a Palestinian state at peace with Israel and said Palestinians faced a choice between the Islamist militant group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and the more moderate Abbas,” never mind the Palestinians elected Hamas to represent them. Of course, both Bush, or rather his neocons, and Israel under Olmert prefer the CIA-infested Fatah and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas. Naturally, the point here is to have yet another conference with a trusted toady micromanaged by the CIA and Shin Bet, the latter diligent at making sure any agreement between Israel and the Palestinians terminates predictably (see Shin Bet Vetoed Secret Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement), following yet another conference leading nowhere, or maybe to the same place Oslo led, i.e., to the theft of even more Palestinian land. Any new conference will, of course, produce likewise results.

It should be noted that Weisglass made his formaldehyde comment in the wake of the Herzliya Conference. Gabi Becker comments:

The Herzliya Conference, attended by the likes of the Occupation’s military generals, “Yesha” council representatives (West Bank and Gaza settlers), Knesset members, government officials, university professors, bank representatives (the list clearly overlapping), US think tanks, members of the US Jewish “community,” and this year’s special guest former US President Carter who stopped by on his way to “observe” the Palestinian Legislative Council elections, all take part in the Conference to make a toast to the past and future of Israeli expansionism. Herzl, the “Founding Father” of Zionism and author of The Jewish State, would be proud. The Herzliya Conference, taking place in Herzl’s namesake settlement of “Herzliya”—built on the destroyed Palestinian village of Abu Kishk—resonates similarities to the World Zionist Congresses, the first of which took place in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland and chaired by Herzl himself. But, unlike the Zionist Congresses that took place in Zionism’s homeland—Europe—this conference takes place after the Palestinian displacement, and this time the plan is not how to establish a Jewish State in Palestine, but how to bring about the final annihilation of Palestine (under the very cynical rhetoric of establishing a “state”).

As Becker notes, the template is Oslo and the outcome is to talk the talk but do little else, as Israel plans to eventually and completely dispossess what remains of the Palestinians, a long-term plan conceived well before the “establishment” of the Israeli state (a state “established” under British colonialism and signed off on by the United Nations at the expense of Arabs).

Meanwhile, focus around “negotiations,” “final status,” and “statehood” continue to be the mainstay of Occupation under Oslo. While terms remain the same, so does the colonial, expansionist reality on the ground. The various peace proposals that surface remain within this framework, as their distinctions are solely about shifting the borders in different areas and in percentage of lands that would be “security zones” and annexed, and not about the regime that is and will be established under the bantustan state. Olmert also stated that, “We firmly stand by the historic right of the people of Israel to the entire Land of Israel. Every hill in Samaria and every valley in Judea is part of our historic homeland. We do not forget this, not even for one moment…” another reminder that “final borders” themselves are but a means and will ultimately not be final, just as living in a ghetto is not living at all.

Olmert’s declaration, quite prosaic for Israelis, and those of us who have bothered to read the history of Zionism, stands now as it did then, or for that matter as it did when screamed from the rooftops by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, Chaim Weizmann, and indeed Theodor Herzl, the latter who may be considered old fashioned and quaint, as he advocated spiriting “the penniless population across the border” and “gentle” expropriation of the Palestinians (see Benny Morris, no slouch when it comes to making excuses for the less kinder and gentler form of ethnic cleansing currently in vogue; Righteous Victims, p. 21-22).

Meanwhile, as should be expected, in order to set the stage for new discussions the bankrupt Abbas arrived at Olmert’s office dressed like a welcome mat. “Olmert and Abbas met for two hours at Olmert’s Jerusalem residence. They discussed ‘how they can see arriving at a two-state solution’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Olmert’s spokeswoman Miri Eisin said, although sources in Olmert’s office said they did not discuss such divisive issues as the fate of Jerusalem, borders and Palestinian refugees…. ‘The Palestinians want to go a lot faster. The average Israeli would like to go a lot slower. We have to find something that is acceptable to both sides,’ Eisin said.”

In other words, the Israelis want yet another generation of Palestinians, and no doubt the one to follow, ad infinitum, to wait for a “solution” to the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Of course, there is but one solution.

Israel must abide by Security Council resolution 242. In fact, as criminally flawed as the so-called 1947 “the Partition Plan” is, it must be finally and fully implemented, as demonstrated by this map. As it now stands, keeping in mind Olmert’s declaration, the Palestinians are reduced to bantustans charmingly called “Arafat’s Islands,” now the CIA quisling Abbas’ islands (see this map).

Bush’s “bilateral discussions and negotiations” will lead to more thievery and genocide. Call it a holding pattern for brutality and eventual ethnic cleansing, at present incremental. As should be expected, when Hillary reigns supreme come November, 2008, the situation will remain the same, as the Democrats, creatures of AIPAC who stumble over each other in clownish effort to pledge American treasure and blood to the tiny outlaw state of Israel, are no different than Republicans and neocons. All that will be missing is that sickening neocon bravado stinking to high heaven, as the Democrats like to do their betrayal and sellout by cover of darkness.

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Regurgitating Osama’s Greatest Hits

In the wake of the Dorgan and Conrad amendment designed “to double the reward for information leading to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks,” as KXMB in North Dakota puts it, a “new” Osama video has surfaced, prompting the corporate media to circle like a brood of hungry vultures. “A brief clip of an older-looking Osama bin Laden appeared yesterday in a newly posted jihadist video on the Web, ABC News reported,” claims the scurrilous neocon propaganda newspaper, the New York Post. “The al Qaeda boss appears for just one minute and discusses martyrdom with an unseen group in a mountainous location, wearing fatigues, a watch and a ring and showing extensive graying in his beard.”

CNN, on the other hand, noted the obvious. “The environment shown [in the video] is similar to that on releases made before the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, in which bin Laden is seen in the company of some of the hijackers,” Octavia Nasr, CNN’s senior editor for Arab affairs, admitted. “Some of the backdrops also resemble those shown in videos when the U.S. attacks against the Taliban in Afghanistan began not long after the 9/11 attacks.”

Of course, that’s because the video tape is a “release” made before the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, as should be obvious. In other words, once again, the government is recycling old Osama video footage.

“The video, titled ‘Scent of Heaven,’ was produced by al Qaeda’s propaganda arm. It includes no time references and was posted on jihadi Web sites with little fanfare,” the New York Post continues. In other words, the video, with its absurd title, was produced by the CIA or the Pentagon, using regurgitated video footage, and subsequently posted on CIA “jihadi” websites, likely hosted out of Texas or Maryland

All of this makes certain sense following on the heels of Michael Chertoff’s interview with the Chicago Tribune last week. In response to the patently absurd “attacks on London and Glasgow,” as CBS News characterized recent non-events, Chertoff remarked: “All of this causes me in general to look at the summer as time when we have somewhat more risk and we need to be very vigilant,” that is to say the public needs to be frightened by regurgitated Osama video tapes and warnings of “al-Qaeda” sleeper cells coming out of the woodwork.

“The draft National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is expected to paint an ever-more-worrisome portrait of al-Qaeda’s ability to use its base along the Pakistan-Afghan border to launch and inspire attacks against the United States over the next several years,” reports the Associated Press. “The U.S. will face ‘a persistent and evolving terrorist threat’ within its borders over the next three years. The main danger comes from Islamic terrorist groups, especially al-Qaeda, and is ‘driven by the undiminished intent to attack the homeland and a continued effort by terrorist groups to adapt and improve their capabilities’” and “Al-Qaeda is probably still pursuing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and would use them if its operatives developed sufficient capability.” Of course, there is absolutely no evidence of any of this, not that the National Intelligence Council needs evidence, as we are told the NIE “is the most authoritative written judgment concerning a national security issue prepared by the Director of Central Intelligence,” according to SourceWatch.

As well, the NIE and its Brothers Grimm prediction of “a persistent and evolving terrorist threat’” is related to the neocon effort to continue killing and immiserating Iraqis. “At a news conference Thursday, President Bush acknowledged al-Qaeda’s continuing threat to the United States and used the new report as evidence his administration’s policies are on the right course,” the Associated Press continues. “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on Sept. 11,” said Bush “That’s why what happens in Iraq matters to security here at home.”

Chertoff, we are told, has a “gut feeling” about an “al-Qaeda” attack this summer. “I believe we are entering a period this summer of increased risk,” Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune. “Summertime seems to be appealing to them.” Or rather, summertime is the time to scare witless Americans, most unable to notice that old Osama video is once again being recycled into new Final Cut Pro timelines over at the CIA.

According to Time, however, it is not Osama and his Afghan cave dwellers we must worry about, but “home-grown imitators.”

The London and Glasgow attempts, like another failed attack on trains in Germany last year, were notable for their comparative lack of sophistication. The suspects in London and Glasgow apparently got the know-how to make their bombs off the internet, as did the two men who failed to detonate a bomb on a passenger train in Germany last year. So, even as the threat of a major professional attack emanating from Al-Qaeda central may be on the rise, the danger from local amateurs acting autonomously remains ever-present. The limits on their technical expertise has helped Europe dodge a good few bloodbaths. But if Al-Qaeda managed to get one of its Iraq-based bomb-makers into Britain to service local cells such as the one that conducted the London and Glasgow attacks, the local-amateur circuit would become a whole lot more deadly.

Maybe they can send another Richard Colvin Reid, aka the “shoe bomber,” the mental deficient who supposedly attempted to bomb American Airlines 63 on December 22, 2001. According to the official mythology, Reed was sent on the botched bombing mission by Khaled Shaikh Mohammed, who we are told was a senior member of “al-Qaeda,” the database. Of course, according to the Pakistanis, who know something about “al-Qaeda,” as they collaborated with the CIA to create it, Khaled Shaikh Mohammed was killed and his body buried without informing the Americans.

Questions about all of this are not in order, as Michael Chertoff has a “gut feeling” about renewed terrorism. It remains to be seen if “al-Qaeda” or its purported “home-grown imitators” will strike this summer. No doubt, as usual, it will depend on political expediency, especially now that even neocon-friendly Republican Congress critters are weary of the neocon “effort” in Iraq.

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Is Dennis Kucinich Incurably Clueless?

“Representative Dennis J. Kucinich accused two of the major contenders for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards, of participating in a ‘conspiracy to rig the presidential election,’ after they apparently suggested that future presidential debates should be pared down to include fewer candidates,” reports the New York Times, or rather its “political blogging” division. “One argument would say that the presidency is for sale, and the other is kind of a Forrest Gump approach to politics, which says that if you have name recognition then you win without a campaign,” complained Kucinich. “But in a democracy people get exposed to ideas and they make the decision for themselves.”

Good one, Dennis.

It is not so much that the “presidency is for sale” rather than it is a fixed horse race, the horses picked and groomed by the global elite. It has nothing to do with Forrest Gump or not running a campaign. It has to do with the winner decided in advance and everything that follows is little more than a homecoming float rolled out to bedazzle the masses, who mostly believe everything they are told, even the ruse they live in a “democracy,” as Dennis would have it.

In Dennis’ “democracy,” the commoners “get exposed to ideas and they make the decision for themselves,” when in actuality the commoners are exposed to “ideas” trotted out by the corporate media, controlled by the same people who pick and groom the “candidates,” actually selectees, and the “decision” is made far in advance. Either Dennis is clueless and a Forrest Gump character himself—a simple man, not that shrewd political players, in Congress for decades on end, are simple-minded—or he is playing right along with the globalists, as dictated by the script. Of course, this may be deemed unfair to Mr. Kucinich. On the other hand, as a Congress insider and chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, it is difficult to believe he sincerely buys into the nonsense he peddles.

In letters sent to Clinton and Edwards, Kucinich wrote:

Rather than a mere forum restricted to 60 second answers that must avoid any critique of the history and positions of other participants, I am challenging you to a debate in the classical style. With America’s constitutional democracy shaping and defining the essence of our government, the American people deserve no less.

If you are truly seeking debates where there are fewer participants and where there is more meaningful and serious discourse, this is a great opportunity for us to join together in and an open discussion on behalf of the American people.

Um, Dennis? Far too many Americans have not the attention span or intellectual capacity for debates held in “classical style” and our globalist overseers understand this well, in fact have programmed the people for some sixty odd years now to be little more than dumbed-down cattle, sheeple if you please, with one hand on the television remote and the other shoved in a plastic bag of aspartame goodies. Unfortunately, and all too predictably, “meaningful and serious discourse” is not on the agenda, indeed it is resented by millions.

Moreover, John and Hillary, one a CFR regular and the other a Bilderberg attendee, are not interested in “discussion on behalf of the American people,” but smoke and mirrors for the sake of the global elite, the bankers, the transnational corporations, the aristocracy, the ruling elite families: the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Kuhn-Loebs, Goldman-Sachs, to name but a few of the more recognizable. As Georgetown professor Dr. Carroll Quigley, who brought Bill Clinton under his wing, wrote in Tragedy and Hope (New York: Macmillan, 1966), the goal of the investment bankers firmly in control of the central banks is “nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole… controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.”

It has nothing to do with “democracy,” essentially mob rule, or for that matter the supposed foundation of America, a constitutional republic. In fact, Americans have never enjoyed a constitutional republic, as the “constitutional lawyer,” Alexander Hamilton, made sure to deliver the First Bank of the United States, modeled after the Bank of England, in 1791. It was established precisely as an engine for speculation, financial manipulation, and corruption, and killed the Constitution and the Bill of Rights outright. It was no mistake, a few years later in 1798, president John Adams signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts, designed to punish severely “Certain Crimes against the United States,” that is to say certain crimes—i.e., criticism of the government, a right supposedly enshrined in the First Amendment—against the banking and business elite that ran and run to this day the country. Ever since, we have lived under varying degrees of tyranny, often carefully window dressed as “democracy,” but as of late prancing around stark raving naked and in our faces, thanks to the lamentable fact the commoners are now dumb as dirt, or simply don’t give a whit.

Thus Dennis Kucinich is little more than an anachronism, a political throwback, a quaint if seriously out of touch politico from the 10th District of Ohio in the United States House of Corporate Whores, er “Representatives,” and as such suffers as a distant contestant in the fixed presidential race, about as remote and relevant as the Oort Cloud.

You can almost hear Hillary Clinton and John Edwards laughing.

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Osama: More Bounty, More Baloney

It is politics as usual. In order to hype the “war on terror” angle over what is perceived as a floundering effort in Iraq—in fact, the effort in Iraq is a smashing (no pun intended) success, as it has destroyed the country—the “U.S. Senate on Friday voted to double the bounty on Osama bin Laden to $50 million and require President George W. Bush to refocus on capturing him after reports al Qaeda is gaining strength,” according to Reuters. “By a vote of 87-1, the Senate set the reward for the killing or capture, or information leading to the capture, of the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.”

Of course, there is no evidence Osama bin Laden had anything to do with nine eleven and the government refuses to provide any, beyond pointing to a handful of obviously faked video and audio tapes.

Moreover, as the Arab and Asian media reported years ago, Osama bin Laden died in December, 2001, in Afghanistan. “A prominent official in the Afghan Taleban movement announced yesterday the death of Osama bin Laden, the chief of al-Qa’da organization, stating that bin Laden suffered serious complications in the lungs and died a natural and quiet death. The official, who asked to remain anonymous, stated to The Observer of Pakistan that he had himself attended the funeral of bin Laden and saw his face prior to burial in Tora Bora,” al-Wafd, an Egyptian newspaper, reported on December 26, 2001.

It should be recalled that even the neocon-infested Bush administration admitted on January 18, 2002, that bin Laden “needs dialysis every three days,” as reported by CNN, and “that could be an issue when you are running from place to place, and facing the idea of needing to generate electricity in a mountain hideout,” according to an unnamed U.S. official. As any doctor will tell you, hemodialysis, or renal dialysis, “is something that really is reserved for patients in end-stage renal failure. That means their kidneys have just completely shut down,” as Dr. Sanjay Gupta notes. It is, to say the least, absurd to believe “al-Qaeda” would be able to keep a dying Osama on a complicated dialysis machine in a cave situated in a remote mountainous area of one of the most backward countries in the world. It is not, as the above quoted Bush factotum indicates, an “issue,” it is rather an impossibility.

In October, 2002, a London-based Arab news magazine published Osama’s last will and testament. “He did write the will as someone saying good-bye,” Hani Nakshabandi of the Arab news magazine Al Majalla told CNN. “He said one of the magazine’s reporters obtained the four-page document, said to be signed by the leader of the al Qaeda terrorist network and dated December 14, 2001, in Afghanistan…. In the document, which was translated for CNN, the writer expresses disappointment with the Taliban, who harbored him in Afghanistan, speaks of betrayal, and urges his children to shun al Qaeda.”

Naturally, this story soon found its way to the memory hole, as it does not jive with the plan to demonize Osama, a plan alive and well, unlike Bin Laden, and kicking around the U.S. Senate nearly six years after Osama departed the mortal coil to be with 72 virgins in heaven. It is interesting Osama warned his “children to shun al Qaeda,” good advice as the organization, named after a database of mujahideen mercenaries and patsies, is a CIA-ISI contrivance.

“My last advice is to the mujahedeen everywhere,” declares Osama’s will. “Take a breather and put aside for the time being, fighting the Jews and the Crusades, and instead devote your efforts to purifying your groups from the agents and the cowards and those impostors who claim to be scholars amongst you.” In short, “al-Qaeda,” according to its purported leader, was rife with fake jihadists, poseurs, spooks, and informers, as should be expected of a bogus terror organization created by the CIA.

Finally, to underscore the fact Osama is dead, last July the CIA “closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants,” the New York Times reported. No sense wasting precious resources hunting for a dead man, even if the hunt was a front all along.

“Top U.S. intelligence officials informed the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee this week that inhabitants of remote northwestern Pakistan, where bin Laden is believed to be holed up, have proved impervious to the financial rewards already on offer from the U.S. government,” Reuters continues. “The U.S. government says it has spent more than $62 million in a ‘rewards for justice’ program for various information that has helped prevent attacks or prosecute those responsible for attacks.”

Of course, the impoverished dirt farmers of northwestern Pakistan are “impervious to the financial rewards” because Osama is long dead and buried, not in Pakistan but over the border in Afghanistan.

But never mind. None of this matters. It is simply more propaganda designed to scare witless American adults and small children, as the Senate, once again, tells us “al Qaeda is gaining strength,” not unlike Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein, the stuff of two minute hate sessions on Fox News and CNN. In fact, the spooks are burning the midnight oil, cranking out “al-Sahab” propaganda tapes (the “al-Qaeda” supposed “propaganda unit” has issued 62 “messages” in just over six months this year), in order that terrorism remain front and center, never mind that the latest events attributed to “al-Qaeda,” namely the lame “attack” on the Glasgow airport, are so inept as to be entirely laughable, that is to say they would be laughable if not for the fact such cartoonish antics are used to slowly rob us of our liberty and lock us up in a high-tech police state.

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Selectees Clinton, Edwards Plot Against Kucinich, Obama

It makes perfect sense, of course. “Following a debate during Thursday’s Democratic candidates forum at the NAACP convention, news agency microphones picked up comments by Sens. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards as they discussed limiting future debates to only ’serious’ candidates,” reports Newsroom America. “We should try to have a more serious and smaller group,” suggested Edwards. “We’ve got to cut the number,” Hillary responded. “They’re not serious.”

Serious “candidates,” or elite selectees, hate the idea of sharing the corporate media spotlight with the unselected. All of this is quite natural, as Edwards rubs elbows with the Council on Foreign Relations and Hillary is a Bilderberg doorstop. Serious candidates are arranged in advance by the elite and outsiders such as Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are not welcome, are in fact deeply resented. But then, of course, the very idea of open and fair elections are resented by our rulers, who go out of their way nonetheless to pedal the idea of democracy and the absurd grade school myth that any man or woman may one day be president.

Hillary’s backstabbing is demonstrative. For instance, when “Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio walked by,” Clinton thanked “them for attending. Then, turning back to Edwards, she said she believed their campaigns had already attempted to limit candidates in the debate and ‘we’ve gotta get back to that,’” and Edwards apparently agreed.

“Imperial candidates are as repugnant to the American people and to our democracy as an imperial president,” said Kucinich.

Well, not exactly. If the American people truly and sincerely found such repugnant, they would have long ago surrounded the White House and demanded not only impeachment, but criminal charges be leveled against the current cabal, handpicked in advance by the very same elite Hillary and John represent.

“Today, Congressman Dennis Kucinich—1 of the candidates who might be kept out of a more limited forum—is accusing Edwards of showing a “lack of integrity” in the way he made the suggestion and the way he then tried to explain it,” reports the Associated Press. “Edwards told reporters today he doesn’t want to keep anyone out of future gatherings. Instead, he said, he wants to see them separated into two groups of 4 each, chosen randomly.”

Of course, the disfavored 4 will have their “debate” held at a Motel Six in Spearfish, South Dakota.

Finally, for all the Democrats who will vote for Hillary or Edwards, obviously the anointed, contra the Republicans come November of next year, the comments of Edwards are informative. “At one point in the debate, Edwards laughed when he followed Kucinich, who called for the impeachment of Dick Cheney. ‘Dick Cheney, huh?’ Edwards said, smiling and laughing.”

Real funny, John. But then Edwards is no different than Dick Cheney, except he has yet to drunkenly shoot anybody while duck hunting.

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Winston Booted in Favor of Climate Change Propaganda

Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper, the Sun, reports from Whitehall that “fury erupted last night after Sir Winston Churchill was axed from school history lessons. Britain’s cigar-chomping World War Two PM—famed for his two-finger victory salute—was removed from a list of figures secondary school children must learn about,” as Churchill will be replaced with “relevant” issues such as the Great Global Warming Swindle, designed to usher in the new feudalism. British children need to be indoctrinated in such, naturally at the expense of history, even disinfected history.

Of course, tossing out Winston outraged no shortage of Brits, as he is considered “the greatest ever Briton,” thus reflecting the apparently immutable if pathetic habit of no shortage of commoners in England to kiss the ermine hem of the aristocracy, lords of the admiralty, and chancellors of the Exchequer.

“The Arabs are a backwards people who eat nothing but Camel dung,” once declared the “greatest ever Briton.” In regard to the Kurds, Churchill, as colonial secretary in 1920, wrote to Sir Hugh Trenchard, a baron and viscount unable to pass rudimentary military exams, asking if it would be possible to take “control” of Iraq by way of “asphyxiating bombs calculated to cause disablement of some kind but not death… for use in preliminary operations against turbulent tribes” resentful of the British occupation of Iraq. “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes,” declared Churchill. “Churchill remained unimpressed” by the fact the use of gas, eventually outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, would kill children and the sickly, “arguing that the use of gas, a ’scientific expedient,’ should not be prevented ‘by the prejudices of those who do not think clearly.’ In the event, gas was used against the Iraqi rebels with ‘excellent moral effect,’” writes Geoff Simons (Iraq: From Sumer to Sudan, London: St. Martins Press, 1994). In other words, the “prejudices of those who do not think clearly,” that is to say those who are not psychopaths, were dismissed out of hand, a routine expedient.

Churchill, as Secretary of State for War, was responsible for the disastrous invasion of Gallipoli, resulting in 130,764 dead and 261,654 wounded. According to the Red Cross, the Allies bombarded Turkish hospitals and hospital ships on several occasions between the start of the campaign and September 1915. “Ruling class elites are rarely held politically accountable for military disasters however,” notes Dkosopedia. But of course, as commoners are entirely expendable, and war crimes are only attributed to losers.

Churchill and the Conservative party lost control after the Second World War because many Britons felt that the sacrifices made in the war had not been shared equally by all social classes and many political elites. In fact, this is quite normal, as the commoners and little people always make the ultimate sacrifice for monarchs, elitists, and other privileged classes. Undeterred, Churchill kicked off the “Cold War,” a profitable scheme for his class and associated industrialists and bankers, with his “Iron Curtain Speech.” It is interesting to note Churchill’s hypocrisy, as he accused the Soviet Union of the same practices that had built the British Empire, in particular the use of concentration camps and torture by the British in Kenya during the Mau Mau Rebellion. Finally, Churchill played an instrumental role in the creation of the United Nations.

But never mind. It really does not matter if the “greatest ever Briton” will be excised from school books, as the dark and psychotic side of Winston—emblematic of the bloody and putrid stain on the whole of the British Empire—is of course routinely ignored and omitted from lessons.

Winston Churchill, according to Murdoch’s Sun, will go “off the required lessons list, along with Hitler, Gandhi, Stalin and Martin Luther King,” as the point is to brainwash and condition the new generation to accept the emerging orthodoxy of “climate change,” little more than the latest and greatest device for enslavement foisted on the world at large.

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German TV: Kurds Used to Attack Iran

Last month, as the corporate media mulched over renewed Pentagon claims Iran is providing deadly IEDs to Iraqi “insurgents,” German television reported the Maoist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan (PKK), has “killed over 200 Iranians,” a handful by way of IED, according to a PKK terrorist quoted by German ARD television (original in German). “Three months ago, by using radio-controlled mines we killed 13 to 14 Iranian soldiers,” Sertan, a “PJAK” terrorist, told the Germans. PJAK “is a cover name, because the organization is dedicated to Abdullah Öcalan, to the boss of the [PKK]. It is forbidden in Europe and America as a terrorist organization,” in fact, the U.S. State Department lists PKK as a terrorist organization.

As Iranian Press TV reported yesterday, the leader of the “Pejak terrorist group says he has good relations with the US and German governments and they know everything about the group.” Abdel Rahman Haj-Ahmedi, who lives in Cologne, told German ARD television: “Big powers help our military stations and American army generals completely overlook our activities.” Moreover, according to Haj-Ahmedi, “some US generals even visit Pejak’s military camps and have good ties with Pejak…. Haj-Ahmadi in a similar interview with the Kurdish newspaper Media had acknowledged that some US senators and generals had met with Pejak leaders in Iraq’s Qandil.” In short, PJAK enjoys full neocon support, as should be expected, never mind PKK’s supposed lunatic Maoist persuasion.

Of course, this “support” should not come as a surprise. In 2004, Seymour Hersh, citing Pentagon and U.S. government sources, reported an Israeli presence in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. At the time, Hersh wrote:

In a series of interviews in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, officials told me that by the end of last year Israel had concluded that the Bush Administration would not be able to bring stability or democracy to Iraq, and that Israel needed other options. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government decided, I was told, to minimize the damage that the war was causing to Israel’s strategic position by expanding its long-standing relationship with Iraq’s Kurds and establishing a significant presence on the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. Several officials depicted Sharon’s decision, which involves a heavy financial commitment, as a potentially reckless move that could create even more chaos and violence as the insurgency in Iraq continues to grow.

Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war. The Israeli operatives include members of the Mossad, Israel’s clandestine foreign-intelligence service, who work undercover in Kurdistan as businessmen and, in some cases, do not carry Israeli passports.

If we are to believe Hersh, the Israelis simply decided to go off on their own, as they figured the occupation would not “bring stability or democracy to Iraq,” an angle at odds with the agenda, that is to say the exact opposite of what Hersh, or his “sources,” expect us to believe. In fact, the plan is to destabilize, deconstruct, and balkanize Iraq, that is top say carve it up into three distinct pieces based along ethnic and religious lines. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to believe the Pentagon would be left out of the loop, especially the side of the Pentagon to this day dominated by intractable and quite maniac neocons. More likely, the Israelis and the U.S. are collaborating in northern Iraq and directing attacks against Iran through surrogates such as the PKK, or rather its cover PJAK. Iran, after all, is the next target on the “clean break” list.

Don’t count on the corporate media to report any of this. Instead, we are obliged to rely on German television and Iranian state media. Such events may be reported and commented upon here and across the blogosphere, but not by the Pentagon script readers at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox News, CNN, et al, “news” organizations long ago folded into the CIA and now serve as the Ministry of Disinformation and Omission for the neocons, who will attack Iran, first by proxy and later by the U.S, military, the latter indeed a “dumb animal” as Kissinger characterized it, at the disposal of “foreign policy,” a realm now under the control of psychopathic neocons bent on reducing the Middle East to a wasteland.

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Interim Assessment of the Highly Successful Destruction of Iraq Due

Once again, they take us for complete idiots. “A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration’s reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday,” reports NBC News, the corporate media propaganda outlet owned and operated by General Electric, makers of cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, B-52 bombers, AWACS, and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system, the sort of stuff used up in record numbers inside Iraq and Afghanistan, thus ensuring mega-profits for the merchants of death and destruction.

In fact, the “U.S.-backed government in Baghdad,” that is to say the U.S. puppet government in Baghdad, is doing precisely what it was cobbled together to do under the dog and pony show of purple finger democracy—absolutely nothing short of avoid car bombs and assassination attempts.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure any of this out. After Bush Senior attacked Iraq in 1991, methodically destroying the country’s power, communications, water, sewage treatment and health facilities, more than a decade of sanctions were imposed to make sure these critical services were not rebuilt and restored, thus resulting in the premeditated murder of around a million Iraqis, half of them helpless children. Bush the Lesser, of rather his coterie of neocons, have done the same this time around, albeit without sanctions but through occupation instead, an occupation promised to last for decades to come, as admitted by General David Petraeus, commander of Multi-National Force in Iraq (or rather the diminished coalition of the bribed). “Northern Ireland, I think, taught you that very well. My counterparts in your [British] forces really understand this kind of operation… It took a long time, decades,” Petraeus told the BBC.

Apparently, when he attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Petraeus’ instructors did not bother to teach history, as history is replete with examples of such “operations” terminating in dismal failure due to the fact the occupied—or “liberated,” if you’re a neocon—resent the persistent presence of foreign troops, especially trigger-happy yahoo and gang banger foreign troops brought up on Duke Nukem video games. Resistance is a natural. Call it Red Dawn, Iraqi style.

“The interim assessment, which will be presented on Capitol Hill on Thursday, finds the Iraqi government has failed to pass long-promised laws that Washington has called key to national cohesion and economic recovery, such as legislation that would fairly divide Iraq’s oil resources,” adds Forbes. “The report also will point toward signs of hope throughout Iraq, such as a drop in sectarian killings in Baghdad and opposition to al-Qaida by tribal sheiks in Anbar province.”

“The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq’s oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil,” reported Greg Palast back in March, 2005. “The industry-favored plan was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq’s oil fields…. The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Mr. Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel. Mr. Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Newsnight he flew to the London meeting at the request of the State Department.”

No doubt the “interim report” on “progress” in Iraq, due to arrive tomorrow, will not make mention of this “policy battle” between thieves. Instead, we will be told once again that the damn Iraqis are screw-ups, never mind the neocons decimated their country and “al-Qaida… tribal sheiks,” at least some of them doubling as SAS operatives in wigs and Arab garb, are busy blowing up mosques and markets, per plan, and the fact they are unloved and certainly unwanted bothers them not. It will, of course, sketch out in bold lines the plan to “fairly divide Iraq’s oil resources,” undoubtedly with the assistance of a few transnational oil corporations.

As James Paul writes for the Global Policy Forum, back in 2003 “Coalition governments were extremely interested in oil and that intense negotiations were going on, even while the initial fighting was still under way, to parcel out Iraq’s major oil fields. The main decisions were being taken in Washington. Key players—in the UK, Australia, France and elsewhere—saw Washington as the ultimate arbiter of Iraq’s oil resources,” decisions revealed in an official diplomatic cable. “Since the time of the meeting, as Coalition forces have faced a powerful insurgency, the participants’ expectations of quick deals have proved illusory. Still, the document is extraordinarily valuable as a clue to what is happening at present. It provides indispensable and very precious evidence about how governments and companies have been thinking about the division of Iraqi oil in the post-war period. We see that oil companies and high political figures have been involved in intense secret negotiations, that participation in the Coalition was seen to be a key claim on future oil contracts, and that the United States government—not Iraqis—was seen to be the ultimate arbiter of Iraq’s oil resources,” Paul explains.

As we know, or should if we read history, the 1916 Sykes-Picot Accord was as much about stealing oil as creating a Zionist state in the Middle East, the latter a pet project of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, known fondly in Israel as HaNadiv HaYdu’a, the “Famous Benefactor,” for spending over $50 million on settlements, a foothold that would eventually usher in the state of Israel.

It can be stated with a fair degree of accuracy the invasion of Iraq was not simply about Israel’s “security,” or rather maintaining its hegemonic designs on the neighborhood, a pet project of the rabid Jabotinsky dual loyalists surrounding Bush—a fact admitted by Bush insider, Philip Zelikow—but is also about oil, or rather the effort to keep an appreciable amount of oil out of circulation and thus drive up prices. As James Paul notes, attacking Iraq—and possibly Iran soon enough—was also intended to break up OPEC, an organization hated by neocons, considering it has made a few Arabs wealthy.

Arabs, according to the neocon way of looking at things, should be relegated to hewers of wood and drawers of water, as stated by Moshe Dayan and other Zionists, or at best provide color to tourist designations.

As for the transnational oil corporations, they really don’t care who rules the roost—Israelis, Arab sheiks, or anybody who may be bought off at reasonable cost—so long as they dictate the supply and price and dominate the market, as transnational corporations, essentially fascist organizations, are wont.

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On Cue, “al-Qaeda” Threatens Iran

For the neocons, “al-Qaeda” is a dream come true. For instance, the current arch nemesis of the clash of civilizations gang, Iran—or rather, the latest target, as the previous target, Iraq, is mired in engineered “sectarian violence,” and other targets, such as Syria, await their turn—has supposedly fallen afoul of “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” as the corporate media reports. “The leader of an al-Qaida umbrella group in Iraq threatened to wage war against Iran unless it stops supporting Shi’ites in Iraq within two months, according to an audiotape,” the Associated Press would have us believe, mostly because we are suckers for these sort of things. “Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who leads the group Islamic State in Iraq, said his Sunni fighters have been preparing for four years to wage a battle against Shi’ite-dominated Iran,” precisely as their handlers—the CIA, Mossad, and MI6—have planned.

But wait a minute. Didn’t the nine eleven whitewash commission conclude that “al-Qaeda” is in cahoots with Hezbollah and thus Iran? “In relation to Iran, commission investigators said intelligence ’showed far greater potential for collaboration between Hezbollah and al Qaeda than many had previously thought.’ Iran is a primary sponsor of Hezbollah, or Party of God, the Lebanon-based anti-Israel group that has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States,” the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post, reported on June 26, 2004, never mind “ancient animosities between Shiite and Sunni Muslims,” an angle mentioned by the Associated Press.

On the one hand, “al-Qaeda” supposedly declares a hankering to attack Iran, while on the other, according to NewsroomAmerica, “al-Qaeda” is “using Iran to organize and launch operations against U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq and elsewhere, western officials say…. The Financial Times reports that while the extent of al-Qaeda operations based in Iran isn’t clear, it is believed to be taking place with the direct approval of Iran’s hardline Islamic government.”

Go figure.

Last year, the dead Osama bin Laden told “Sunnis in Iraq to retaliate against Shiites, deviating from al Qaeda’s stand of not promoting sectarian violence,” CNN reported. Around the same time, the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the one-legged master terrorist wonder, “railed against Shiites in a four-hour-long audiotape harangue posted on the Internet” and described as “an unprecedented screed that chronicled what al-Zarqawi said was a Shiite campaign throughout history to destroy Islam and help foreign invaders of Muslim lands,” according to USA Today.

It is precisely this fickle character the neocons love, as Osama and Abu Musab will lash out on cue at Shi’ites one day and team up with them the next, never mind purported genocide, betrayal, or bad feelings spanning centuries. Of course, it helps that the commoners, to say nothing of no shortage of senators, are virtual no-nothings when it comes grasping the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam.

A month after the nine eleven whitewash commission made its absurd claim, Iran “arrested a number of Iranian supporters of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda group,” ABC News reported. “Iran says it has arrested and repatriated hundreds of Al Qaeda suspects in the last two years,” likely because they recognize a gaggle of CIA-ISI created patsies and mental patients when they see them. Even though the whitewash commission made sure to implicate Iran, “they said there was no evidence that Iran helped Al Qaeda with the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington,” not that a lackadaisical public is capable of making crucial distinctions, as millions remain convinced Saddam and Osama plotted mayhem and mass murder, mostly because they hate our freedom to jack up the credit card at the local mall.

Of course, as Rick Santorum realizes, the American public is easily swayed by such things, never mind the Brothers Grimm character. “In an alarming display of fearmongering, former Republican Senator Rick Santorum has suggested that a series of ‘unfortunate events,’ namely terrorist attacks, will occur within the next year and change American citizen’s perception of the war,” writes Paul Joseph Watson. “Appearing on the Hugh Hewitt radio show, Santorum also hyped the necessity of “confronting Iran in the Middle East,” and predicted that Giuliani, Romney and Tommy Thompson would be the three surviving Republican candidates who would go head to head in the race for the nomination…. Santorum went on to clearly imply that terror attacks will occur inside America which will alter the body politic and lead to a reversal of the anti-war sentiment now dominating the country.”

Naturally, this “anti-war sentiment” is not only easy for our “representatives” to ignore, as the Democrats pandered to it and then ignored widespread antiwar sentiment after the election was over last November, but it will also be easy to reverse with a bit of manufactured terrorism. Moreover, it is no mistake Santorum mentioned terrorism and Iran in the same breath.

So powerful is “al-Qaeda,” we are told the CIA-ISI created terror organization is operating in India. According to B. Raman, writing for Rediff News, “pro-Al Qaeda jihadi organizations from Pakistan,” including Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, and Lashkar-e-Tayiba, mostly active in the disputed areas of Jammu and Kashmir, are active in India, primarily because of “India’s close relations with the US and Israel. Al Qaeda not only looks upon India as a close associate of the US similar to the UK, but also as providing favorable conditions for its overseas operations directed against US nationals and interests in Indian territory.”

Finally, CIA asset Mahmoud Abbas “said on Monday the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas is protecting al Qaeda and allowing it to gain a foothold in Gaza,” Reuters reports. “It is Hamas that is protecting al Qaeda, and through its bloody behavior Hamas has become very close to al Qaeda,” said Abbas, blaming the phantom organization, or database. “That is why Gaza is in danger and needs help.”

Actually, Gaza is threatened by Israel, currently engaged in a blockade “threatening to destroy the territory’s commercial sector and drive more people into the hands of extremists,” that it to say those resisting occupation. “In the last three weeks, 75 per cent of Gaza’s factories have closed because they are not allowed to import raw material or export finished products, forcing thousands of families to rely on food aid to survive,” notes Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization. “In reality, a policy of collective punishment is being imposed upon 1.4 million people, in violation of international humanitarian law and contradictory to Israel’s interest. Destroying Gaza’s economy only exacerbates dependence on extreme elements.”

Abbas, following his CIA script, signed off on by Olmert, is oblivious to all of this.

But never mind. We have an “al-Qaeda” epidemic just about everywhere, even Gaza.

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Brzezinski, Kissinger, et al, Shill Global Slave Plantation

Back on May 19, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch poked fun at the New World Order tinfoil hatters, that is to say those of us who understand what the global elite have in mind for the people of North America.

“Forget conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination, black helicopters, Sept. 11, 2001. This is the big one,” the newspaper wrote, adding that a “rumor is sweeping the Internet, radio and magazines, spread by bloggers, broadcasters and writers who cite the ‘proof’ in the writings of a respected American University professor, in a task force put together by the Council on Foreign Relations and in the workings of the Commerce Department. As do many modern rumors, fears of a North American Union began with a few grains of truth and leapt to an unsubstantiated conclusion.”

As it turns out, these “few grains of truth” soon transmutated into a virtual silo of evidence, not that we should expect the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to publish a follow-up. A few days later, on May 24, WorldNetDaily reported: “A powerful think tank [the Center for Strategic & International Studies] chaired by former Sen. Sam Nunn and guided by trustees including Richard Armitage, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Harold Brown, William Cohen and Henry Kissinger, is in the final stages of preparing a report to the White House and U.S. Congress on the benefits of integrating the U.S., Mexico and Canada into one political, economic and security bloc.”

The momentarily defeated “comprehensive immigration reform” bill, i.e., illegal immigrant amnesty, contained “provisions for the acceleration of the Security and Prosperity Partnership, a plan for North American economic and defense integration with remarkable similarities to the CSIS plan,” similar because CSIS, its high profile globalists, and the elite coterie behind the SPP are on the same page, indeed they are working closely in a huddle, determined to reduce North America to a huge slave labor plantation, à la “communist” China.

“CSIS boasts of playing a large role in the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994—a treaty that set in motion a political movement many believe resembles the early stages of the European Community on its way to becoming the European Union.” NAFTA, of course, was designed to decimate the industrial base of the United States, now glaringly apparent in the fact the United States no longer manufactures anything of note, delegating that role to Chinese and Asian slaves locked down in sweatshops sixteen or more hours each and every day, cranking out baubles for “service economy” Americans, who eventually will be “harmonized” with Mexican peasants, that is if Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski have their way.

“In order to remain competitive in the global economy, it is imperative for the twenty-first century North American labor market to possess the flexibility necessary to meet industrial labor demands on a transitional basis and in a way that responds to market forces,” declares the CSIS report, actually a blueprint for feudalism. “It is the sense of Congress that the United States and Mexico should accelerate the implementation of the Partnership for Prosperity to help generate economic growth and improve the standard of living in Mexico, which will lead to reduced migration.”

In other words, come hell or high water, and contrary to the desire of the commoners, who want secure borders, the globalists are determined to have “open borders,” that is to say unhindered migration of slaves across borders, an effort designed to “accelerate the implementation” of poverty and misery here in the United States, soon enough to be merely the middle slice of the North American Union. Recall Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve head honcho and one-time objectivist, stating in March of this year that skilled American workers earn too much. “The hero of the corporatocrats and plutocrats wants to distribute your income into the hands of needy billionaires by using H-1B visa ’skilled workers’ to knock you off your haughty middle-class pedestal,” comments Dick Eastman of the Job Destruction Newsletter. “Our skilled wages are higher than anywhere in the world,” said Greenspan. “If we open up a significant window for skilled workers, that would suppress the skilled-wage level and end the concentration of income.”

Greenspan, of course, is not talking about the “concentration of income” held by transnational corporations and international bankers, but the mass of commoners who must be folded at all cost into the emerging corporatist global slave plantation. CSIS is not interested in improving the living standard of Mexicans, as this was knocked down a few pegs when NAFTA jobs went from Mexican slave maquiladoras to the sprawling labor gulag in China where workers are paid even less and a massive totalitarian state runs the shop. Mexicans are worse off now than they were ten years ago when NAFTA was in full swing.

Peter F. Drucker, writer and Habsburg empire factotum, “describes in his book [Post Capitalist Society, published in 1993] the worldwide trends toward globalization that were evident back then—the creation and empowerment of transnational organizations and institutions, international environmental goals regarding carbon dioxide and agreements to fight terrorism long before 9/11.” In short, none of this is new or should it be surprising, as the globalists have planned to reduce us to grinding peonage for some time now. Moreover, they have planned for some time to exploit the global warming scam to get us all working on the slave plantation, making sure to condition us first with a bit of terrorism.

Of course, in the brave new world envisioned by the decadent criminal elite, mere terrorism—raving jihadists, we are told ad nauseam, who want to dirty nuke our cities because they hate our freedom to shop—will pale in comparison to the dire scenarios of melting ice caps, flooded coastal cities, aberrant weather patterns, a Katrina catastrophe or worse every other week, and wars and rumors of wars based on the prospect of diminishing resources, including “peak oil,” all of it designed to prepare us for a dystopian future of slave labor down on the transnational corporate plantation.

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Untouchable Scooter Scoots as Conyers Blows Hot Air

Congress critter John Conyers, who predictably reneged on a promise to impeach the decider-commander guy after the Democrats took control of Congress, now tells us he will look into not only Bush’s commuting of convicted criminal Scooter Libby’s sentence, but will review all recent presidential pardons. “Yes, we’re going to review all of them, including Clinton’s, Bush one, Bush two, we’ll go back as far as they want,” Conyers told the Ministry of Propaganda, Fox News division. “We’ll be doing the research. We won’t need to review each and every one of them but the whole idea is to examine to what use this part of our criminal law is being put and whether it’s being used adequately or are there other changes necessary.”

Sure, John. And the moon is made of blue cheese.

Conyers expects us to be believe the House Judiciary Committee has the will and power to change a long standing tradition, sort of a mafia credo—presidential henchmen and factotums may be prosecuted, as the illusion that no man is above the law must reign, but at the end of the day they will be pardoned, have their sentences commuted, and will be allowed to fade into the sunset or eased into teaching positions at Georgetown University.

Of course, back in the day, when our founding lawyers drafted the Constitution, they made sure to provide an escape clause for their criminal pals, as stipulated in Article II Section 2: “The President… shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States,” thus demonstrating some people are indeed above the law.

“We’re trying to examine the use and misuse of the clemency power and the commutation power and we’ll be examining it of all presidents because that’s the only way we can determine whether they’ve been used properly and whether there should be changes considered,” Conyers said as he yanked our chain. “We may be able to restrict it in some ways, but in addition to, we want everyone to be examining it,” in other words Conyers wants to change the Constitution. Of course, this is about as likely to happen as Bush doing the perp walk in a freshly starched orange jumpsuit.

In response to Conyers’ hot air, ranking committee Republican Lamar Smith of Texas told Fox News: “I really on the whole think the Judiciary Committee has a lot better things to do than to spend time investigating what is a constitutional prerogative of any president, Republican or Democrat.” In other words, the Judiciary Committee, and Congress as a whole, should mind its business, that is to say attending to the business of transnational corporatism and the global elite, busy rendering the United States into a feudal plantation, sort of an Americanized version of the slave gulag in China.

Meanwhile, “Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., announced he will introduce a censure resolution against Bush for his ‘egregious and politically-motivated commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence’…. ‘This presidential intervention is an unconscionable abuse of authority by George W. Bush, and Congress must step forward and express the disgust that Americans rightfully feel toward this contemptible decision.’”

Please, spare us the theatrics. Neocon Libby, who not only outed CIA agent Valerie Plame for her husband’s crime of telling the truth about Saddam’s illusory yellowcake but is also an “egregious” war criminal par excellence, will skate and in six months, as the decider-commander guy approaches the end of his “term,” few will remember his name, let alone his crimes, most notably and opprobriously his prominent role in the methodical slaughter of more than 750,000 Iraqis, a total stacked upon Clinton’s supervision of killing off 1.5 million Iraqis, mostly helpless children, by way of “sanctions,” that is to say a decade-long medieval siege.

Don’t expect Conyers and the Judiciary Committee to take up discussion on genocide, as the lives of Iraqis are really quite insignificant in Washington. Instead, for the moment, we can expect our “representatives,” actually representing Wal-Mart and Halliburton, to continue making ludicrous comments, designed to assuage the outrage of average Americans, or a few anyway, who know a sweetheart deal when they see one, not that it particularly matters. In a week or two the Libby outrage will be paved over by the next dizzy antic of Britney Spears or a drunken American Idol contestant.

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“Behavior-Detection” Graduates from Airports to Bus and Train Stations

In celebration of Independence Day commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, the feds have increased the visibility of armed goons at train stations and bus terminals across the country. “Officials from the Transportation Security Administration, formed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, said the additional security is not a response to any specific threat to any of the regions,” reports the Examiner. In other words, there are no terrorists and you are not in danger. Since the Constitution is nothing more than a “goddamned piece of paper,” according to the decider-commander guy, it makes sense the government has decided to roll out this in-your-face escalation—from airports to bus stations—on the same day baby-kissing politicians blabber on about liberty, freedom, equality under the law, inalienable rights, and representative government, blah, blah, blah.

“The federal security officers are part of the TSA’s Visual Intermodal Protection and Response teams, which consist of behavior-detection officers, federal air marshals not scheduled for flights, and rail, security and aviation inspectors,” the Examiner continues. “The VIPR (pronounced ‘viper’) program has conducted 84 targeted security assignments in the last 18 months.”

Behavior-detection officers. How perfectly Orwell. These guys are trained to detect “micro-expressions,” that is to say “a sign of an emotion being concealed,” as Paul Ekman, writing for the CIA’s favorite newspaper describes it. Had a fight with your wife, or experienced the death of a relative? Don’t show your emotions in public, bub, not unless you want three or four goons to “pull you aside,” that is to say interrogate you for the crime of inappropriate behavior in a public place. Not long ago, especially on the day we supposedly celebrate our freedom, this would have outraged most Americans. Now we thank the automatic weapon-toting goons and behavior-detection officers for treating us like criminals and slaves.

TSA spokeswoman Ellen Howe told KWTX the VIPER goons are intended to provide “a visible deterrent,” whatever that means. Maybe she means we will be deterred from showing emotion in public, lest we be pegged as a terrorist, never mind there is “no credible, specific threat for the Fourth,” according to Howe. Of course, there was two incidents of patently absurd “foiled terrorist attempts” in London and Glasgow, nicely timed to coincide with the Fourth, when we are busy with fireworks, parades, barbecues, picnics, baseball games, etc., all supposedly commemorating our freedom. In fact, we have very little freedom and the Fourth is a day we celebrate our enslavement to government. In the not too distant past, it was enough to be fleeced by the government and follow a dizzy array of meaningless laws, but now we being conditioned to accept the police state personal and right up close like they do in other totalitarian countries.

Obviously, the plan is to expand the Gestapo zones from airports to bus terminals and train stations and eventually down to the highways and the intersection at the end of your neighborhood block. Of course, at present there are not enough cops, VIPER goons, and behavior-detection officers to do this effectively. “In this post-9/11 world, our state and local officers need more help, not less; and they need our assistance with both areas of their job: helping fight terrorism and protecting our communities from crime,” declared senator Joe Biden in 2005. “It’s these officers who not only deter and prevent crime, but also they likely will be the ones finding the bomb under the trash can or the ones to notice a terrorist cell moving in to an apartment building,” or detect and punish inappropriate behavior in the hood.

Naturally, hiring more cops, “federal security officers,” and behavior-detection goons will be expensive, as the Ministry of Homeland Security readily admits, so get ready to fork over more cash. “Homeland security is expensive. It can’t be accomplished on the cheap. And because the war against terrorism is a national fight, a substantial portion of the responsibility falls to the federal government. It takes serious money to make the necessary changes to our services and infrastructure,” notes a Ministry press release. “In transportation, we must move beyond aviation and also secure mass transit, rails, air cargo, pipelines, tunnels, and bridges. These tough jobs and countless others can’t be accomplished with wishful thinking or a magic wand. And they cannot be accomplished by placing an unfair share of the burden on state and local governments who are already facing the worst fiscal crises in decades.”

In other words, the local cop shop will be federalized. Of course, there are not enough bodies to protect us from “al-Qaeda,” and that’s why the city of Santa Fe “is looking at the possibility of recruiting Mexican nationals to fill vacancies on the city police force,” according to the New Mexican. In addition to recruiting Mexicans, Gillian Alessio of the Santa Fe police department “said the Santa Fe police force, like others around the country, has found itself vying to recruit the same 21- to 30-year-olds as the U.S. military,” and thus looked to Mexico.

It makes you wonder if Mexican cops will have the same response to “micro-expressions” as American cops or if they will engage in the sort of shake-down the federales in Mexico are famous or rather infamous for.

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Dumb “al-Qaeda” Doctors

Neurologist Mohammed Asha, and his lab technician wife Marwah, threw away their baby, Anas, in order to join “al-Qaeda,” the CIA-ISI database. Sure they did. And I have a bridge for sale.

If we believe the corporate media, the dark under current of Islamic extremism, and that of the “al-Qaeda” database, is so strong it was able to sweep up promising neurologist Mohammed Asha, who became a would-be terrorist apparently more adept at brain surgery than cooking up bombs.

According to the cheesy British tabloid the Mirror, however, Asha and his wife, Marwah, are your garden variety Palestinian terrorists, the sort who throw away their lives, including an infant son, Anas, due to a self-destructive “hate against the West over Palestine…. The couple, from Palestinian families, blamed Britain and the US for backing Israel’s ‘occupation’, relatives said.” According to Asha’s father Yunis Dana, the couple “aren’t the type to be interested in political Islam,” so it remains a mystery why they would team up with so-called Muslim radicals. As well, Marwah was radicalized because people made fun or her veil.

For some reason, though, Mohammed Asha assisted people he supposedly hates. “Dan Robinson, 61, a retired museum keeper, said Dr Asha visited his home in Newcastle-under-Lyme when his 83-year-old mother suffered leg problems,” reports the Daily Express. “Dr Asha was a good neighbor. My mother thought he was great. We can’t get our heads round it,” Robinson told the newspaper. Asha senior “said his son arrived in London in 2004 with his lab technician wife Marwah, 27. They settled in well in Britain and were happy with their lives,” but apparently not happy enough, as they supposedly conspired to kill Brits, never mind they did not know the first thing about bomb-making.

In Canada, the story of the failed British and Scottish terrorist plot gets an extra added dimension. “Just three weeks after ABC’s Brian Ross broke an exclusive story including video evidence that some 300 recruits had been sent off on suicide missions to the west following an enmasse ‘graduation ceremony’, came the failed London and Glasgow bombings,” reports the Canada Free Press, citing the UK Daily Mail. Of course, the Canada Free Press has absolutely no evidence of this so-called “connection,” and in fact headlines its “story” (as in speculative fiction) as a question—”Al Qaeda, Suicide Bombers: Failed terrorist attacks overseas linked to June’s graduating suicide bomber class in Pakistan?”—but then, naturally, when it comes to “al-Qaeda,” no evidence is required. Here in the United States, large numbers of Americans will believe almost anything, as the fact millions of Americans believe to this day Saddam had something to do with the attacks of September 11, 2001, thanks to incessant corporate media repetition of this lie.

Another medical student, Bilal Abdullah, on the other hand, threw away his life because he “was radicalized by the influence of Iraq’s al-Qaeda chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” the phantom one-legged terrorist, alternately described as retarded and a terrorism mastermind. “He actively cheered the death of British and American troops. One of his best friends had been killed by Shias,” Shiraz Maher, supposedly a friend, told the Mirror. Abdullah subscribed to “an al-Qaeda ideology. He had a number of videos by al-Zarqawi. The aims were something he closely identified with,” that it to say Bilal Abdullah identified with a CIA-ISI contrived ideology.

According to Medical News Today, citing the BBC, no less than eight would-be terrorists involved in the London and Glasgow incidents “have links with the British National Health Service,” in other words the average Brit should be afraid, very afraid, as the medical system in Britain is rife with “al-Qaeda” and Palestinian terrorists. Of course, this is nonsense, but it sure plays well in the UK Mirror, a market check-out tabloid unable to admit the obvious—Israel does indeed “occupy” the West Bank and Gaza, in violation of international law.

As it turns out, however, the London and Glasgow bomb fumblers were “watched” by Britain’s master terror organization, MI5. “Several doctors arrested over the London and Glasgow car bomb plot were on the files of MI5,” reports the UK Telegraph. “At least one was on a Home Office watch list after being identified by security services—meaning their travel in and out of Britain was monitored by immigration officers…. Others were found to be on the MI5 database, which contains an estimated 2,000 suspected jihadists or supporters of terrorism.”

Recall that Mohammed Siddique Khan, the alleged ringleader of the 7/7 London bombings, was working for British intelligence agency MI5 as an informant at the time of the attacks, according to Charles Shoebridge, a 12-year veteran detective of the London Metropolitan Police.

Moreover, as Paul Joseph Watson notes, “the British security services were intimately involved in numerous terror attacks in Britain over the past few decades, namely car bombings, that were blamed on the IRA or its offshoots.”

And then there is the strange case of Abu Qatada, “a Muslim cleric believed by several European countries to be a pivotal figure in international terrorism,” according to the Guardian, who “disappeared from his west London home … before a round up of alleged terrorist suspects. It was rumored that he had fled abroad.” However, according to “senior members of European intelligence services,” Abu Qatada was “fed and clothed by British intelligence,” that is to say he was protected as an asset.

“Relatives of two brothers suspected of plotting a terrorist bombing outrage in Britain today made extraordinary claims that they were visited by an MI5 agent in the weeks before they were arrested,” the Scotsman reported on April 1, 2004. “The eight suspects, all British citizens and Muslims, were held under the Terrorism Act as police found half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer which they believe could have been used in a devastating blast.”

Finally, it appears Bisher al-Rawi, sweating it out in Camp Gitmo, claims “he acted as a go-between for British intelligence and an alleged leading member of al-Qa’ida in London,” according to London Independent. “Mr. Rawi claimed he had acted as an intermediary between Abu Qatada, a Palestinian refugee, and MI5. He named three MI5 agents, ‘Alex’, ‘Matthew’ and ‘Martin’, and asked for them to be called as defense witnesses. Although the tribunal agreed, the British Government refused to allow them to give evidence.”

None of this, however, means diddly, as the corporate media rarely if ever mentions such suspicious connections and, as in the case of the previous example, these stories often find their way to the memory hole, or rather the “500 Internal Server Error” hole. Of course, the story of the “al-Qaeda” patsies, neurologists and well-educated medical students, clueless when it comes to making bombs—while no shortage of bored teenagers are able to do so using household chemicals—is not intended to be believable but rather is designed to augment the incessant corporate media campaign to demonize Muslims, part and parcel of the “clash of civilizations,” that it to say the plan to attack Muslim and Arab countries, kill their grandmothers and toddlers, and balkanize the region, as long ago planned.

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Numbskull “al-Qaeda” Patsies Flub in Glasgow

Obviously, the British and Scotland branch of “al-Qaeda” need to call the home office, as “al-Qaeda in Iraq” is far more effective at car bombs and the UK version need a bit of tutoring. “A vehicle that crashed into Scotland’s largest airport was being treated as a potential terror attack linked to two car bombs found in London, police said Saturday,” reports MSNBC. “Britain raised its security alert to ‘critical’—the highest level possible and an indication that terrorist attacks are imminent. U.S. airports increased safety precautions.” In other words, goons with automatic weapons and dogs, reminiscent of Nazi soldiers on train platforms demanding to see papers, will be sending a message to holiday commuters next week, as America celebrates its independence to shop, eat hot dogs, and blow off fireworks made by slaves in China.

Naturally, the two patsies who “rammed a petrol-filled, four-wheel-drive vehicle into Glasgow airport,” as Reuters describes the pathetic suicide bomb attempt, are linked to the staged events in London. “There are clearly similarities and we can confirm that this is being treated as a terrorist incident,” declared Willie Rae, the chief constable in the Glasgow area. “Rae said the badly burnt man was found to have a ’suspect device’ hidden on his body, but he would not confirm it was a suicide vest. The hospital briefly had to be evacuated while the device was inspected.” Obviously, “al-Qaeda,” the Scottish division, recruited the most dim-witted duo available, or rather MI5 recruited these retards, probably unable to count on their fingers without losing track three digits in.

“Britain’s Home Office announced it had raised the national security alert level to ‘critical,’ the highest ranking and one which indicates further attacks are expected imminently,” or rather further attempts, purposely designed to be nothing more than pathetic flubs, will be executed, resulting in a marked increase in gun-toting goons at airports, engineered to get all of us accustomed to an ever increasing police state in our faces. If we are to believe the corporate media, the average Brit is inured to all of this, as the average Brit is climatized to 500,000 “security” cameras positioned everywhere, resulting in the average person being photographed 300 times each and every day.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, “Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff said the government is putting in place plans to increase security at airports, on mass transit and at transportation facilities,” according to Fox News. In other words, millions of holiday travelers will be subjected to the spectacle of increased numbers of goons with automatic weapons patrolling not only airports but “mass transit and … transportation facilities” as well, thus sending the message we are not safe from “al-Qaeda,” never mind these mentally challenged terrorists are apparently unable to make and detonate suicide bombs, unlike their brethren in Iraq who are, after all, well-trained by British SAS operatives donning Arab garb and wigs.

No doubt, as we celebrate our “independence” here in the land of wall-to-wall Wal-marts next week, the country is more threatened by unsupervised kids with sparklers than “al-Qaeda,” a phantom terrorist group created by the CIA and ISI and used by MI5 and the Mossad to keep the “war on terrorism” alive in the face of public apathy and indifference.

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Absurd London “Bomb Plot” Inaugurates “Control Freak” Brown

“British police Friday thwarted a car-bomb attack that would have brought carnage to the streets of London just days before the second anniversary of the July 7, 2005, bombings that claimed 52 lives,” writes Nile Gardiner for the neocon house organ, the National Review Online. “The car was packed with nails, gas canisters and petrol containers, and left outside a nightclub near Piccadilly Circus. This latest attempt to kill and maim hundreds of civilians is most likely the work of al Qaeda or one of its numerous British-based affiliates. It was timed to coincide with the departure of Tony Blair, and the entrance of new Prime Minister Gordon Brown. It also coincided with Blair’s appointment as the Quartet’s new Middle East envoy in the face of strong opposition in the Arab world.”

Gardiner has no evidence “al-Qaeda,” the database, is involved in this absurdly incompetent plot, and even Scotland Yard has said it is far too early to determine who is behind the “foiled attack,” but now that the corporate media is hysterically braying “al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda,” it makes little difference who is responsible. Gardiner believes, or wants us to believe, the plot was “timed to coincide with … the entrance of new Prime Minister Gordon Brown,” and in fact Gardiner may be correct, although not for the reason he states. Brown was selected to lord over the British people because he is a darling of the Bank of England, a former chancellor of the Exchequer, a medieval English institution for the collection of royal revenues, that is to say the fleecing of subjects. As well, Brown was selected because he is regarded as a “control freak” and “totally uncollegiate,” according to Charles Clarke, the former home secretary. In short, he unflinchingly runs roughshod over his victims, the sort of psychological makeup considered a prerequisite for a principate, especially one taking orders from bankers and the globalist coterie.

It stands to reason Tony Blair’s “appointment as the Quartet’s new Middle East envoy” faces “strong opposition in the Arab world,” as Blair is a war criminal. He was informed by the Foreign Office that an attack on Iraq was illegal under international law and he met with Bush in Crawford April 2002 and vowed his support for the invasion, that is to say he promised to donate the lives of Brits in the effort to slaughter Iraqis, an effort that has paid off handsomely (more than 750,000 killed to date), that is if you’re a psychopath, as Blair obviously is. Arabs who know anything about Blair realize he is a pathological liar, as he said up until the eve of the invasion attacking Iraq was not inevitable when in fact he secretly agreed with the neocons to attack Iraq all along.

In addition to sending out the message Gordon Brown is the “war on terrorism” prime minister, the fake would-be attack, likely staged by MI5, serves as yet another object lesson for British commoners, who, according to the New York Times, “shrugged stoically at the July 7 bombings two years ago” and “seemed less than troubled here today after police announced that they had defused an explosive mixture of gasoline, nails and gas canisters in a car abandoned outside the Tiger Tiger on a thoroughfare called Haymarket.” Staged terrorism and repeatedly foiled plots carried out by terrorists apparently unable to tie their shoes in the morning without assistance is “something you get used to, living in London,” according to a lawyer quoted by the Times. “And given the stance our government made on the war in Iraq and elsewhere, I think we are just getting used to being a target. It’s something we have to live with.”

No doubt, as well, Brits will need get “used to” the fact their country is “sinking into a police state,” as George Churchill-Coleman, who headed Scotland Yard’s anti-IRA squad, told the Guardian two years ago. “We live in a democracy and we should police on those standards…. I have serious worries and concerns about these ideas on both ethical and practical terms. You cannot lock people up just because someone says they are terrorists. Internment didn’t work in Northern Ireland, it won’t work now. You need evidence.”

Of course, you need evidence to claim “al-Qaeda” is behind the sloppy and wholly amateurish work in London today, but that has not stopped the corporate media or the fear-monger hacks with an agenda—i.e., slaughtering Muslims and divvying up the Middle East—from leading to conclusions and thus subjecting the public to non-stop propaganda.

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Alan Watt on the Alex Jones Program

Alan Watt provides a concise historical and philosophical run-down on the NWO agenda in a conversation with radio host Alex Jones:

54 minutes, 26 seconds.

Alan Watt’s site: http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.net/

Alex Jones’ site: http://infowars.com/

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General Predicts Israel Will Attack Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, “al-Qaeda” this Summer

It is a provocative headline: “Israel braces for July war with up to five enemies.” If we are to believe Israeli military intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, this attack will be launched by Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and, of course, “al-Qaeda,” the database. “Each of these adversaries is capable of sparking a war in the summer,” Yadlin told the World Tribune. In other words, Israel is capable of attacking one or all of these “adversaries,” as Israel has a notorious history of attacking its neighbors under contrived pretense.

Few remember the words of the Irgun terrorist Menachem Begin, later Israeli prime minister—as Israelis, much like Americans, prefer to be led by terrorists and war criminals—who admitted in 1982 “that Israel had fought three wars in which it had a ‘choice,’ meaning Israel started the wars,” according to Donald Neff, writing for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Here is Begin’s quote in full: “In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

As Livia Rokach writes in the introduction to Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, based on the memoirs of Moshe Sharett, the former Israeli prime minister, the “Israeli political/military establishment aimed at pushing the Arab states into military confrontations which the Israeli leaders were invariably certain of winning. The goal of these confrontations was to modify the balance of power in the region radically, transforming the Zionist state into the major power in the Middle East.” In order to realize this modification of power, Israel engaged in “military operations aimed at civilian populations across the armistice lines,” in particular against a defenseless Palestinian population, but also against Israel’s Arab neighbors, and these “operations [were] designed to dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement, and create puppet regimes which would gravitate to the regional Israeli power.”

“A clear, lucid, coherent logic runs through the history of the past three decades,” Rokach wrote in the 1980s. “In the early fifties the bases were laid for constructing a state imbued with the principles of sacred terrorism against the surrounding Arab societies on the threshold of the eighties the same state is for the first time denounced by its own intellectuals as being tightly in the deadly grip of fascism.”

“Lebanon was the model, prepared for its role by the Israelis for thirty years, as the Sharett diaries revealed,” explains Ralph Schoenman in his book, the Hidden History of Zionism. “It is the expansionist compulsion set forth by Herzl and Ben Gurion even as it is the logical extension of the Sharett diaries. The dissolution of Lebanon was proposed in 1919, planned in 1936, launched in 1954 and realized in 1982.” Schoenman cites Oded Yinon’s A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s, a document that “outlines a timetable for Israel to become the imperial regional power based upon the dissolution of the Arab states.”

In regard to Syria, Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery tells us the Zionist state created a convenient myth in order to escalate hostilities and thus steal land. “According to legend, the Syrians exploited their control of heights overlooking the Israeli villages in the valley below them. Again and again the evil Syrians (the Syrians were always ‘evil’) terrorized the helpless kibbutzim by shelling. This myth, which was believed by practically all Israelis at the time, served as a justification for the occupation of the Golan Heights and their annexation by Israel. Even now, foreign visitors are brought to an observation post on the Golan Heights and shown the defenseless kibbutzim down below.”

The truth, which has been exposed since then, was a bit different: Sharon used to instruct the kibbutzniks to go to their shelters, and then he would send an armored tractor into the demilitarized zone. Predictably, the Syrians shot at it. The Israeli artillery, just waiting for its cue, then opened up a massive bombardment of the Syrian positions. There were dozens of such “incidents.”

Earlier this month, Jan Muhren, a Dutch UN observer stationed interchangeably at the Golan Heights and the West Bank in 1966-67, told a Dutch current affairs program “neither Jordan nor Syria had any intention to start a war with Israel,” according to Monsters and Critics. Muhren said “Israel was not under siege by Arab countries preceding the Six-Day War … and that the Jewish state provoked most border incidents as part of its strategy to annex more land,” that is to say steal land at gunpoint, most notably from Syria, although the “war” resulted in the theft of Gaza and the West Bank from Egypt and Jordan respectively. As well, Israel grabbed the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt.

Once again, Israel is not “under siege by Arab countries,” or Hezbollah, Hamas, and the fantastical “al-Qaeda” for that matter, and yet we are told each “of these adversaries is capable of sparking a war in the summer.” Israeli officials, according to the World Tribune, “said Iran has direct influence over Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas. He said Al Qaida has increasingly come under Iranian influence and was being used by Iran and Syria in such countries as Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon.” In short, the Israeli “security myth” documented by Livia Rokach in the 1980s and in the current era buttressed by ludicrous fairy tales, is alive and well. Under such a “security” pretense, never examined by the corporate media, we can expect Israel, or more likely the United States, under an AIPAC and neocon zombie trance for some time now, to attack Iran and Syria, possibly next month, certainly before the Commander Guy leaves office.

Iraq was attacked and 750,000 Iraqis slaughtered in the name of “Israeli security,” that is to say Israeli hegemony. “Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990—it’s the threat against Israel,” Philip Zelikow, Bush insider and former executive director of the nine eleven whitewash commission, told a crowd at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002, according to Emad Mekay, writing for the IPS-Inter Press Service. Naturally, the corporate media completely ignored Zelikow’s comments.

As should be expected, the Likudniks and American neocons will demand, in the wake of Israel’s defeat to Hezbollah last summer, another go, this time making certain to accomplish their goals. Meyrav Wurmser, the Israeli married to the neocon David Wurmser, admitted as much last December. “Hizbullah defeated Israel in the war. This is the first war Israel lost,” she told Yedioth Internet. “I know this will annoy many of your readers… But the anger is over the fact that Israel did not fight against the Syrians. Instead of Israel fighting against Hizbullah, many parts of the American administration believe that Israel should have fought against the real enemy, which is Syria and not Hizbullah.” Wurmser, of course, is talking about the neocon part of the administration, the part that has control of American foreign policy. Iran, naturally, figures prominently on the target list as well. If the Israeli Likudniks and the American neocons have their way, Israel will have a second go this summer.

Addendum

In order to underscore the neocon connection to the Israeli Likudniks, I am including here a short video I produced last year:


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Poll: Even More Americans Blame Saddam for 9/11

As distrustful as I am of polls conducted by the corporate media, I had to take note of the following. “A new Newsweek poll out this weekend exposed ‘gaps’ in America’s knowledge of history and current events,” writes Josh Catone for Raw Story. “Perhaps most alarmingly, 41% of Americans answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001?’ That total is actually up 5 points since September 2004.”

I wouldn’t call this lack of knowledge a “gap” but rather a chasm, the result of years of brainwashing—indeed, a process instituted from grade school onward, right up the present as millions of Americans sit idly before the tube with their brains disengaged, absorbing the incessant propaganda dispensed by Fox News and CNN.

Of course, there is no evidence Saddam had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001, and the Bush neocons never bothered to provide any, although several absurd theories, passed off as truth, appeared in the wake of the attack. Hands down, my favorite came from the installed neocon puppet government of Iraq. “Iraq’s coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist,” the Telegraph reported back in December, 2003.

It is safe to assume Nidal worked for Israeli intelligence, an assertion with more validity than the claim nine eleven was the responsibility of Saddam Hussein. “Before dismissing the idea that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency could be so devious as to deliberately help an Arab terrorist group in order to further its own agenda, consider this: when investigators probed the collapse of the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International in 1991, they found not only evidence that Mossad was banking with BCCI, but also that payments had been made from the Mossad accounts to Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers rebels and the Abu Nidal Organization,” write Ben Vidgen and Ian Wishart for Investigate magazine.

In addition to catering to the elite—Lord Callaghan, Britain’s former Prime Minister, Pakistan’s President Zia, former President Jimmy Carter, current resident George W. Bush, Clark Clifford, an adviser to presidents starting with Harry Truman, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the drug dealing Manuel Noriega, all banked with BCCI—the bank “catered to all sorts of clients, ranging from the CIA and Israel’s Mossad to the Palestinian terrorist leader Abu Nidal,” Adam Shore told an Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship Colloquium.

Of course, you’ll never hear such speculation on Fox News or MSNBC. In fact, any such speculation is considered a thought crime in many parts of the world, as it is “antisemitic” and thus illegal to attribute nefarious motives and acts to Mossad or any other Israeli organization.

Moreover, as additional evidence Israel conducts black ops and attributes the result to its enemies, consider the allegation, confirmed by a British diplomat, that the “state of Israel [by way of Shin Bet] was behind the hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe in 1976, and cooperated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in staging the affair,” according to Yedioth Internet. “The operation was designed to torpedo the PLO’s standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans.”

It should be noted, according to Wikipedia, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s Wadie Haddad, aka Abu Hani, collaborated with “non-PFLP organizations such as the Abu Nidal Organization and the West German Red Army Faction” and “also employed [Haddad’s] PFLP protégé, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (’The Jackal’).”

Of course, a large percentage, if not a majority of Americans know absolutely nothing about such things. In addition, according to Raw Story, most Americans are unable to keep the official fairy tale straight, never mind incessant propaganda, as “a majority of people couldn’t identify Saudi Arabia as the country of origin of most of the 9/11 hijackers, even given the question in multiple choice format. 20% answered Iraq, while 14% believed the hijackers came from Iran.”

Considering such a level of ignorance and willful stupidity, no doubt, when the neocons finally get around to attacking Iran—neocon grand master Normal Podhoretz promises this before Bush leaves office—the American people will buy whatever flimsy pretext is invented and, five years down the road, they will fudge the official version again, as is apparently their unfortunate yet predictable habit.

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Bukovksy: EU is Soviet Union Reborn

It takes a victim of sovietism to recognize a likewise process in Europe. “Vladimir Bukovksy, the 63-year old former Soviet dissident, fears that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union,” writes Paul Belien for the Brussels Journal. “In a speech he delivered in Brussels last week Mr. Bukovsky called the EU a ‘monster’ that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a fullfledged totalitarian state.”

“In 1992 I had unprecedented access to Politburo and Central Committee secret documents which have been classified and still are even now, for 30 years,” Bukovksy declared in a speech delivered at a Polish restaurant opposite the European Parliament. “These documents show very clearly that the whole idea of turning the European common market into a federal state was agreed between the left-wing parties of Europe and Moscow as a joint project which [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev in 1988-89 called our ‘common European home.’”

Bukovsky fingers the usual globalist suspects:

In January of 1989, for example, a delegation of the Trilateral Commission came to see Gorbachev. It included [former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro] Nakasone, [former French President Valéry] Giscard d’Estaing, [American banker David] Rockefeller and [former US Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger. They had a very nice conversation where they tried to explain to Gorbachev that Soviet Russia had to integrate into the financial institutions of the world, such as Gatt, the IMF and the World Bank.

In the middle of it Giscard d’Estaing suddenly takes the floor and says: “Mr. President, I cannot tell you exactly when it will happen—probably within 15 years—but Europe is going to be a federal state and you have to prepare yourself for that. You have to work out with us, and the European leaders, how you would react to that, how would you allow the other Easteuropean countries to interact with it or how to become a part of it, you have to be prepared.”

For Bukovsky, the European Parliament resembles “the Supreme Soviet. It looks like the Supreme Soviet because it was designed like it. Similarly, when you look at the European Commission it looks like the Politburo…. If you go through all the structures and features of this emerging European monster you will notice that it more and more resembles the Soviet Union.”

The Soviet Union used to be a state run by ideology. Today’s ideology of the European Union is social-democratic, statist, and a big part of it is also political correctness. I watch very carefully how political correctness spreads and becomes an oppressive ideology, not to mention the fact that they forbid smoking almost everywhere now. Look at this persecution of people like the Swedish pastor who was persecuted for several months because he said that the Bible does not approve homosexuality. France passed the same law of hate speech concerning gays. Britain is passing hate speech laws concerning race relations and now religious speech, and so on and so forth. What you observe, taken into perspective, is a systematic introduction of ideology which could later be enforced with oppressive measures. Apparently that is the whole purpose of Europol. Otherwise why do we need it? To me Europol looks very suspicious. I watch very carefully who is persecuted for what and what is happening, because that is one field in which I am an expert. I know how Gulags spring up.

Here in North America, we are in for much of the same. “Former President of the Soviet Union Gorbachev on March 23, 2000, in London, referred to the European Union (EU) as ‘the New European Soviet.’ If he refers to the EU in that way, it only stands to reason that he would refer to the North American Union (NAU) as the ‘New American Soviet,’ since the NAU is modeled on the EU,” writes Charlotte Iserbyt. “United States government officials, elected and unelected, with enormous financial assistance from the tax-exempt foundations, have for many years been working to implement unconstitutional regional planning at the local, state, national and international level, all of this required for full implementation of a One World Socialist Government…. It is a well-known and documented fact that Wall Street funded the Bolshevik Revolution and the corporate communists and our government have been supporting the communist regime in Russia since 1917.”

Iserbyt hits the nail square on the head. In school, I learned that communism represented a classless, stateless social organization based on common ownership of the means of production, in its beginning stage characterized by the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Of course, the so-called proletariat never had their day in the sun and instead a massive Soviet totalitarian state emerged, a vampire-like leviathan designed to feed on the proletariat. Now we have “corporate communism,” although it is more accurately defined as corporate fascism, as Mussolini, the grand daddy of fascism, knew fascism is nothing if not corporatism. Sovietism, with its nomenklatura of globalist bureaucrats, is simply the most effective control mechanism, far better than anything Mussolini or Hitler devised.

A Google News search returns but one U.S. publication mentioning the comments of the “uroskeptic” Vladimir Bukovsky: the Washington Times. “Liberty and democracy require limited governments, while supranationalism by definition tends toward unlimitedness,” writes Paul Belien for the newspaper on June 20. “The former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky refers to the EU as the ‘EUSSR.’ He does so, he explains, because the former USSR and the EU share the same goal: the obliteration of nations. ‘The European Union, like the Soviet Union, cannot be democratized,’ he says. If the EU becomes a genuine state it is bound to be an evil empire, because there is no European nation.”

Same applies for North America, soon enough to become a supranational entity on par with the European Union. Of course, this time around, there will be no Maastricht Treaty, no embarrassing referendums, no Edinburgh Agreement with frustrating exceptions attached, as our rulers have little patience for the objections of commoners and are woefully behind schedule implementing their one-world project, that is to say global corporatism, more accurately described as transnational corporate fascism.

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Phares: Gaza Fighting Part of Iran-Syria Plot

According to neocon Walid Phares, writing for FrontPageMagazine, Iran and Syria are “involved in a regional campaign to seize as much physical terrain and score as many victories across the Middle East in order to consolidate their strategic posture” before Bush leaves office. Phares’ “Tehran-Damascus axis” is “arming and supplying neo-Taliban and other Jihadi forces in Afghanistan,” stirring up sectarian divisions in Iraq, and “has unleashed two blitzkrieg-like offensives” in Lebanon and Gaza.

Phares, a darling of the neocon “talent” agency Benador Associates, believes the “heavy fighting in Gaza represents an important decision made by the regional masters: The acceleration of the axis offensive so that by the end of summer, four battlefields will be fully ignited against the U.S., its allies and regional democracies: Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza (Palestinian territories). But just as important is the fact that an entire Taliban-like zone has been established on the eastern Mediterranean under Hamas control and with Syro-Iranian backing. Our expectations are that, short of a large-scale counter-operation aimed at dislodging the “coup” in the enclave, the area will become a massive terror base of operations.”

Of course, this is nonsense, but then Benador operatives are known for telling lies and making things up, as Iranian exile Amir Taheri made up the story about Iranian Jews forced to wear a yellow insignia, thus attempting to rekindle images of Nazi Germany era Jews forced to wear identifying stars. Eleana Benador, grand dame of the Benador Associates propaganda operation, admitted that her “PR firm” had planted the piece, according to Larry Cohler-Esses, writing for the Nation.

In addition, Juan Cole notes that it “is very dangerous for the US cable news channels to depend so heavily for analysis of things like Iraq and the war on terror, on retired military officers and on well-connected cyphers like Walid Phares.” But then, of course, neocons are stock and trade “consultants” for the corporate media, “experts” tasked with the neocon propaganda effort to convince Americans “Jihadi forces” are determined to take over the world, beginning with the Middle East.

“Seizing Gaza would, in their estimation, curtail U.S. efforts in Iraq, and pressure Israel away from Syria and Hezbollah. The Jihadi strategic mind is in its full offensive mode in the region,” Phares concludes.

On the other hand, we learn that the CIA was “in its full offensive mode” in Gaza, and “US-Israeli intelligence agencies have been collaborating with high-ranking members of the PA to help crush the Palestinian national liberation movement,” according to Mike Whitney. “When Hamas gunmen stormed the Fatah security compounds in Gaza last week they found…. CIA files which purportedly contain ‘information about the collaboration between Fatah and the Israeli and American security organizations; CIA methods on how to prevent attacks, chase and follow after cells of Hamas and the Committees; plans about Fatah assassinations of members of Hamas and other organizations; and American studies on the security situation in Gaza.’”

In fact, Israel and the United States nurtured the “neo-Taliban” and “Jihadi forces” in Gaza in standard problem-reaction-solution fashion—the “solution” comprised not only of the dismantling of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, but “transfer,” i.e., ethnic cleansing, of the remaining population as well, a project well documented in Zionist literature (note: it is increasingly considered “antisemitic” to reference this large body of literature).

As we know, Hamas is as an outgrowth of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Muslim Brotherhood itself was long ago penetrated and compromised by the CIA and British intelligence. “The CIA was following the example of British Intelligence and sought to use Islam to further its goals,” writes Peter Goodgame. “They wanted to find a charismatic religious leader that they could promote and control and they began to cooperate with groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Moreover, as mentioned often here but dutifully ignored by the corporate media, Israel supported Hamas and this “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” according to CIA sources quoted by UPI correspondent Richard Sale. “According to documents United Press International obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood,” a puppet on CIA strings.

In short, Israel and the United States have supported both sides in an effort to destroy Palestinian nationalism, no matter its ideological or religious persuasion, an effort that has produced a “year zero” situation in the Gaza and will soon enough on the West Bank.

Of course, this is simply divide et impera—divide and rule, divide and conquer—a tactic long employed in the Middle East, as journalist Robert Dreyfuss notes in his book, Devil’s Game. Dreyfuss, according to Wikipedia, “discusses how the West used Islamic radicalism to suppress Communist movements in the Middle East and the rest of the Islamic world. He provides a comprehensive review of the support of Western governments for the Mujahadeen and Jihadi Islamic fighters, who were trained and sent into Afghanistan. With the close support and advice of CIA paramilitaries, these Islamic jihadists helped defeat Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The book also describes the work of Dr. Bernard Lewis and his model of Islamic Balkanization, where the CIA secretly supported Islamic movements within the Soviet Union to utilize them as Anti-Communist insurgents in the event of war.”

In the current context, communism is irrelevant, as the point is to undermine and render ineffective Arab nationalism, most effectively from the inside out, as the CIA-Fatah link demonstrates. Now that yet another intelligence contrivance, Hamas, is in control of Gaza, the Israelis and their neocon collaborators will tell us the “Tehran-Damascus axis” is busy at work. Naturally, all of this slips nicely into the larger Zionist context, i.e., that both Iran and Syria must be “confronted,” that is to say their lands bombed and people slaughtered in an effort to realize Bernard Lewis’ balkanization model and the “strategy” of Oded Yinon as well, a plan resulting in “a world of Arab fragments that is ready to succumb to Israeli hegemony,” as Khalil Nakhleh describes it.

Walid Phares, the neocon operative by way of Benador Associates, tells us “short of a large-scale counter-operation aimed at dislodging the ‘coup’ in the enclave, the area will become a massive terror base of operations,” although he neglects to tell us these “operations” will be conducted at the behest of Israel and the United States, not Iran or Syria. In fact, Iran and Syria figure prominently on Israel’s target list and Phares, a former Lebanese Forces commander—that is to say, a former commander within the Maronite Phalange, a fascist Lebanese construct in cahoots with Israel—was trotted out to sell this Houdini illusion by way of the corporate media.

As should be expected, the logical terminus of this latest propaganda effort will end in the bombing of Iran and Syria. Walid Phares, of course, is simply doing his part to bring about the mass murder of thousands of Iranians and Syrians, as is David Horowitz, the former Marxist gone to neocon seed, running his website on fascist foundation money, primarily provided by the Bradley, Olin, Sarah Scaife and Smith Richardson foundations. Scaife is a CIA asset, as the late Steve Kangas notes, thus demonstrating the circularity of the neocon agenda, from the set at Fox News to the soon-to-be blood spattered killing fields of Tehran and Damascus.

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MEMRI Loss

As we have known for some time now, MEMRI, short for the Middle East Media Research Institute, specializes in disinformation by distorting translations of film and print media stories originating in Arabic, Iranian and Turkish media. In essence, what MEMRI does is change the context of news stories by way of mistranslation and excision. Call it MEMRI loss, the deliberate mangling of media. MEMRI did this to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by turning a speech he delivered in 2005 into a racist and genocidal screed. MEMRI accomplished this through mistranslation. Not a day passes now we do not witness corporate media claims Ahmadinejad wants to wipe Israel off the map. In fact, Ahmadinejad said the “regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history.” He did not say Israel must be wiped off the map. But this engineered lie is repeated constantly by the corporate media and to such a degree it is now accepted as fact.

Earlier this week, as Israeli PM Olmert met with Bush, we once again heard this MEMRI spawned lie. Olmert “said he wanted to discuss with Mr. Bush the threat to Israel from Iran, whose president has said Israel must be ‘wiped off the map.’” the Associated Press reports. “Mr. Bush replied that he views Iran’s statements as a ’serious threat’ to Israel and that ‘all options are on the table’ to make sure Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon.” In other words, Olmert used the MEMRI lie as the cornerstone for his argument that Iran must be attacked and Bush agreed. It wasn’t long ago the neocons made up similar lies about Saddam Hussein, lies that have so far resulted in the murder of more than 750,000 Iraqis.

For those of us who know something about history, these neocon lies may be accurately compared with the lies and disinformation used by the Nazis to ultimately invade countries and slaughter millions of people. MEMRI, according to Norman G. Finkelstein, employs “the same sort of propaganda techniques as the Nazis. They take things out of context in order to do personal and political harm to people they don’t like,” or people Likudniks and neocons want the United States military to mass murder.

Finkelstein had a close encounter with MEMRI in 2006, when “he gave a TV interview in Lebanon on the way the Nazi Holocaust is used to silence critics of Israel,” according to Lawrence Swaim, writing for InFocus, the largest Muslim newspaper in California. “MEMRI recently posted what it alleged was an interview I did with Lebanese television on the Nazi Holocaust. The MEMRI posting was designed to prove that I was a Holocaust denier,” Finkelstein told the newspaper. “Far from being a Holocaust denier, Finkelstein’s own parents were Holocaust survivors, a fact he has often spoken about,” Swaim adds. “But MEMRI was able to create the opposite impression, as Finkelstein demonstrated on his Web site, by editing out large chunks of the actual interview.”

“MEMRI is a main arm of Israeli propaganda,” explains Finkelstein. “Although widely used in the mainstream media as a source of information on the Arab world, it is as trustworthy as Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer was on the Jewish world.” Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, accuses MEMRI of “outright distortion,” while former CIA case officer Vince Cannistraro has written that “they (MEMRI) are selective and act as propagandists for their political point of view, which is the extreme-right of Likud,” in other words, the people associated with MEMRI—David Wurmser, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle and other neocons—are racist reactionaries, no different than the above mentioned Julius Streicher (instead of hating Jews, the neocons hate Arabs and Muslims).

(As an aside, a few pranksters connected to the former Marxist gone neocon David Horowitz’s FrontPage operation, funded by the CIA operative Richard Mellon Scaife, have spent time modifying photos of Streicher in Photoshop, dropping your humble blogger’s head on Streicher’s body, apparently as a reaction to my criticism of Israel and the “extreme-right of Likud” neocons, thus demonstrating not only the silliness but the vicious tenacity of people who cannot stand to hear criticism of their beloved apartheid state, even in the blogosphere.)

“According its critics, until MEMRI starts translating Hebrew stories about the rightward drift of Israeli society, torture of Palestinians in Israeli jails, the forced exile of Ilan Pappe and Azmi Bishara, and the elevation of the neo-fascist Avigdor Lieberman to deputy prime minister of Israel, they aren’t really covering all Middle Eastern media,” Swaim concludes.

Of course, these topics are strictly forbidden, not only for a Mossad operation pretending to be a media translation service, but for the rest of us as well. For instance, in Canada, a news website, the Peace, Earth and Justice News, may soon be convicted of disseminating hate by the Canadian Human Rights Commission at the behest of the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith for posting an article written by your humble blogger on this very subject, as well as for daring to post articles penned by a handful of others accused of “hate crimes” for criticizing Israel.

Come the North American Union, all of us may be sharing a Canadian jail cell or one in Israel, in much the same way Ernest Zündel is locked in a German prison for the crime of bucking the Zionist orthodoxy. As we know, or some of us do—most Americans believe Israel is a democracy—prison cells in Israel, for non-Israelis, often translates into a death sentence. Others are murdered outright—for instance Rachel Corrie, American member of the International Solidarity Movement, crushed to death by an IOF bulldozer for the crime of demonstrating against the demolition of the home of Samir Nasrallah, a Palestinian pharmacist.

Finally, it appears an appreciable number of mostly clueless Americans are stupid enough to fall victim to MEMRI’s lies, as millions of them sincerely believe Ahmadinejad wants to wipe Israel off the map. Of course, they know nothing of MEMRI, or that it is an Israeli intelligence operation run by Yigal Carmon, who “served” in the IOF’s intelligence branch, or that it was co-founded by one Meyrav Wurmser, wife of “Clean Break” author David Wurmser, a dual citizen questioned by the FBI for allegedly passing state secrets on to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It should be noted that Meyrav Wurmser wrote her Ph.D. thesis on Revisionist Zionism, the racist and murderous political philosophy behind the Herut and Likud parties in Israel, thus demonstrating Meyrav’s racism and hatred is a generational affair.

Naturally, when the depleted uranium tipped bunker busters and cruise missiles begin taking out grandmothers and babies in Iran, MEMRI, the mass murdering Likudniks and neocons will be to blame.

However, instead of justice, the perps will likely move on to teach a new generation of psychopaths at Georgetown University or retire to palatial estates on land ethnically cleansed of Palestinians.

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Israeli Futurologist Warns of Nanotech Armed Cave Dwelling Muslim Terrorists

In Bushzarro world, and its concurrent manifestation in the world of Zionism, up is down, black is white, and cave-dwelling terrorists have their paws on nanotechnology and biochip brain implants.

According to Dr Yair Sharan, director of Tel Aviv University’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Technology Analysis and Forecasting, terrorists—not the NWO type, mind you, but the Muslim sort—will in 20 short years utilize “suicide bombers remote-controlled by brain-chip implants” and unleash “nano-technology cluster bombs, or biological compounds for which there is no antidote.”

Such horrors will not be devised in Iran or “al-Qaeda” controlled areas of Iraq or hopelessly backward Afghanistan but right here in the good old USA. Of course, our spooks and military men would never use such things on innocents, never mind the CIA will supposedly come clean, according to Michael Hayden, and detail how the spook and world mayhem organization conducted “a series of ‘unwitting’ tests on US civilians, including the use of drugs,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

It is well-known the CIA used swine and dengue fever viruses against Cuba, and the Pentagon conducted radiation experiments on U.S. soldiers and even Eskimos, unwitting patients at university hospitals were injected with plutonium and uranium, mycoplasma was used in research on private citizens by the University of Maryland, and there are countless less documented cases of anthrax, tularemia, yellow and Q fever, botulinum toxin, wheat rust, rice blast, etc., ad nauseam, used against people and plants in Asia, South and Central America, and the Caribbean.

Dr Yair Sharan makes no mention of the terrorists who sprayed Agent Orange—and Agent White, Agent Blue, Agent Purple, Agent Pink and Agent Green—over Southeast Asia, resulting in countless cases of peripheral neuropathy, spina bifida, Type 2 diabetes, acute myelogenous leukemia, renal cancer, testicular cancer, spontaneous abortion, birth defects, neonatal or infant death and stillbirths, low birth weight, childhood cancers, abnormal sperm parameters, cognitive neuropsychiatric disorders, ataxia, peripheral nervous system disorders, circulatory disorders, respiratory disorders, skin cancers, urinary and bladder cancer, on and on.

No mention, as well, of the terrorists who dispensed tons and tons of depleted uranium in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Serbia, a process, according to Leuren Moret, that “will slowly annihilate all species on earth including the human species…. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy.” As we now know, depleted uranium particles are responsible for chronic myeloid leukemia, lymphoma, melanoma, pancreas carcinoma, Gulf war-syndrome, fibromyalgia, auto-immune deficiencies, lung-, liver-, kidney failure, on and on.

Before frightening the little ones with Brothers Grimm stories about future terrorists unleashing nanotech cluster bombs, Dr Yair Sharan may want to take a look at his own government, responsible for “a new type of explosive” used in the Gaza Strip last year. “These explosives contain toxics and radioactive materials which burn and tear the victim’s body from the inside and leave long term deformations,” the Electronic Intifada reported.

“Allegations that Israeli forces have used chemical and biological weapons date back to the War of 1948,” notes Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel. “In March 2003, the highly-respected BBC television network presented Israel’s Secret Weapon, an investigation of Israel’s development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The BBC reported: ‘The Israeli army has used new unidentified weapons. In February 2001 a new gas was used in Gaza. A hundred and eighty patients were admitted to hospitals with severe convulsions….Israel is outside chemical and biological weapons treaties and still refuses to say what the new gas was.’”

And then there was Israel’s attack against Lebanon last summer. “Blackened bodies have been showing up at hospitals in southern Lebanon two weeks into the war between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported. “Bachir Cham, a Belgian-Lebanese doctor at the Southern Medical Centre in Sidon…. said the bodies of some victims were ‘black as shoes, so they are definitely using chemical weapons. They are all black but their hair and skin is intact so they are not really burnt.’”

I’m supposed to worry about “terrorists armed with powerful new explosives delivered by robot” and “remote controlled toys [that] might be used to deliver dangerous payloads into crowded places like supermarkets” at some destination in the future?

In 20 years, when Sharan’s alarmist and politically skewered predictions come true, many of us will likely be at death’s door from the deadly effects of depleted uranium and other industrial and military toxins increasingly polluting the biosphere. If Leuren Moret is correct, there will be precious few Muslims and Arabs remaining in the Middle East to receive brain chip implants and sneak “radical nanotechnology that could produce something called the MOAB, or Mother of All Bombs” into the United States.

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Fred Thompson Links Dem Harry Reid to 9/11 “Fringe Anti-American Elements”

As further evidence Republicans are clueless as Democrats, a Rasmussen poll indicates Fred Thompson, the “non-candidate” (or would-be selectee) bedecked with globalist credentials as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, holds “a statistically insignificant one percentage point lead over former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the national poll of likely Republican primary voters, 28 percent to 27 percent,” according to NewsMax. Thompson’s “candidacy has been fueled by Republican dissatisfaction with the current field, particularly among conservatives,” thus demonstrating such “conservatives” lack two functioning brain cells to rub together.

Thompson is a one-worlder, not a “conservative,” and if “elected” (selected) he will continue the globalist plan—as will the Bilderberger Queen, Hillary Clinton, who is the odds on favorite. In addition, Thompson is a “visiting scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute, the “think tank” where Bush gets his “minds,” that is to say warmongering psychopaths, and routinely rubs elbows with the likes of Max Boot, Fred Kagan, and Danielle Pletka. “When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas,” Jean Harlow once quipped. Thompson, however, apparently had fleas before mixing it up with convicted felons such as Scooter Libby and the boy wonder of the neocons, Bill Kristol, who dreams of a Supreme Leader, an idea he gleaned no doubt from Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s crown jurist who managed to escape the gallows at Nuremburg.

In order to draw attention his way, especially from the blathering ditz-heads over Fox News, Thompson “suggests that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) criticized outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace last week to appeal to ‘fringe’ anti-American elements ‘who think the 9/11 attacks were an inside job,’” writes Think Progress. “Thompson also compares 9/11 conspiracy theories to claims that the war in Iraq was a ’sinister Republican plot.’ He says, ‘Reid has led the attack on the administration, with Nancy Pelosi, charging it lied and tricked America into supporting the war.’ Thompson claims that ‘multiple hearings and investigations into pre-war intelligence findings’ have ‘debunked this paranoid myth,’” the latter an obvious lie, not that the folks watching Fox will catch the drift. Most still believe plots requiring state intelligence services and matrix-like levels of sophistication are hatched by medieval Muslims in remote caves with the assistance of satellite phones, laptops, and kidney dialysis machines.

As we know, the events of nine eleven were not strictly a “sinister Republican plot,” although Republicans were assuredly involved. In fact, Fred’s buddies at the CFR and AEI had hands-on participation in nine eleven, as the events were specifically designed to take us down the thorny path to world government totalitarianism. In short, Fred Thompson is a heck of a lot closer to the epicenter of evil than your garden variety Republican or Democrat, although the latter are not shy when it comes to exploiting the event and 3,000 or so dead people.

But never mind. Thompson will throw his hat in the ring with the rest of the one-worlders, thugs, psychopaths, and opportunists, the sort of people selected precisely for their connections to the elite and their unsurpassed ability to receive and carry out orders. In Thompson’s case, it is the ability to read a script, a skill he excels at while the current resident is nothing short of an embarrassment.

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Fred Thompson, Please Go Back to Hollywood

In order to get in the running to be a presidential selectee, one has to be an over-the-top warmonger. Well, that’s not exactly true, as Ron Paul is not a warmonger, but Fred Thompson, former television actor, most certainly is.

“Fred Thompson, who may join the Republican presidential race, said today that the U.S. and its allies should consider a blockade against Iran before military action to curb the nation’s nuclear ambitions,” reports Bloomberg. “Thompson didn’t give details about his view for a possible blockade or discuss whether it should be limited to naval power or extended to cover Iran’s land borders with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey or Azerbaijan.”

A blockade is considered an act of war, as there is no regulation of international law which justifies a blockade in times of peace. Since 1909, in the London Naval Conference, as a principle of international law, it was defined that “blockade is an act of war,” and thus it is legally employed when countries are at war.

Iran and the United States are not at war, although there is no shortage of neocons who would like nothing better than to attack Iran. Fred Thompson is obviously one of these neocons. He believes the United States is at war with Iran, or it should be.

“When the president of Iran shares his nightmare visions before cheering crowds, those are not just a fanatic’s version of an empty applause line,'’ Thompson told the Policy Exchange, a political research foundation, in London. “The only safe assumption is that he means it.”

Thompson is apparently talking about Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the program nobody can demonstrate exists, certainly not the International Atomic Energy Agency. According to the neocons and the “hawks” in Israel—that is to say the racist, Arab and Muslim hating regime currently in control—Iran plans to cobble together a nuke or two and bomb Israel. Israel and the neocons base this illusory threat on a speech Ahmadinejad made, a speech deliberately mistranslated by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Mossad front in the business of mistranslating the Arab and Persian media. Thanks to MEMRI and its founders—a former IDF Intelligence colonel, Yigal Carmon, and Dr. Meyrav Wurmser, wife of the neocon David Wurmser—the corporate media in this country insists on a daily basis Ahmadinejad wants to wipe Israel off the map. Ahmadinejad, of course, said no such thing. He simply said the “regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history.” But, naturally, for Israel and the neocons, the two statements, one a historical reality and the other a Brothers Grimm fabrication, are equivalent.

“If we know anything from modern history it is that when fanatical tyrants pledge to wipe out an entire nation, we should listen,” the former actor continued. “We must gather our alliance and do all in our power to make sure that such men do not gain the capability to carry out their evil ambitions.”

In other words, short of bombing the heck of Iran, the “alliance” (no word on its composition) should lay siege to the people of Iran, beginning with a blockade.

As John Lyly declared in Euphues, The Anatomy of Wit, all’s fair in love and war, so what’s to stop Iran from blockading our harbors? Of course, Iran is incapable of such a feat and, moreover, if they attempted to retaliate the neocons, with no shortage of chortling yahoos decked out in “God Bless America” t-shirts (made by slaves in China) calling for Iran to be turned into a glass parking lot, would have an excuse to nuke the place, something they are itching to do but yet do not have the political consensus required.

In the meantime, we can only hope Fred Thompson, after he fails to be selected as president—obviously, that selection, this time around, will go to a Democrat—will return to Hollywood. No doubt Thompson believes, as an actor, he is as good if not better than Ronald Reagan at reading scripts. Chances are slim he will be given the chance, not that it matters.

For as we know, Democrats are warmongers too, that is in their special if nauseating Democrat way.

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“Futurists” Sugarcoat Globalist Agenda

Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, “Sir” Arthur Clarke, Alvin Toffler, and the World Futurist Society have a wonderful (not) future planned for you and me. On a WFS web page entitled “Forecasts for the Next 25 Years,” Timothy C. Mack offers “a few forecasts from members of The World Future Society,” including:

Generation Y will migrate heavily overseas. For the first time, the United States will see a significant proportion of its population emigrate due to overseas opportunities. According to futurists Arnold Brown and Edie Weiner, Generation Y, the population segment born between 1978 and 1995, may be the first generation in U.S. history to have many of its members leave the U.S. to pursue large portions of their lives, if not their entire adult lives, overseas.

It is not indicated where these “opportunities” will be located, but it is not difficult to make a guess—the sprawling corporate slave labor gulags situated in China and India. “Generation Y” will migrate to China or India because they will have no choice, as the United States is destined to become a third world wasteland, a process well underway as jobs are increasingly “offshored.” Now that the manufacturing base of the United States is gutted, it is time for IT and other technical jobs to be “outsourced” to the slave labor gulag.

“According to a Princeton University study, released in March, IT jobs are among the top occupations most vulnerable to outsourcing and offshoring, with computer programmers ranked first and computer-systems analysts ranked third,” NBC reported last week. But it is not simply factory and IT jobs—the slave gulag will eventually absorb so-called “service” jobs as well. “Tony Plath, a finance professor at UNC Charlotte, said that as technology improves and costs are lowered, more service jobs are likely to be exported.”

“Tens of millions of additional American workers will start to experience an element of job insecurity that has heretofore been reserved for manufacturing workers,” declared “free trader” and former member of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Alan S. Blinder. “The cheap and easy flow of information around the globe… will require vast and unsettling adjustments in the way Americans and residents of other developed countries work, live and educate their children.” In other words, “Generation Y” will work in China or India and send checks home to Baby Boomer parents, sort of the same way illegal Mexican immigrants send checks home to family in the barrio.

If you think the Democrats will save you from this fate, think again. “If a leading American presidential candidate—and her husband, an ex-president—seem to have unnaturally close connections to foreign companies interested in draining away American jobs, should that be of interest to Americans?…. For the past six years—since Bill Clinton left the White House, since Hillary Clinton entered the U.S. Senate—both Clintons have cultivated close ties with Indian companies…. Hillary has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Indian-American campaign contributors…. Surely middle-class Americans should know about these matters: In the most literal sense, their jobs might depend on it. But the mainstream media don’t seem to agree—maybe because reporters want Hillary to win, no matter what, or maybe because they just can’t imagine being against ‘free trade,’ no matter what,” Newsday reports. Or maybe because the lot of them—including the corporate media—are “free traders,” that is to say global loot and plunder specialists.

Back to the WFS “predictions,” or rather globalist agenda:

We’ll incorporate wireless technology into our thought processing by 2030. In the next 25 years, we’ll learn how to augment our 100 trillion very slow interneuronal connections with high-speed virtual connections via nanorobotics. This will allow us to greatly boost our pattern-recognition abilities, memories, and overall thinking capacity, as well as to directly interface with powerful forms of computer intelligence and to each other. By the end of the 2030s, we will be able to move beyond the basic architecture of the brain’s neural regions.

I sort of like my old fashioned and “very slow interneuronal connections” and dread the very idea of “augmenting” my brain “with high-speed virtual connections via nanorobotics.” I prefer the ancient social “interface” and dread the prospect of using “powerful forms of computer intelligence” to bypass “the basic architecture of the brain’s neural regions.”

Of course, all of this is simply window dressing for the real and quite horrifying agenda our rulers have in mind—or rather to be planted in mind: a Borg Hive bio chip.

“In this era of high-tech memory management, next in line to get that memory upgrade isn’t your computer, it’s you,” writes Lakshmi Sandhana for Wired. “Professor Theodore W. Berger, director of the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California, is creating a silicon chip implant that mimics the hippocampus, an area of the brain known for creating memories. If successful, the artificial brain prosthesis could replace its biological counterpart, enabling people who suffer from memory disorders to regain the ability to store new memories.”

Or create memories and ideas outright by way of “neural prosthesis.”

“The Neurochip records the activity of motor cortex cells,” Eberhard Fetz of the University of Washington told Live Science. “It can convert this activity into a stimulus that can be sent back to the brain, spinal cord, or muscle, and thereby set up an artificial connection that operates continuously during normal behavior. This recurrent brain-computer interface creates an artificial motor pathway that the brain may learn to use to compensate for impaired pathways.”

Of course, we are told quadriplegics and such need the Neurochip, but in the Brave New World envisioned by our rulers those of us with other kinds of “impaired pathways”—i.e., we may be disinclined to work eighteen hours a day at starvation wages or have an unfortunate propensity to think of ourselves as individuals, not members of the corporate Borg Hive—may be required to get the chip.

On the other hand, such a brain chip may be unnecessary, especially if you are obsolete:

The robotic workforce will change how bosses value employees. As robots and intelligent software increasingly emulate the knowledge work that humans can do, businesses will “hire” whatever type of mind that can do the work—robotic or human. Future human workers may collaborate with robotic minds on projects for a variety of enterprises, rather than work for a single employer.

Or “future workers” may be tossed in the dustbin of history altogether. Humans, after all, unlike robots and computers, get ill, old, experience mental and emotional problems, and often don’t go along to get along, make trouble for bosses and their overlords, and on occasion organize in resistance to the pathocracy.

As Britain’s Malthusian Prince Philip declared, should he be reincarnated, he would want to come back as a deadly virus that would reduce world population, as the elite hate and distrust the large mass of commoners and useless eaters.

Alexander King, scientist and pioneer of the “sustainable development” movement who co-founded the Club of Rome—established by the Morgenthau Group and consisting of members drawn from the Bilderbergers—was a bit more circumspect: “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill … All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

Humanity, of course, consists of you and me, not David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger.

Companies will see the age range of their workers span four generations. Workers over the age of 55 are expected to grow from 14% of the labor force to 19% by 2012. In less than five years, 77 million baby boomers in the United States will begin reaching age 65, the traditional retirement age. As a result, the idea of “retirement” will change significantly.

In other words, for those not replaced by robots or Chinese and Indian slave laborers, there will be no retirement, as there will be no room for slackers—call them non-productive useless eaters—and, of course, all pension funds will be “reinvested,” polite-speak for pilfered by the bankers and their “investment” (i.e., swindle) minions.

Naturally, the World Future Society describes all of this as “the opportunities and challenges of tomorrow”—a correct assessment for the parasitical elite, not for the average person with a brain chip forced into a globe-trotting Grapes of Wrath search for work, provided of course he or she is not replaced entirely by an Asimovian robot programmed not to complain or raise a banner or placard of protest when the ruler emerges from his palatial estate and happens past the commoners.

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Coming Soon to a Mall Near You: Dadullah’s “Suicide Bomber” Grads

According to Brian Ross of the ABC “Investigative Team,” the lad pictured at the left is a Taliban “suicide bomber” school graduate. “Large teams of newly trained suicide bombers are being sent to the United States and Europe, according to evidence contained on a new videotape obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com,” Ross reports, or rather reads from a Pentagon script. “Teams assigned to carry out attacks in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany were introduced at an al Qaeda/Taliban training camp graduation ceremony held June 9.”

“These Americans, Canadians, British and Germans come here to Afghanistan from faraway places,” Taliban military commander Mansoor Dadullah avers on the videotape. “Why shouldn’t we go after them?”

Mansoor Dadullah is the bother of the late Mullah Dadullah Lang Kakar of Baluchistan, Pakistan, a CIA-ISI useful idiot. “The fierce thirty nine year old, executioner and ‘war fighter,’ one legged Dadullah, was a product of the West’s fear of communism, and was given the opportunity and training by Pakistan’s ISI (Inter Services Intelligence), backed by the CIA, to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan,” explains the Center for Strategic Analysis. “Under [Pakistan] Prime Minister [Benazir Bhutto]’s watchful eye, and the assistance of Maj-Gen Naseerullah Barbar her Interior Minister, the one eyed Mullah Omar (Dadullah’s jihad buddy) led a tiny outfit of True Muslim Talib (students) to form the menacing Taliban in an effort to control the corrupted, decaying ‘war fighters,’ the Mujahaideen who aided by the ISI, CIA, Saudi Arabia, and [CIA asset] Osama bin-Laden, helped in the fall of the Soviet empire.” No doubt brother Mansoor is tasked with carrying out his brother’s assignment, that is to say an assignment engineered by the CIA.

“It doesn’t take too many who are willing to actually [engage in suicide bombing] and be able to slip through the net and get into the United States or England and cause a lot of damage,” ABC News consultant Richard Clarke told Ross. Clarke, of course, as a member of the National Security Council, marketed product Osama, Public Enemy Number One, the new Goldstein. Now he wants us to believe pubescent Pashtuns will soon sneak across the border and scream “Allahu Akbar” before blowing up the local mall or kindergarten classroom.

Of course, even if Clarke’s latest admonition had a basis in reality, the fact the U.S.-Mexico border is wide open would certainly make it easy for Dadullah’s putative graduates to sneak into the country, never mind they would stick out like a bull in a china shop. But then millions of illegal immigrants have no problem blending in, so obviously a few Taliban teenagers would have no problem doing likewise.

As for the Canadian border, Canadian public safety minister Stockwell Day told the Canadian Press Dadullah’s group has “limited abilities to travel and get through our border systems.” Stockwell should know about the border, as he is currently working feverishly with the North American Forum, the “parallel structure” to the Security and Prosperity Partnership, to erase borders for the sake of “free trade,” that is to say free and unhindered transnational corporate looting and plunder.

So, let us summarize: 1) the brother of a documented CIA-ISI asset has organized teenage “suicide bombers” and promises to unleash these pubescent killers against the United States and Europe and 2) a key North American Union operative admits these supposed terrorists indeed “have a limited ability to travel and get through our border system.”

In short, it appears the groundwork for an attack against either the United States, Europe, or both, is underway, and for the usual reasons—to terrorize the blinkered public into acquiescing to a police state, a project well advanced but in need of a few important flourishes.

On the other hand, this may simply be yet more propaganda designed to jack up the fear and paranoia level, as the public must be continually reminded that “al-Qaeda,” once again in cahoots with a resurgent Taliban, is out to get us because they hate our freedom to dizzily shop, consume, and channel surf in pursuit of Girls Gone Wild infomercials.

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Solution for Darfur Genocide: Stop Breathing

According to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, “the slaughter in Darfur was triggered by global climate change and that more such conflicts may be on the horizon,” reports Breitbart. “The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change…. This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming…. It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought.”

In short, 450,000 people died in Darfur not only because you drive a car and run a television and computer, but also because you have the audacity to emit carbon dioxide.

In fact, as the U.S. State Department admits, the “primary cleavage is ethnic: Arabs (GOS and militia forces) vs. non-Arab villagers belonging primarily to the Zaghawa, Massalit, and Fur ethnic groups [also the Tunjur, the Birgid, the Dajo, and others]. Both groups are predominately Muslim.”

“These people have long been politically and economically marginalized, and in recent years the National Islamic Front regime, based in Sudan’s capital of Khartoum, has refused to control increasingly violent Arab militia raids of African villages in Darfur,” writes Eric Reeves. “Competition between Arab and African tribal groups over the scarce primary resources in Darfur—arable land and water—has been exacerbated by advancing desertification throughout the Sahel region.”

Of course, there is no evidence this desertification is a result of “climate change,” but that will not stop Ban Ki-moon and the United Nations from insinuating that your daily commute to work in an air conditioned car is responsible for the murder of nearly a half million people.

As Yongkang Xue and Jagadish Shukla of the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies in Calverton, Maryland, note, “the vegetation cover has been increasingly degraded across the African continent, with the possible exception of central Africa and some countries bordering the Gulf of Guinea. This has been caused by many factors, such as overexploitation of land resources by overgrazing, poor irrigation, and the destruction of woody vegetation.”

“Drought, deforestation, overpopulation and overgrazing have accelerated desert encroachment and have exerted huge pressures on the ecology of the region,” writes Jonathan Robinson for Cambridge Journals. “Indigenous plant genetic resources, including many wild species used as famine foods, are the key to livelihoods in the region. The upsurge in violence has resulted in many farmers abandoning their farms and seed stocks. Social systems are disrupted and rehabilitation of agriculture will be very difficult.”

Dan Connell, however, does not view the conflict as ethnic. “The Darfur crisis is not one people assaulting another in a frenzy of long-buried ethnic hatred, as in Rwanda. It is a mob of armed thugs cashing in on the opportunity to loot at will, while securing political objectives set by their handlers: the quashing of an uprising that could not only threaten the government’s hold on this region but also unravel its efforts to reach a lasting truce with the rebellious south.”

It has more to do with politics as usual than “climate change.” In other words, more than “climate change” or any other factor, the situation in Darfur is the result of political psychopathology. It is, of course, a problem of global dimension, not confined to Darfur or Africa.

“Nor is the nature and scope of this disaster unique within Sudan,” Connell continues. “It is the outcome of a decades-long strategy of divide and rule that successive governments—all drawn from the fractious elite that resides in and around Khartoum—have used to put down challenges, mostly out of the international spotlight.”

It is, as well, hardly surprising there is a mineral and natural resource element to the conflict. “According to an interview with the ruler of North Darfur, Othman Yosuf Kibir, published in the United Arab Emirates’ Khaleej Times, the Darfur conflict revolves around oil and minerals, including uranium discovered in Hofrat an Nihas. Kibir stated that these resources have set off fierce competition between the U.S. and France. The U.S. has started to invest in oil industry in Chad, France’s former colony, while France’s Total Corporation obtained drilling rights in Sudan,” writes Keith Harmon Snow. “Petroleum and other companies targeted by the Save Darfur divestment movement for their alliances with the Government of Sudan in Sudan include Total, Agip, Talisman Oil, PetroChina and Asea Brown Baveri. The latter company has close ties to former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: in the 1990’s Rumsfeld was on the board of directors.”

Indeed, according to Harmon Snow, the very “humanitarian” effort underway in Darfur is itself a corporate scam, designed to enrich the likes of Archers Daniels Midland at the expense of millions of impoverished Africans. Some things never change.

“To understand Darfur, understand where the World Food Program gets its relief foods, who sells these and who buys them, and how the foods are used. Archers Daniels Midland sells grain into the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust, while companies like ADM and Cargill receive massive government subsidies paid by American tax dollars, and the tax dollars back up the WFP and USAID, and provide the funds from which to purchase the ‘food’…. The United Nations agencies like the World Food Program, and government ‘AID’ departments like DFID and USAID, all serve to undermine food security and domestic food prices in Sudan, while artificially boosting prices in the USA, putting Sudanese farmers out of business and forcing people to become ‘refugees’ in search of food, thereby creating and not mitigating famine; massive relief centers destroy nomadic ways of life, they don’t sustain them.”

But never mind. Darfur’s problems, according to Ban Ki-moon and the United Nations, will be solved “using new technologies, genetically modified grains or irrigation, while bettering health, education and sanitation,” solutions, of course, offered by Archers Daniels Midland, Monsanto, Siemens AG from Germany, Alcatel SA from France, ABB Ltd from Switzerland, Tatneft from Russia and PetroChina.

“The only way to stop this genocide now is for a mass campaign to force multinationals to disinvest from Sudan,” Eric Reeves told the Independent.

In the meantime, expect the corporate media to take up Ban Ki-moon’s mantra—Darfur’s problem is the result of “climate change”—in other words it is directly related to the fact your pulmonary alveoli send carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere.

Shame on you.

Now pony up for a carbon tax.

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Surprise, Surprise: Democrat Carville Defends Convicted Neocon Felon Scooter

Justin Raimondo makes mention of the voluminous “love letters” sent to Judge Reggie B. Walton defending war criminal Scooter Libby in his latest column (massive reproduction of said letters in PDF format here). “It seems that this is the new neocon litmus test: if you’re a member of the club, you prove it by going to bat for Scooter,” writes Raimondo. “The list of special pleaders reads like a Neocon Who’s Who: Norman Podhoretz, Fouad Ajami, Bernard Lewis, Ken Adelman, John Bolton, Joseph Bottum, Eliot Cohen, Midge Decter, John Hannah, Christopher Demuth (who piously avers ‘Scooter is devoted to truth’!), Douglas Feith, and even the neocon defector Francis Fukuyama, who perhaps is trying to signal that his recent heresy is neither permanent nor really a defection. These worthies are joined by a platoon of high-powered lawyers, present and former government officials (Henry the K, former Congressman and present head of the SEC Christopher Cox), academics, personal acquaintances, and corporate movers-and-shakers who type their paeans to Scooter the selfless altruist and patriot on impressive-looking letterheads. A more graphic illustration of the sense of entitlement these people feel, on account of their power, their positions, and their wealth, would be hard to imagine.”

Indeed, the usual—and not so usual—suspects, insiders all, have come out of the woodwork to defend Scooter. Justin, however, fails to mention one particular culprit: James Carville, former Clinton campaign manager and husband of Mary Matalin, Bush assistant. “Though my husband James Carville, a Democratic Strategist and Clinton supporter, shares neither political nor philosophical views with Scooter, he has deep respect for his intellect, his integrity, and joins me in the sentiments expressed here,” Matalin effuses in a letter sent to Judge Walton. “One of the many enduring and endearing memories of Scooter is his universal love of families…. I have seen what this trial has done to my own kids, just reading about it.”

Of course, this “universal love” has nothing to do with Iraqi families, now suffering under weight of invasion, occupation, mass murder, and slow death by way of depleted uranium and other toxins, courtesy of the Scooter and crew. Naturally, psychopaths of Scooter’s caliber are incapable of “universal love,” except for themselves. Matalin ’s letter, and those of her compatriots, or rather co-conspirators, serve only to blow smoke up a certain orifice, as factotums for the elite consider themselves beyond the law. Imagine their outrage when one of their ranks is offered up as a sacrifice and scapegoat.

Kos the Democrat makes mention of this funny business: Carville, the blogger notes, is “not pretending to be a disinterested political observer lauding Hillary Clinton on CNN. Let’s see what company he’s in: Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith.” In short, even the most obtuse Democrat and Clinton worshipper should realize there is absolutely no difference between Democrats and Republicans. One might expect an excoriation of the “Jackass” party from Mr. Kos, but mild criticism seems to suffice, as the point here is not to lambaste the blue side of the property party too severely. No need to drag Howard Dean, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Steny Hoyer into the fray, never mind they are as complicit in the murder of 700,000 or more Iraqis as Scooter and the most reprehensible neocon.

At any rate, it appears Scooter will go to prison, regardless of all the “love letters” tenderly sent by concerned insiders. “If this court stays Libby’s sentence, that will be a grievous mistake,” explains former Nixon counsel John Dean. “Judge Walton has taken care to scrupulously follow the law, and he has clearly set aside the fact he was appointed by a Republican president. If the panel deciding upon the stay should overrule Judge Walton, that result ought send shudders through the land—because it will mean the rule of law has become secondary to party loyalty.” Or, more accurately, class loyalty, as both parties are actually two sides of the same political coin.

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Defreitas: Not Simply an Idiot, but a Useful Idiot

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“The recently publicized terrorist plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport, like so many of the terrorist plots over the past few years, is a study in alarmism and incompetence: on the part of the terrorists, our government and the press,” writes Bruce Schneier for Wired.

Schneier concludes that the corporate media is “just as deluded as Defreitas,” the supposed “homegrown terrorist” nabbed before the plot came to fruition. Of course, as Schneier explains, the

alleged plan, to blow up JFK’s fuel tanks and a small segment of the 40-mile petroleum pipeline that supplies the airport, was ridiculous. The fuel tanks are thick-walled, making them hard to damage. The airport tanks are separated from the pipelines by cutoff valves, so even if a fire broke out at the tanks, it would not back up into the pipelines. And the pipeline couldn’t blow up in any case, since there’s no oxygen to aid combustion. Not that the terrorists ever got to the stage—or demonstrated that they could get there—where they actually obtained explosives. Or even a current map of the airport’s infrastructure.

However, Bruce Schneier is mistaken when he states the corporate media is “just as deluded as Defreitas.” Schneier would have us believe the corporate media has all the reasoning of a five year old, that is to say precious little. In fact, the corporate media is tasked with selling the Brothers Grimm fantasy of Islamic terrorism to an often witless public, apparently ready to believe any sort of nonsense trotted out as “evidence” terrorists, now “homegrown,” hate us for our freedoms.

Mr. Schneier continues:

This isn’t the first time a bunch of incompetent terrorists with an infeasible plot have been painted by the media as poised to do all sorts of damage to America. In May we learned about a six-man plan to stage an attack on Fort Dix by getting in disguised as pizza deliverymen and shooting as many soldiers and Humvees as they could, then retreating without losses to fight again another day. Their plan, such as it was, went awry when they took a videotape of themselves at weapons practice to a store for duplication and transfer to DVD. The store clerk contacted the police, who in turn contacted the FBI. (Thank you to the video store clerk for not overreacting, and to the FBI agent for infiltrating the group.)

The “Miami 7,” caught last year for plotting—among other things—to blow up the Sears Tower, were another incompetent group: no weapons, no bombs, no expertise, no money and no operational skill. And don’t forget Iyman Faris, the Ohio trucker who was convicted in 2003 for the laughable plot to take out the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. At least he eventually decided that the plan was unlikely to succeed.

In regard to the latter, Ed Strong writes, and not for the New York Times, there “is every indication that this … purported terrorist threat—described by some media outlets as ‘even bigger than September 11′—was manufactured by the FBI, which used an undercover agent posing as a terrorist mastermind to entrap those targeted for arrest.” In addition, Strong writes about other sting operations pawned off on a gullible public, all too willing to swallow the propaganda bait hook, line, and sinker:

Until now, these “sting” operations have been targeted at Muslim immigrants. Last month, for example, Pakistani immigrant Shahawar Siraj in New York City was found guilty of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station in a “plot” that the evidence indicated was based entirely on suggestions from an FBI informant.

The FBI agent provocateur taunted the defendant with photographs of Abu Ghraib torture victims and demanded to know how, as a Muslim, he could fail to take action.

Similarly, in Albany, New York two years ago, the FBI recruited a Pakistani immigrant, promising him leniency on minor fraud charges, to ensnare two other immigrants in a fictitious scheme to help a non-existent person buy a weapon for a fake terrorist plot.

In the JFK “plot,” the FBI “had an inside man, an undercover operative who videotaped and recorded conversations with the suspects. He flew to Guyana with the suspects where the FBI says they tried to contact some Islamist groups. He helped them case the airport,” according to Dina Temple-Raston, writing for NPR. “The FBI’s inside man was a twice-convicted drug dealer. He was helping the FBI in the hope that it would reduce his own prison sentence. Former federal prosecutor and Miami lawyer Neal Sonnett said the informant could have changed the tenor of the investigation because he had a lot at stake.”

“By all accounts, the informant gave a masterful performance that appeared to shape the plot’s development: After winning the confidence of the 63-year-old Guyanese-born U.S. citizen, the Source repeatedly drove Defreitas, who had no car or money, to conduct airport “surveillance,” bought plane tickets for the two of them, as well as a third man, to fly to Trinidad last month, and trumpeted his jihadist sympathies, declaring that the greatest way for a Muslim to die was as a martyr, say court papers,” Newsday reported on June 10.

As Bill Van Auken wrote a few days before, the corporate media had a field day portraying the easily duped patsy Defreitas, a man who often struggled with homelessness, as a threat:

As usual, New York City’s tabloids excelled in … sensationalism. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post Sunday referred to the alleged plot in its headline as an “inferno plan” and carried an editorial stating that the purported plan “to do calamitous damage to JFK International Airport and surrounding residential neighborhoods underscores yet again the overarching threat Islamist terrorism poses to America.”

The New York Daily News on Monday carried five pages on the “plot,” with a ludicrous front-page headline, “Evil Ate at Table Eight,” promoting an inside interview with the Brooklyn waitress who served a meal to Russell Defreitas, whom the paper describes as the “mastermind” of the alleged plot, just before he was picked up by federal agents and police.

Yet the profile of Defreitas, a 63-year-old US citizen who emigrated from Guyana 25 years ago, hardly suggests a terrorist “mastermind.” A former friend describes him as someone who, before becoming a Muslim, had declared himself a Rastafarian and grown dreadlocks. He recalled his involvement in various business schemes to ship air conditioners or refrigerators to Guyana, none of which ever came to anything.

“He couldn’t even fix brakes,” the former friend said. “He never built bombs.”

Other accounts described him as a retired worker living in an impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood, who on various occasions had been homeless. New York Newsday, for example, reported, “Since being laid off from his job as a cargo worker several years ago, Russell Defreitas has lived a meek existence—at times sleeping in trains and trying to eke out a living running two-bit scams, selling incense on street corners and collecting welfare, acquaintances said.”

As Paul Joseph Watson notes, the JFK case reveals “that the terror threat has been overhyped and magnified a thousand-fold for political propaganda,” a fact demonstrated “by documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act that show only 0.0015 percent of the total number of cases filed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were terrorism related, despite the fact that the Bush administration has repeatedly asserted that it is the primary focus of the DHS.”

In 2004, writing for Counterpunch, Bruce Schneier hit the nail squarely on the head: “There are two basic ways to terrorize people. The first is to do something spectacularly horrible, like flying airplanes into skyscrapers and killing thousands. The second is to keep people living in fear through constant threat warnings, security checks, rhetoric, and stories of terrorist plots foiled by the diligent work of the increasingly intrusive Department of Homeland Security.”

Of course, it helps if “spectacularly horrible” events are orchestrated by the government precisely “to keep people living in fear.” It also helps when the FBI burns the midnight oil, cranking out one fantastical plot after another, with the help of convicted drug dealers, and the corporate media, with yellow journalist Rupert Murdoch taking the lead, turns such questionable nonsense into easily digestible pabulum to be inserted between “stories” about Britney’s “wardrobe mishap” and the “judicial travesty” of Paris Hilton’s jail sentence.

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Vaclav Klaus, Eco Criminal

Consider Vaclav Klaus, eco criminal. Klaus, due to his status as the president of the Czech Republic, is allowed to speak his mind on the pages of the Financial Times. In the not too distant future, however, such dialogue will be forbidden, even for national presidents, as the scientific dictatorship, masquerading under the cloak of environmentalism, will punish all who dare question the new orthodoxy of control, no matter status. Soon enough, such dissidents will be persecuted, even punished as heretics, enemies of mankind, or rather enemies of the global elite who sell us one problem-reaction-solution trick after another in their quest for total domination.

Mr. Klaus dares question the emerging eco-fascist hierarchy, namely Al Gore, Tony Blair, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Gang of Eight, commonly known as the Group of Eight, all conspiring to hammer out control mechanisms predicated on a foundation of junk science. “Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond,” Klaus argues. “The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced…. As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.”

Vaclav Klaus agrees with professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: “future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”

Of course, future generations, if the global elite are successful, will not possess the capacity for “bemused amazement,” as they will be bio-chipped, medicated, surveilled via the pantopticon and, to use the Matrix metaphor, reduced to mere batteries, that is to say rendered into a greatly reduced, through the coming Great Culling (i.e., “population control”), slave class in perpetual service to their psychopathic rulers, the heirs of Al Gore, Tony Blair, and the Gang of Eight.

“The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature,” Klaus notes, and follows with specific suggestions:

“Small climate changes do not demand far-reaching restrictive measures.”

Certainly not, but then the idea here is not to save the planet and humanity from fantastical climatological cataclysm, but rather, as noted above, impose a water tight social control mechanism, one far more effective in frightening the blinkered masses than the current emphasis on manufactured terrorism, almost effortlessly forgotten, unlike “climate change.”

“Any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided.”

Indeed, but again Mr. Klaus misses the point: our rulers fully intend to eradicate not only the possibility of “freedom and democracy,” but eliminate, in Orwellian fashion, the very presumption of natural rights and freedom, a postulation already working its way to the graveyard of ideas, toward the memory hole where the past is methodically liquidated. Few of us understand that natural or universal rights are inherent in the nature of people and not contingent on human actions or beliefs, not predicated on political absolutism or the repellent idea of the divine right of kings, or in the modern context the divine right of transnational corporatism.

“Instead of organizing people from above, let us allow everyone to live as he wants.”

Surely, a commendable thought, but one that will soon be extinct as the ill-fated dodo bird. Our oligarchic rulers fully intend to organize humanity, or more accurately the emerging slave class, “from above,” or on-high, as they have done for several millennia. In order for the global slave plantation to function as the psychopathic oligarchy intends, the very idea humanity has a natural right to decide how (or where) to live must be exterminated, put on the extinction list same as the dodo bird.

“Instead of speaking about ‘the environment,’ let us be attentive to it in our personal behavior.”

Our “personal behavior,” by and large, here in the United States and somewhat to a lesser degree in Europe and the “Western” world, is bound and determined by rampant consumerism and “status-enhancing appeal,” e.g., the idea that frivolous and transitory products, increasingly manufactured by slaves in China, “make the man,” or woman for that matter. According to the new eco-fascist paradigm emerging under the “climate control” rubric (actually a human control mechanism), such mindless consumerist behavior will be deemed a crime against the planet, as the agenda calls for a massive and global-wide feudal order based on the China Model thus dictating the elimination of the middle class.

“Let us be humble but confident in the spontaneous evolution of human society. Let us trust its rationality and not try to slow it down or divert it in any direction.”

Let us, instead, confront the psychopathic oligarchy, the plutocracy of death and disease, of poverty and diminishment. Unfortunately, with the current degree of stepfordization endemic among the masses, this task will be extremely difficult, to say the least, as most people do not realize they are working their way toward a dismal future in cradle-to-grave service as batteries to the plutocratic oligarchy.

“Let us not scare ourselves with catastrophic forecasts, or use them to defend and promote irrational interventions in human lives.”

Indeed, although the process of frightening the masses is well underway—a process hardly unique, as the masses were long ago inculcated by the “irrational interventions” of the state by way of its subordinate propaganda apparatus, otherwise known as the “mainstream media,” so accomplished at not only diversion by way of bread and circus “entertainment,” but the highly advanced art of gussying up the truly horrific as benevolence.

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Feds Torture “Tax Protester” Irwin Schiff

Considering what the government is doing to “tax protester” Irwin Schiff, it makes sense the “tax protesters” Ed and Elaine Brown have vowed to die before allowing hired guns working in the service of the psychopathocracy to take them in.

According to a post on the Rumor Mill News website, political prisoner Schiff was “was given the diesel treatment,” that is to say his sadistic wards put him on a bus, trussed in shackles, and drove him around for twelve or more hours. “The blood pools in your legs… the shackles cut in to your skin. You are NOT allowed to go to the bathroom, so people urinate in their clothes,” the post explains. “Prisoners are routinely given shoes that are too small… toe nails become ingrown to the point that prisoners have to pull them out with pliers to ease the pain… This is what happened to Irwin… they gave him boots that were too small. His foot became infected, he developed gangrene and they had to amputate his toe.”

For those unfamiliar with Schiff, he is 78 years old and serving 151 months in prison and was ordered to pay over $4.2 million in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service for the crime of not paying “income taxes,” otherwise known as slave ransom, or that’s what your humble blogger calls it, anyway. He currently languishes, apparently minus a toe, as Inmate #08537-014 at the Federal Correction Institution at Fort Dix, New Jersey, located on the Fort Dix/McGuire Air Force Base military installation. Fort Dix was in the news recently when a pizza delivery guy threatened to attack the base and kill as many soldiers as possible.

IRS Generalfeldmarschall Mark Everson told the media upon Schiff’s conviction in 2005, “Paying taxes is the price of citizenship. After three strikes, I would hope that even Schiff realizes that he has struck out.” Indeed, Schiff not only “struck out,” but apparently is in the process of losing body parts due to the Abu Ghraib-like conditions at Fort Dix.

Of course, it was our psychopathic rulers who long ago decided paying ransom, er income taxes, is “the price of citizenship,” as this was considered a reprehensible concept until the 16th Amendment was “ratified” in 1913. No doubt Mr. Everson missed history class on the day the teacher told the story about Thomas Jefferson, who managed to repeal all direct federal taxes—call it ransom, excuse me, income taxes—passed by the Federalists and boasted that ordinary Americans would never see a federal tax collector in their whole lives. Back in the day, the Republicans fought not only against direct taxes, but the authoritarian Alien and Sedition Acts foisted on the country by the Federalists. Nowadays, Republicans make the Federalists of yore look like pikers.

Again, considering the “diesel treatment” meted out to Schiff, the determination of Ed and Elaine Brown not to be taken alive makes perfect sense, as only a masochist would allow himself to be subjected to such brutal abuse, purposely inflicted by minions in the service of our rulers, who are criminal psychopaths.

Naturally, the taxes we are now paying will pale in comparison to what is coming, beginning with the so-called “carbon tax,” that is to say a fleecing scheme predicated on a ruse or at best an unsubstantiated theory based on junk science. Other taxes will of course follow, as our rulers have a mighty thirst for thievery and, unfortunately, far too many Americans are easily distracted and bamboozled when the government snake oil wagon trundles down Main Street promising miracle cures against the ills that plague us. Osama bin Laden, the CIA operative, is one such ill, and yet another is “climate change.”

But we are ripe for the picking. And the question is: How many of us will end up no better off, possibly worse, than the average Chinese zek, and how many of us will end up sharing Irwin Schiff’s fate?

No doubt plenty to the former and precious few to the latter.

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Galloway on the Lie Ahmadinejad Called for Israel to be “Wiped Off the Map”

Even though the out-going poodle, Tony Blair, has called for a “journalism regulator” in the UK, i.e., he demands a censor be appointed, and he considers alternative news sources “more pernicious and less balanced” than the government script-reading corporate media, there seems to be a bit of freedom left to tell the truth in Britain, that is until the country slides into total dictatorship, a process well underway thanks to Blair.

For instance, George Galloway, member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow, on his talkSPORT program, broadcast over the largest commercial radio station in Britain, continues to get the truth out. Indeed, Galloway’s program, according to UTV, has pulled in record call numbers and the highest ever ratings for its weekend slots, even pulling in more than the station’s Football First program.

In the United States, Galloway would never be allowed near a radio microphone, especially not on a large corporate station. Instead, here in America, the large stations are dominated by neocon tools such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and the “liberal” stooge Alan Colmes. In America, Galloway would never be allowed to get away with telling the truth, namely: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, never called for Israel to be wiped off the map, a lie repeated almost daily by a corporate media serving dutifully as a warmongering handmaiden for the neocons, who want to attack the country and slaughter thousands of Muslims before the decider and Commander Guy Bush leaves office.


Popout

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Daniel Pipes Details Israeli Attack Against Iran

Earlier this week, warmonger and Israel Firster Joe Lieberman said “I think we’ve got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq,” predicating, as neocons are wont, his argument on allegation. Now we have yet another Israel Firster and former United States Institute of Peace—as in war is peace—board member nominee, Daniel Pipes, calling for an attack against Iran.

Pipes cites “talented outsiders,” that is to say psychopaths, who focused “exclusively on feasibility, not political desirability or strategic ramifications: Were the Israeli national command to decide to damage the Iranian infrastructure, could its forces accomplish this mission?” Of course, in the process of destroying Iran’s “heavy water plant and plutonium production reactors under construction at Arak, a uranium conversion facility in Isfahan, and a uranium enrichment facility at Natanz,” the Israelis would be spreading radioactive fallout across Pakistan, India, China, Russia, Japan, and other downwind countries in Asia and the Pacific Rim, not that this or “political desirability” are of concern to the Israelis or their cheerleading neocon cohorts.

Of course, simply bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, resulting in the potential death of thousands, if not millions in the above mentioned countries, Pipes tells us “the IDF could reach Kharg Island, through which over 90 percent of Iranian oil is exported, heavily damaging the Iranian economy,” thus inflicting economic suffering and misery on millions of additional people, mostly average working people, albeit “dark-skinned” Muslims “with strange eating habits and less-developed notions of hygiene,” as Pipe famously characterized them.

One way or another, Pipes and his crazed compatriots will get their attack against Iran, not because the country is developing nuclear technology but rather because it serves as an example of a relatively strong and proud Muslim nation, something the neocons and Israelis detest, as they detested Saddam Hussein’s version of Arab nationalism and his support of the Palestinians. As we know, and as Zionists such as Oded Yinon tell us, the idea is to balkanize the Muslim world and spread as much chaos and misery—and, apparently, radiation—as possible.

Expect more of this as Bush prepares to exit office. As Pipes and crew realize, the Israelis will be unable to attack Iran, but the United States, already present in large numbers in the neighborhood, will be able to pull off an attack. For as the swami of the neocons, Norman Podhoretz, has promised, after consultation with Bush, the United States will attack Iran before Bush the Junior departs Washington.

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Neocon “Scholars” Call for Dismembering Bill of Rights

Imagine my surprise. A “guest scholar at the center-left Brookings Institution,” Benjamin Wittes, wants to gut the Second Amendment. Wittes told CNSNews “that rather than try to limit gun ownership through regulation that potentially violates the Second Amendment, opponents of gun ownership should set their sights on repealing the amendment altogether.”

Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett, however, did not limit his comments to the Second Amendment, suggesting instead that much of the Bill of Rights has “no contemporary relevance.” As an example, Barnett cited the Fourth Amendment. “Sure it was fine that persons should be secure in their papers and effects back in the old days when there wasn’t a danger of terrorism and mass murder.” According to the professor, the Fourth Amendment is “archaic [and] we don’t need it anymore.”

Of course, this sort of authoritarian nonsense should be expected, as we have allowed the government to be hijacked by a gaggle of neocons and their neoliberal kissing cousins who favor the sort of government operating in China to a constitutionally limited republic of the sort we had until 1791 when the Federalist Alexander Hamilton set-up the first central bank in America modeled after the Bank of England. In essence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have languished ever since and the neocons are now simply doing away with all pretense, not that most Americans will notice—so long as they remain “free” to shop, consume, and watch American Idol.

Incidentally, it is amusing CNSNews characterizes the Brookings Institution as “center-left,” a designation deemed to give the impression the place is crawling with Democrats and fence-sitting “progressives.” Never mind such labels are worthless, as the transnational plutocrats and globalists in control of the horizontal and vertical consider such appellations of little use beyond hypnotizing the commoners.

In fact, Brookings is strictly a neocon “think tank,” connected at the hip with the American Enterprise Institute (where Bush gets his “minds,” that is to say psychopaths) and the Wharton Business School, allegedly fronted by the Tavistock Institute. In addition, Brookings hosts the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, founded by Haim Saban, the billionaire former Israeli who proudly declares: “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.” Saban is a Democrat—thus demonstrating you can’t tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans without a scorecard.

Finally, it should come as no surprise neocons and neolibs want to do away with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, even though these founding documents are now little more than a historical facade, as the founding concepts enshrined in the documents were dismantled and floated down the river by bankers and the financial elite more than two centuries ago. Neocons have no use for the First, Second, Fourth or any other number of amendments, as they subscribe to the Führerprinzip, that is to say the leadership or Führer principle based on the Auctoritas of ancient Rome, as spelled out by Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist who elevated the concept of a dictatorial Reichspräsident, a concept embraced by neocons far and wide.

Thus it makes perfect sense the boy wonder of the neocons, Bill Kristol, would declare: “Maybe we should have Supreme Leader Bush. I kind of like the sound of that.”

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Agent Provocateur Smith Goes Ballistic

On the one hand, the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith and the Canadian Human Rights Commission accuse your humble blogger of anti-Semitism, while on the other Daryl Bradford Smith and his sidekick, Eric Hufschmid, accuse me of being a Zionist shill. In addition, Smith and Hufschmid seem to believe I am rolling in the cash. “The truth movement has divided into two, very distinct groups. There is the very large and wealthy group that consists of such people as Alex Jones, Mike Rivero, dailykos.com, Kurt Nimmo, physics911.net, and Webster Tarpley,” writes Hufschmid on Smith’ site. I must be hiding all this Zionist payola in a hole somewhere, because I currently live in a mobile home situated in one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states in the country and work as a low-paid web designer. But then, of course, Smith and Hufschmid have never bothered to check facts or practice reality checks. As an aside to large and more important issues, I include here agent Smith’s latest paranoid rant, if anything as an object lesson in how agent provocateurs operate:

17 minutes, 4 seconds:

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AFRICOM Eyes the Islamic Maghreb

Mokhtar Belmokhtar, leader of Algeria’s Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, worked for the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI in Afghanistan.
It should now be considered standard operating procedure—in order for the Pentagon to set-up shop in far-flung nations, a threat from “al-Qaeda” must be present. Thus we learn “U.S. counterterrorism officials are paying renewed attention to an increasingly dangerous incubator for extremism: a swath of northern and sub-Saharan West Africa, from the Atlantic coast of Morocco and Mauritania to the harsh deserts of Chad,” according to USA Today. “The centerpiece of terrorism problems in the region is Algeria’s Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, better known by its French initials GSPC. Late last year, it joined forces with Osama bin Laden and renamed itself al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an Arabic term used to refer to North Africa.”

And why exactly is the Pentagon warning us about “al-Qaeda” terrorists that “probably could not attack the U.S. homeland”?

As usual, the answer is simple and predictable enough. “The U.S. focus on the group comes as the Bush administration finalizes plans to create a new military command in Africa, called AFRICOM,” part and parcel of the neocon vision of Pax Americana.

According to the “experts,” GSPC is led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, “a former [Algerian] soldier who followed the familiar route for radical young Muslims and went to fight in Afghanistan,” the BBC reported in 2003.

In other words, Mokhtar Belmokhtar was recruited by the CIA. “Between 1982 and 1992, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East would pass their baptism under fire with the Afghan mujahideen,” writes Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. “Tens of thousands more foreign Muslim radicals came to study in the hundreds of new madrassas [religious schools] that Zia’s military government began to fund in Pakistan and along the Afghan border. Eventually more than 100,000 Muslim radicals were to have direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan and be influenced by the jihad [against the USSR],” a pet project of Zbigniew Brzezinski and later CIA director William Casey.

James Ingalls summarizes:

The CIA assembled a terror network that remains a cause of misery worldwide. CIA Director William Casey called it “the kind of thing we should be doing.” According to standard sources, aid to extremist groups in Afghanistan was a response to the Soviet invasion. The truth is that President Carter gave the green light for covert support to the Mujaheddin six months before the December 1979 invasion. In the words of then National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, a major architect of Carter’s policy, they were “drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.” The US supported seven fundamentalist extremist groups throughout the 1980s and into the early 90s with cash, sophisticated weapons, and training to the tune of $5 billion–according to official figures. The secret Black Budget of the CIA reportedly quadrupled to $36 billion per year when Reagan became president in 1980, and some of this money went to support secret operations in Afghanistan. Some of the earliest training exercises took place inside the US, including rifle shooting at the High Rock gun club in Naugtuck, Connecticut. More technical training took place at the CIA’s Camp Peary, nicknamed “The Farm,” northeast of Williamsburg, Virginia. Among the topics covered by training sessions were surveillance and countersurveillance, counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics and paramilitary operations.

“Motivated by nationalism and religious fervor, the Islamic warriors were unaware that they were fighting the Soviet Army on behalf of Uncle Sam,” explains Michel Chossudovsky. “While there were contacts at the upper levels of the intelligence hierarchy, Islamic rebel leaders in theatre had no contacts with Washington or the CIA.”

And no doubt, as well, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, described by locals in Algeria “as a kind of modern day Robin Hood,” a former officer in the Algerian army and veteran of the CIA-ISI war in Afghanistan, does not realize he is working for the CIA and the Pentagon, providing a pretext for the establishment of AFRICOM. “The goal is to prevent another Afghanistan,” Lieutenant Commander Joe Carpenter, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Boston Globe last December.

On the other hand, the idea may be to create another Afghanistan, an incubator for engineered terrorism, this time in the Islamic Maghreb.

For an unknown number of impoverished African villagers, death by way of AC-130H Spectre gunship is now a certainty.

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Jolie: the Pretty Face of the Global Slave Gulag

It’s official. The “UN Goodwill Ambassador” Angelina Jolie will front for the “prestigious” NWO “think tank,” the Council on Foreign Relations. “Angelina Jolie will now be joining former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Diane Sawyer and several other distinguished names as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations,” TransWorldNews reports. “The bombshell Oscar winner-turned globe-trotting activist is one of 94 new ‘term members’—a category reserved for up-and-coming young policy thinkers in their early 30s, most from the corporate world, government, academia or the media, who after their five-year terms can apply to join the ‘life membership’ ranks of Cheney, Soros, Greenspan, Kissinger, etc. What this means for Angelina: a chance to kibitz with top global policy experts. What this means for CFR: more paparazzi,” adds the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post.

One is reminded of the actress Lana Turner cavorting with mobster Johnny Stompenado, or maybe Liz Renay’s relationship with racketeer Mickey Cohen. Of course, chances are slim to none Jolie will take up with the hoary and criminal likes of Cheney, Soros, Greenspan, or Kissinger, although she may as well, considering the fact she has in essence become a whore for the ruling elite, attaching her “paparazzi” celebrity glow to an organization determined to reduce the world to a one-world slave labor gulag based on the China model of medieval feudalism at the behest of transnational mercantile capitalism. Of course, most Americans remain clueless of this agenda, even as the CFR works diligently to erode their endangered sovereignty. “Most Americans who are even aware of the CFR consider its objectives as visionary rather than a pressing political certainty or reality. Senators, Congressmen, and others in some branch of government service, doubtless for the most part consider an invitation to CFR membership as an honor,” notes Noah W. Hutchings, “and after all, CFR membership enhances political career opportunities and potentiality.”

But never mind. As we know, or rather as the corporate media would have us believe, “the merging of the governments of Canada, the United States and Mexico,” otherwise known as the North American Union, as sketched out by the CFR’s Robert Pastor, is an “urban legend,” part of the insanity of “the xenophobic or frightened right wing of America that is afraid of immigration and globalization,” as Pastor told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In other words, if you are suspicious of the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership, i.e., the merging of Mexico, Canada, and the United States into a European style “union,” you are naturally a tinfoil hat nutter, never mind Benn Steil, writing for the CFR’s “influential” Foreign Affairs magazine, who tells us “the world needs to abandon unwanted currencies, replacing them with dollars, euros, and multinational currencies as yet unborn.”

As James Madison warned the people of Virginia in 1799, a “nation which reposes on the pillow of political confidence, will sooner or later end its political existence in a deadly lethargy,” as it should be realized there is “a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust.”

It is sincerely unfortunate the American people no longer embrace this “circumspection and distrust” and instead believe, thanks to decades of brainwashing via public education and the incessant babble of 24/7 television, that government is our friend and the president has our best wishes at heart. Indeed, not only is government our friend, but the CFR, and thus the World Bank, IMF, Rockefeller and Ford foundations, et al, are our friends, never mind friends unrealized by most.

Thus Angelina Jolie is the pretty face on the other end of Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face—forever.” It is sincerely disturbing to realize most Americans will conclude, that is if they ever formulate the thought, the CFR, the North American Union, NAFTA and CAFTA resulting in jobs shipped to China, the vacuum created in the wake of the mugging and disappearance of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the imposition of the panopticon and high-tech surveillance state are all in our best interest because our cherished celebrities tell us so.

How easily most of us are bamboozled.

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Appearance on Vyzygoth’s Grassy Knoll

1 hour, 40 minutes:

Visit Vyzygoth’s Grassy Knoll website for more interviews and related audio files.

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Deconstructing Fatah al-Islam an Easy Task, Thanks to DEBKAfile

DEBKAfile, the Mossad front, makes life so much easier. For instance, in regard to Fatah al-Islam, the bank robbing contract Sunni terrorist group put together by the neocons and Saudi prince Bandar in Lebanon to confront the Shi’a Hezbollah and currently holed up in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp, DEBKAfile tells us “Fatah al-Islam are not fighting alone; they are backed by elite units of the Iranian-Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian-General Command, which is commanded by Ahmed Jibril. These Palestinian units are highly trained in urban guerrilla warfare by Syrian commando battalion officers and Iranian Revolutionary Guards and have better skills than the Lebanese commandoes.”

Of course, as DEBKAfile is an Israeli propaganda unit—and a rather obvious one at that—it makes sense Fatah al-Islam has teamed up with Palestinians, Syrians, and Iranians, never mind my incredulity. However, what is rather telling here is the insertion of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian-General Command, described as a splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

As we learned last week, the famous Entebbe hijacking “was the work of the PFLP, with help from the Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Bet,” according to British diplomat D.H. Colvin. “The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine took credit for the hijacking, which they said was for the purpose of bringing attention to the Palestinian people’s plight. The plane was travelling from Israel to Paris when it was hijacked on June 27th, 1976, and re-routed to Entebbe Airport in Uganda,” the International Middle East Media Center summarizes. “With the newly-released British intelligence document, dated before the military operation to rescue the hostages on July 3rd, 1976, some in the intelligence community are calling for an investigation of Israeli involvement in the planning and implementation of the plane hijacking.”

In other words, we can assume Fatah al-Islam, linked to the Shin Bet compromised PFLP through the splinter group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian-General Command, is yet another covert operation, designed to go up against Hezbollah, never mind the futility of such an operation. It appears to be a collaborative black op intelligence effort between the Israelis, the Saudis, and the neocons—with the cooperation of the Senora government in Lebanon—all interested in taking down Hezbollah a peg or two, especially considering the disturbing fact the Islamic organization is now capable of fending off Israeli predation.

“And so if Saudi Arabia and the Senora government are doing this, whether it’s unintended or not, therefore it has the United States must have something to say about it or not?” CNN International anchor Hala Gorani asked Seymour Hersh last month.

HERSH: Well, the United States was deeply involved. This was a covert operation that Bandar ran with us. Don’t forget, if you remember, you know, we got into the war in Afghanistan with supporting Osama bin Laden, the mujahadin back in the late 1980s with Bandar and with people like Elliott Abrams around, the idea being that the Saudis promised us they could control—they could control the jihadists so we spent a lot of money and time, the United States in the late 1980s using and supporting the jihadists to help us beat the Russians in Afghanistan and they turned on us. And we have the same pattern, not as if there’s any lessons learned. It’s the same pattern, using the Saudis again to support jihadists, Saudis assuring us they can control these various group, the groups like the one that is in contact right now in Tripoli with the government.

GORANI: Sure, but the mujahadin in the ’80s was one era. Why would it be in the best interest of the United States of America right now to indirectly even if it is indirect empower these jihadi movements that are extremists that fight to the death in these Palestinian camps? Doesn’t it go against the interests not only of the Senora government but also of America and Lebanon now?

HERSH: The enemy of our enemy is our friend, much as the jihadist groups in Lebanon were also there to go after Nasrullah. Hezbollah, if you remember, last year defeated Israel, whether the Israelis want to acknowledge it, so you have in Hezbollah, a major threat to the American—look, the American role is very simple. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, has been very articulate about it. We’re in the business now of supporting the Sunnis anywhere we can against the Shia, against the Shia in Iran, against the Shia in Lebanon, that is Nasrullah. Civil war. We’re in a business of creating in some places, Lebanon in particular, a sectarian violence.

Naturally, the corporate media, as a neocon-friendly propaganda apparatus, would have us believe the “mujahadin in the ’80s was one era” and there is no connection between “al-Qaeda” or “al-Qaeda inspired” terrorism of the current era, never mind suspicious facts and the historical record glaringly obvious. Increasingly, with every passing day, it is becoming more and more difficult for the government and its corporate media handmaiden to prop up the official fairy tale of Islamic terrorism spawned from remote caves.

Kudos to DEBKAfile for making the task all the more easy.

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Daily Kos Dems Remain Irrevocably Clueless

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (photo at left), the founder of the DailyKos blog, once again demonstrates the impermeability of Democrat consciousness. “They let us down this time,” Jonathan E. Kaplan quotes the popular blogger’s response to the inability or rather unwillingness of congressional Democrats to impose a timeline on the neocon occupation of Iraq. “But the opportunities for them to make amends still exist. And if they don’t? Well, no one, not even the most rabid partisans, have an endless supply of patience.” In other words, Zúniga, like a battered wife who believes things will get better tomorrow, is sticking with the double-dealing Democrats.

“Liberal bloggers even criticized House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), who helped recapture the House last year as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), for saying that the deal was ‘the beginning of the end of the president’s policy in Iraq,’” Kaplan writes.

Rahm Emanuel? I had to chuckle reading that one.

Apparently, dyed-in-the-wool Democrats are not bothered by the fact Emanuel is high up in the Democratic Leadership Council, he is chairman of the Democratic caucus, and is a member of the New Democrat Coalition. “New Democrats” are described as “moderate and pro-business,” in other words they are committed to globalism and transnational corporatism. It should be noted, for Democrats in need of a history lesson, these “New Democrats” worked tirelessly to pass Permanent Normal Trade Relations for the slave labor gulag of China, fast track Trade Promotion Authority—i.e., gutting the Constitution and the power of Congress—and H-1B visa “reform,” that is undermining American workers who are considered overpaid—even useless eaters—by our corporatist rulers and potentates.

Emanuel, known fondly as “Rahm-bo” for his desire to murder political opponents, is a former Israeli citizen who volunteered for service not in the U.S. military during the so-called Gulf War—actually the first Bush invasion of Iraq—but the Israeli military as a “civilian volunteer,” thus demonstrating his allegiance. Of course, as Emanuel’s father was a member of the Israeli terrorist organization Irgun, notorious for blowing up hotels and killing civilians, this make perfect sense. Naturally, as the heirs of Irgun now run Israel, and they have a vested interest in the United States attacking their enemies in not only Iraq but eventually Iran and elsewhere, and “Rahm-bo” served in the IOF (Israel Occupation Forces), we can assume the Congress critter from Illinois was simply engaging in well-practiced deception when he stated: “At the right time, we will have a position” on the Iraq occupation. Indeed, AIPAC bought and paid for Dems will have a “position,” as Emanuel calls it, after Israel’s enemies are defeated—or short of that, their homelands reduced to smoldering, depleted uranium permeated rubble.

At any rate, as Kaplan writes, “left wing” Democrats have declared they will no longer “contribute a penny” to the party after Emanuel and the leadership issued a “blank check” to Bush and the neocons in regard to the occupation of Iraq. The Daily Kos Democrats have taken umbrage at the issuance of a letter from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Most galling to some activists was a DCCC letter that tried to claim credit for forcing President Bush to agree to ‘accountability and reporting provisions,’” an effort that produces a rather laughable and wholly predictable mirage, as the neocons are firmly in control of Congress and the executive and will not be pushed around by a few libs with conscience. “Readers at the DailyKos website were furious about the letter, while other readers were angry that the DCCC used James Carville, a Democratic political consultant, in a separate fundraising pitch. Many said they would not donate to DCCC any more.”

Carville is married to the Bush “consultant” and neocon, Mary Matalin, once again demonstrating there is no difference between mainline Democrats and Republicans, a fact that apparently irks a few lib Dems, but not to such a degree that they abandon the party in disgust. Obviously, Democrats, even lib Democrats, are gluttons for punishment.

“As angry as liberal activists are over last week’s vote, it is not clear now whether they can punish congressional Democrats who supported the supplemental spending bill,” Kaplan wrote on May 30. “Some Democratic lawmakers and aides are frustrated with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and feel whatever they do would not be good enough.” In other words, these lawmakers and aides are tired of listening to their constituents, who voted overwhelmingly to end the occupation of Iraq and bring the troops home. For these “lawmakers,” actually corporate whores and AIPAC lapdogs, the Daily Kos Democrats need to sit down, shut up, and get accustomed to the in-your-face betrayal.

If common sense ruled the day, the Daily Kos Democrats, with Markos Moulitsas Zúniga leading the charge, would use their “netroot” power to yank the bottom out of the Democrat party and thus send a message to Rahm Emanuel and his ilk. But this will not happen. Daily Kos Dems are emotionally wedded to the party, never mind the self-destructive irrationality of this marriage.

If the Daily Kos murmurings reveal anything, it is that “mainstream” Democrats, even the anti-war and lib faction, are so completely brainwashed and stepfordized they will never reform the party—or, for that matter, defect and start anew with a fresh political party—and will instead spend their time complaining at the “netroot” level on blogs and messageboards, thus not effectuating change, much to the delight of the corporatist whores and AIPAC lickspittles led by Rahm Emanuel, the little “Rahm-bo” who demonstrated his allegiance to Israel, same as the Bush neocons.

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JFK Four: Connecting Propaganda Dots from Jamaat al-Muslimeen to Hugo Chávez?

Russell Defreitas, the elderly and hapless patsy ensnared by the FBI for the crime of dreaming up a fantastical plot to blow up Kennedy Airport, “may have been inspired by Osama bin Laden,” however “was not an al-Qaida wannabe, according to authorities. He told an FBI informant that he and other non-Arab Muslims in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana wanted to do their part in the global jihad,” Newsday reports. These “other non-Arab Muslims in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana” are allegedly members of Jamaat al-Muslimeen, a Muslim group headed up by Imam Yasin Abu Bakr, who led members in an attempted coup d’état against the government of Trinidad and Tobago in July 1990. Bakr is a former policeman who converted to Islam while a student in Canada.

“U.S. and Trinidadian authorities have kept a close eye on the Jammat’s activities since the 9/11 attacks, but there is no hard evidence tying the group to international terrorism, let alone al-Qaeda,” writes Chris Zambelis for Global Terrorism Analysis, a Jamestown Foundation publication (the foundation is linked to CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife and PNAC; members include James Woolsey and Zbigniew Brzezinski). “However, Abu Bakr did maintain links with Libya’s Muammar Qadhafi in the 1980s and 90s and considers him a close friend to this day. The Jammat reportedly received funds through Libya’s World Islamic Call Society (WICS) to finance the construction of its main mosque, schools, and a medical center, but there is no evidence linking Tripoli with the failed 1990 coup attempt. Abu Bakr’s most recent publicized links with controversial international figures include Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.”

No, Russell Defreitas, according to the corporate media, is “not an al-Qaida wannabe,” however he may prove to be a convenient link to Jamaat al-Muslimeen and Hugo Chávez, as the former is basically insignificant beyond the realm of kidnapping and drug smuggling, while the latter is a big fish with a lot of oil at his disposal and the neocons would love to demonize him as a terrorist, thus working toward his overthrow.

Recall, back in February of 2003, a Venezuelan man, Hasil Mohammed Rahaham-Alan, was arrested at Gatwick Airport in Britain, “allegedly carrying a live grenade in his baggage,” according to the BBC. Naturally, the neocons over at the Daily Standard wasted precious little time attempting to link Rahaham-Alan to Hugo Chávez and al-Qaeda, the database. “The British Mail reported that al Qaeda operates a training camp on the Venezuelan island of Margarita,” claimed Thor Halvorssen.

Venezuela, however, does not take kindly to baseless accusations and corporate media propaganda linking Chávez to the aforementioned database. “Venezuela levied charges against US cable network CNN for linking Chavez to Al-Qaeda, and against Venezuelan TV network Globovision for encouraging the president’s assassination,” Agence France Presse reported earlier this week. Not surprising considering the documented fact military personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, worked at CNN headquarters in Atlanta.

But never mind. I’ll bet a dollar to a donut the corporate media eventually gets around to linking Russell Defreitas and his hapless patsies to Hugo Chávez, who is targeted for extinction by the neocons and their kissing cousins, the neolibs.

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Corporate Media Praises Neocon Robert Zoellick

Now that the reprehensible neocon Paul Wolfowitz is out of the way at the World Bank, it is time for our rulers to nominate yet another reprehensible neocon to the post. Said neocon is Robert Zoellick, PNAC signatory, and a former director of the Aspen Institute Strategy Group, a “non-profit” set-up and bankrolled by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford foundation. Zoellick is of course the perfect choice, as he worked in the “private sector” for Goldman Sachs, Enron, and Fannie Mae, in other words he is a seasoned cut-throat operator, ready to inflict neoliberal globalism and loan shark schemes on the impoverished masses, most of them living on less than two dollars a day. If Zoellick and the “private sector” have their way, billions will live on less than a dollar a day.

“Supporters praise Zoellick as a rigorous intellectual and sophisticated globalist who is good at forging consensus,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle. “He is well-connected internationally and well-regarded by European leaders, who pressured Wolfowitz to resign amid an ethics flap. Presently vice chairman of the international unit at Goldman Sachs, the investment banking firm, Zoellick is also well-versed in how markets work.”

For those who understand how things work, very little translation is required: Robert Zoellick, as “rigorous intellectual”—unable or unwilling to compromise, thoroughly ruthless, dogmatic and pedantic—who is “good at forging consensus”—that is, accomplished at arm twisting and intimidation, probably blackmail. He is connected to the decadent royalty of Europe and their EU globalist toadies, determined to turn the planet into a slave labor gulag and, as the corrupt and inbred royals (such as the Malthusian Prince Philip) are fond of telling us, reducing world population to a manageable number, possibly 500 million.

“Detractors paint him as a Bush crony whose main appeal to the president is loyalty. They say Zoellick’s 2001-05 tenure as trade negotiator was marked as much by failure as success—most notably the inability to advance the Doha development agenda at the World Trade Organization, intended to lift nations out of poverty by expanding trade.”

Actually, for the global “free traders.” i.e., plunder and loot specialists, Zoellick is more well regarded than the president, who is basically a front man for the dumbed-down and mostly stepfordized masses, an alcoholic and former cokehead from a Nazi collaborating crime family who initially appealed to the “good old boys” in Texas, a rabble that can be depended upon to vote for the worst sort of mental defectives and psychopaths, so long as the pill is sugar coated by the corporate media.

It is wholly typical the San Francisco Chronicle attempts to pass off the myth the WTO and World Bank intend “to lift nations out of poverty by expanding trade,” when the precise opposite is the case. The “ministerial” Doha “round,” hosted by decadent and inbred royals in Qatar, is nothing short of a prolonged attempt on the part of “free traders” to reduce “trade barriers,” that is to say to undermine attempts by impoverished third world nations to fend off neoliberals who impose high interest rates into perpetuity (and short of the ability of the impoverished to pay this, loot and plunder their natural resources).

“Significantly, Zoellick is familiar with China, the rising power whose entry into the WTO he helped broker in late 2001 as U.S. trade representative. As deputy secretary of state in 2005 and 2006, Zoellick paid special attention to China. That experience will be useful at the World Bank. Although Beijing is sitting atop $1.2 trillion in foreign currency reserves, China—still classified as a developing country—has snared many loans from the World Bank.”

In other words, Zoellick is well-steeped in the China plan, that is to say the plan to reduce the planet to a high-tech feudal state based on dictatorial and ruthless mercantilism perfected by “communist” Chinese rulers, well-suited bureaucratic psychopaths versed in the tactics of coercion, slavery, mass murder, and the selling of the internal organs of executed dissidents and other recalcitrant enemies of the state.

“In my experience, the Chinese are as focused on national interests as any country I’ve ever dealt with, in a very hard-headed way,” Zoellick told the German Marshall Fund, yet another globalist foundation, this one “transatlantic,” that is to say neoliberal, globalist, and stretching across both sides of the pond. Although Mr. Zoellick was rather unspecific, we can assume such hard-headedness includes the violent suppression of free speech and religious freedom, torture of prisoners, denial of due process, the violent suppression of Tibetans and Buddhists, forced abortion and sterilization, etc., policies that will come to America—or maybe we should call it the North American Union—soon enough.

According to the Chronicle and Democrat senator Max Baucus, Zoellick is “the right person for this job,” not simply because he “served three Republican presidents and was a protege of Secretary of State James Baker during George H.W. Bush’s administration,” in other words a consummate insider and crime family intimate, but also because he “is credited with negotiating free-trade deals with Vietnam, Jordan and Australia, helping to push the now-stalled Doha development agenda and guiding Bush’s request for trade promotion authority through a divided Congress in 2002. The trade authority gives the president the right to submit trade proposals to Congress, which can accept or reject but not amend the deals.” Bush’s “trade authority” is in fact “fast-track authority,” in other words stripping Congress of its constitutional right to negotiate trade policy and vesting this power solely in the office of the decider, or rather the neolibs and neocons who pull his marionette strings.

“Zoellick is a forceful and sophisticated advocate of globalization, whereby financial markets, companies and even cultures become intimately intertwined. But critics contend that globalization is a race to the bottom, with the world’s poor as the inevitable losers,” the San Francisco Chronicle concludes. “We are very concerned that Zoellick will apply that same flawed, market-fundamentalist thinking to the major health policy issues that have made the (World Bank) so ineffective in fighting poverty,” Asia Russell, director of international advocacy for the nonprofit organization Health Global Access Project, added.

Indeed, the point is not to fight poverty. Instead, the idea is to loot and plunder third world nations. “The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. A poor country borrows from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it must borrow again, this time from the IMF,” explains Michael Parenti. “But the IMF imposes a ’structural adjustment program’ (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce wages, and make no attempt to protect local enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers. The debtor nations are pressured to privatize their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to private corporations.”

Robert Zoellick will continue this destructive policy and the corporate media will declare up is down, black is white, and “privatization” is a poverty reduction program. As well, Zoellick will be tasked with restoring the World Bank’s image—or rather its facade as an organization dedicated to “economic development and eliminating poverty”—an image tarnished recently by the corruption of fellow neocon Paul Wolfowitz, who apparently regarded the organization as his own candy store.

Finally, at least a few people appear to oppose Zoellick, as they know a neocon when they see one. “Concerns about Zoellick center on his membership of the so-called Vulcans foreign policy team that advised Bush during his presidential campaign in 2000. The group was led by Condoleezza Rice and espoused the neocon ideology that alienated Wolfowitz, another Vulcans member, from World Bank staff members,” notes Today’s Zaman. “As an early backer of US military action in Iraq, and as a former paid adviser to Enron, the infamous energy company, Zoellick brings significant baggage with him,” Paul Zeitz, the executive director of the Global Aids Alliance, told the newspaper.

Of course, in Washington and on Wall Street, this “significant baggage” is considered a sterling and much sought after attribute by financial sector psychopaths, as fraudulent business practices of the Enron sort and the causal act of engineering the slaughter of 750,000 Iraqis fits on the curriculum vitae quite nicely.

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Meet the New Gore, Same as the Old Gore

Democrats never learn. “Many solid progressives want Gore to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2008. A recent AlterNet reader survey (in which Noam Chomsky won the MVP for ‘Most Valuable Progressive’ [sic]) showed Gore way in front of the pack—with Russ Feingold second and corporate media ‘front-runner’ Hillary Clinton way back,” Jeff Cohen wrote last July. “Like many progressives, I’ve grown to appreciate the new Gore. Beginning in 2002 when leading Democrats had lost their voices, a Gore reborn spoke out loudly against Bush policies (and irritated mainstream pundits) through a series of speeches on Iraq, foreign policy, economics and the assault on our precious Constitutional freedoms.”

Of course, the “New Gore” is the “Old Gore” recast, as nothing, or precious little, changes under the so-called two party system—actually a one party, neoliberal, globalist plutocracy dressed up as a mobocracy. Never mind “progressive” Democrats are so blinkered this reality stands before them, completely invisible. Mr. Cohen would have us believe “Gore broke with former allies in the party establishment, worked closely with grassroots groups like MoveOn and endorsed the upstart Howard Dean in the primaries.” Not mentioned here is the fact the top contributor to MoveOn is none other than the Soros Fund Management. Soros, of course, is a former Council on Foreign Relations director and currently invests money with the Carlyle Group. It never fails to amaze how readily “progressive” Democrats will embrace the swindle.

Now the “New Al Gore” tells us “he doesn’t agree with calls for impeaching the president due to lack of ‘time’ and ‘consensus,’” according to Daily News & Analysis. “Many democrats feel that Bush should be impeached for allegedly misleading the country deliberately in the lead up to the war in Iraq.” Heck, simply impeaching Bush would be akin to a gentle slap on the hand, considering the magnitude of his crimes. If Democrats had any spine, they would demand Bush be arrested as a war criminal and would not sit down and shut up until the Commander Guy did the orange jumpsuit promenade. Of course, this will never happen, and the “New Al Gore,” same as the “Old Al Gore,” will never demand Bush be arrested and see the inside of a super-max cell for the rest of his natural life, same as he will never call for the arrest and prosecution of another war criminal, his former boss, Bill Clinton.

It is said Al Gore vehemently disagrees with Bush and the neocons on the Iraq imbroglio. Instead, the “New Al Gore,” as opposed to the “Old Al Gore,” who served diligently as Clinton’s boy friday on NAFTA, is fronting a much better scam to get us all dancing to the neoliberal New World Order tune—”global warming,” now spiffed and rechristened “climate change.” Gore’s project, actually a project of the United Nations, will frighten grade school kids and witless adults far more effectively than Osama and his dour cave dwellers ever did, as a wrathful Mother Nature will not be assuaged, that is not without big time concessions on the part of the ill-behaved mob, addicted as they are to their cars, air conditioners, red meat, and ephemeral “planned obsolesce” habits, never mind the irrational and child-like commoners were methodically acclimated to carbon intensitive consumerism over the last century, a consumerism that made wealthy many of the same transnational corporations now jumping on the “climate change” bandwagon, anxious for profit reborn at the expense of the suckers, who are of course born every minute.

Certainly, Al Gore does not want the messy process of impeachment to interfere with the new flimflam, as the near-impeachment of Nixon more than a generation ago instilled in the public a broad disenchantment with government. Our rulers demand we remain at best ambivalent, surely not hostile, and thus our betters will not be prosecuted for their substantial crimes, let alone called out into the arena of “debate,” an electronic coliseum of never-ending absurdity and irrelevance dominated by Britney, Paris, Jessica, and Jennifer, ad nauseam.

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Entebbe Debunked

Apparently, the New York Times and the Washington Post are not interested in reporting important news, as Venus Williams and the French Open are considered of more importance to the American public than the revelation Shin Bet and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) “teamed up in an ‘unholy alliance’ in an attempt to change foreign policy in the Middle East,” that is to make certain to “torpedo the PLO’s standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

“Their nightmare is that… one will witness the imposition in the Middle East of a Pax Americana, which will be the advantage of the PLO (who will gain international respectability and perhaps the right to establish a state on evacuated territories) and to the disadvantage of the Refusal Front (who will be squeezed right out in any overall peace settlement and will lose their raison d’etre) and Israel who will be forced to evacuate occupied territory,” DH Colvin at the British embassy in Paris, quoting a contact at the Euro-Arab Parliamentary Association, revealed as the staged “crisis” unfolded.

As noted here yesterday, Israel has long nurtured and financed groups opposed to the PLO, most notably Hamas. “The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place,” an anonymous U.S. government official told Richard Sale of United Press International. “The PLO was secular and leftist and promoted Palestinian nationalism. Hamas wanted to set up a transnational state under the rule of Islam, much like Khomeini’s Iran,” a state not likely to make a peace deal with the Israelis, an arrangement that suited them fine, as Israel has never honestly intended to make peace with the Palestinians and instead has worked consistently to terrorize them, drive them off the land, and kill them in numbers.

Naturally, the story never made it on the front page, let alone the back page, of American newspapers, with the notable exception of the Moonie Times, er the Washington Times. A Google News search indicates the story appeared in Ha’aretz, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Ynetnews, Israel Insider, the Scotsman, the BBC, the Telegraph, and other websites. Of course, this makes perfect sense, as the stepfordized American public needs to be kept in the dark about the true nature of the Israeli state, lest they begin, ever so meekly, to complain about the billions of dollars in “assistance” the government ships over the Israel every year, not to mention the incredibly expensive “war” in Iraq, launched at Israel’s behest, as admitted by Bush crime family insider and adviser, Philip Zelikow.

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Corporate Media Blames Victims in Palestine

If we are to believe “experts” quoted by United Press International, the “radicalization of Palestinians” has little to do with Israeli brutality over the span of more than two generations. It is all about “violence as a model created by bin Ladenism,” never mind the Palestinians resisted Israeli occupation when Osama was a glint in Muhammad bin Laden’s eye, well before the elder Bin Laden migrated from Al-Rubat to Saudi Arabia.

“Bush administration officials said more young people in Gaza as well as the Lebanese refugee camps are turning to jihad because they feel more secular or moderate paths have failed to improve their lives,” UPI adds. No doubt, as these “secular or moderate paths” were systematically undermined and destroyed, thanks to the Mossad, also known as the “Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks,” as killing Palestinian nationalists is indeed considered a “special task” for the Israeli government. Both MI6 and the CIA worked to undermine secular Arab nationalism—including its more moderate strain, as represented by Gamal Abd-al Nasser of Egypt. In response to Nasser’s nationalist impudence, former British prime minister Winston Churchill instructed then prime minister Anthony Eden, upon Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez: “Tell them if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter, from which they should have never emerged.”

“The CIA was following the example of British Intelligence and sought to use Islam to further its goals,” writes Peter Goodgame. “They wanted to find a charismatic religious leader that they could promote and control and they began to cooperate with groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. With the rise of Nasser the Brotherhood was also courted more seriously by the pro-Western Arab regimes of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They needed all the popular support that they could muster against the rise of Nasser-inspired Arab nationalism to keep their regimes intact.”

In regard to Israel, its “support for Hamas ‘was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,’” a former senior CIA official told Richard Sale of the UPI. “According to documents United Press International obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. Islamic movements in Israel and Palestine were ‘weak and dormant’ until after the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel scored a stunning victory over its Arab enemies…. According to U.S. administration officials, funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel. The PLO was secular and leftist and promoted Palestinian nationalism. Hamas wanted to set up a transnational state under the rule of Islam, much like Khomeini’s Iran.”

And why exactly would Israel support radical Palestinian Muslims, determined to destroy the Israeli state? “The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place,” an anonymous U.S. government official told Sale.

“There is a security vacuum that creates space for all kinds of new grouplets and forces,” Mouin Rabbani, a Jordan-based analyst of Palestinian politics for the International Crisis Group, told the New York Times, according to UPI. Of course, as history—history studiously ignored by the corporate media, particularly the New York Times—demonstrates, such “grouplets and forces” were and are routinely nurtured and encouraged by Israeli, British, and American intelligence operations for a variety of reasons, most recently to create the specter of Islamic terrorism.

Naturally, Mr. Rabbani should be taken with a large grain of salt, as the International Crisis Group is supported by the usual suspects, namely the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and MacArthur foundations, and not surprisingly the Sarlo Jewish Community Endowment Fund. The Sarlo Foundation, according to its website, doles out grants to “the State of Israel to address the social service needs of its most vulnerable populations.” No indication if such “vulnerable populations” include the Palestinians.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why Palestinians are radicalized, or maybe it should be traumatized, as the Israeli state has, since at least 1967, violated 149 substantive articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention that protect the rights of occupied people. “As matters of fact and of law, the gross and repeated violations of Palestinian rights by the Israeli army and Israeli settlers living illegally in occupied Palestine constitute war crimes,” writes Francis A. Boyle. “The paradigmatic example of a ‘crime against humanity’ is what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish People. This is where the concept of crime against humanity came from. And this is what the U.N. Human Rights Commission determined that Israel is currently doing to the Palestinian People: Crimes against humanity. Legally, just like what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jews.”

But then, of course, it is not permitted to make analogies between the Israeli state and the Nazi state, as in certain parts of the world this is considered a hate crime, for instance in Canada where your humble blogger is designated a thought criminal. Considered more egregious, for the Canadian Human Rights Commission at the behest of the Canadian Jewish Congress and B’nai Brith, is the prospect of accusing the Israeli state of genocide. Francis A. Boyle expands:

Moreover, a crime against humanity is the direct historical and legal precursor to the international crime of genocide as defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The theory here was that what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish People required a special international treaty that would codify and universalize the Nuremberg concept of “crime against humanity.” And that treaty ultimately became the 1948 Genocide Convention.

In fairness, you will note that the U.N. Human Rights Commission did not go so far as to condemn Israel for committing genocide against the Palestinian People. But it has condemned Israel for committing crimes against humanity, which is the direct precursor to genocide. And I submit that if something is not done quite soon by the American People and the International Community to stop Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinian People, it could very well degenerate into genocide, if Israel is not there already. And in this regard, [former and currently comatose] Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is what international lawyers call a genocidaire—one who has already committed genocide in the past.

“All of us know about the genocide that took place in Nazi Germany,” explains Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, “some of us know about the genocide visited on the Armenians in the opening years of the 20th Century and other blood baths that have been carried out for political purposes across the face of the globe. But how many of us are aware that today in Palestine another genocide is underway? Carried out under cover of euphemistic media coverage, carefully worded to disguise an agenda of death, thousands are dying slowly, blown to bits. Children are targeted, shot, maimed. Using a terror that makes Nazi Germany look mannerly and compassionate, lives are being snuffed out coldly as part of a long term plan to eliminate a nation from the face of the Earth.”

This “euphemistic media coverage” is designed to bury notice of Israel’s well-documented and on-going crimes against humanity—especially at a time when “Israel’s former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu—one of the most senior theocrats in the Jewish State ‘ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings,’” according to Ali Abunimah, writing for the Electronic Intifada. “The Jerusalem Post reported that Mordechai made this ruling in a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert citing biblical authority. The letter was published in a weekly journal distributed in synagogues throughout Israel. The report states that ‘According to Jewish war ethics, wrote Eliyahu, an entire city holds collective responsibility for the immoral behavior of individuals. In Gaza, the entire populace is responsible because they do nothing to stop the firing of Kassam rockets.’” In short, “Jewish war ethics” are in no way obliged by rules the rest of the civilized world honors and respects, with the exemption of the United States government and a few tinhorn dictators and sadists around the world.

This kind of genocidal hatred of Palestinians is not unusual in Israel. What used to be unusual was for it to be spoken so brazenly and openly. Of course we know what would happen if a Muslim or Palestinian religious figure made such a statement. We know the international outcry when Iran’s President Ahmadinejad allegedly made statements calling for the elimination of Israel. Will all those EU officials who curried favor by condemning Ahmedinejad take an equally strong and public stance against Israel’s former chief rabbi? Will they demand that Olmert publicly repudiate the letter he received?

A Muslim making such statements about Jews would certainly be banished from traveling to the United States, and could end up in Guantánamo for much less.

Under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted in the wake of the Nazi holocaust, “Direct and public incitement to commit genocide” is a punishable act. One wonders whether the UN Security Council, which created an international tribunal to investigate the killing of one man in Lebanon, will pay any attention to the indiscriminate state- and theocratically-sanctioned massacres of Palestinians by Israel.

Of course, the “theocratically-sanctioned massacres of Palestinians by Israel” will continue, as will the engineered in-fighting between the religious Hamas and the secular Fatah, the former sheparded by Israeli intelligence strictly for this reason, thus providing rationale for the “right-wingers’ opposition to further pullouts and charges that Palestinians are unfit for statehood,” as the International News reports.

Meanwhile, the non-reporting and omissive corporate media here in the land of the intellectually incurious and stepfordized has done a smashing job. “Substantially larger numbers of Americans have placed their primary sympathy with Israel rather than with Arab states or with the Palestinians,” the Pew Forum on Religion and Life notes. “The only other nation in that survey where sympathy for Israel substantially outpaced sympathy for the Palestinians was Germany,” a not surprising fact considering Germans, since the end of the Second World War, have endured incessant pro-Israel propaganda, resulting in a continuing pretext to fleece the German people at the tune of 102 billion marks, about $61.8 billion at 1998 exchange rates, never mind that the vast majority of Germans paying off this blackmail were not alive during Hitler’s reign and are not morally obliged to pay, that is unless one buys into the Old Testament line about the sins of the fathers.

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Republican Candidates Employ “al-Qaeda” Fairy Tales

Like paranoid schizophrenic neglecting his meds, Senator John McCain tells us Osama will get us if the United States pulls out of Iraq.

“In the May 15 Republican debate in South Carolina, Senator John McCain of Arizona suggested that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would ‘follow us home’ from Iraq—a comment some viewers may have taken to mean that bin Laden was in Iraq, which he is not,” reports the Boston Globe.

Indeed, Osama is not in Iraq or anywhere else because he died in late December, 2001. Of course, McCain is simply pandering to the ill-informed, that is to say a large percentage of the American people, who had trouble telling the difference between Osama and Saddam. No doubt many of these folks will vote for the Manchurian Candidate from Arizona if he is selected to run for the office of Commander Guy.

“Former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani asserted, in response to a question about Iraq, that ‘these people want to follow us here and they have followed us here. Fort Dix happened a week ago’…. However, none of the six people arrested for allegedly plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey were from Iraq.”

In fact, they are mental deficient patsies who worked out of a pizza joint set-up by the FBI. But then Guiliani, like McCain, is playing to an audience of dullards, the sort of people who base their worldview on Fox News sound bites.

“Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney identified numerous groups that he said have ‘come together’ to try to bring down the United States, though specialists say few of the groups Romney cited have worked together and only some have threatened the United States…. ‘They want to bring down the West, particularly us,’ Romney declared. ‘And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent.’”

Obviously, Mitt Romney is either a moron or, more likely, he is disingenuous, a liar, that is to say he has what it takes to be president.

“Spokespeople for McCain and Romney say the candidates were expressing their deep-seated convictions that terrorists would benefit if the United States were to withdraw from Iraq. The spokesmen say that even if Iraq had no connection to the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists have infiltrated Iraq as security has deteriorated since the invasion, and now pose a direct threat to the United States,” the Boston Globe continues. “But critics, including some former CIA officials, said those statements could mislead voters into believing that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are now fighting the United States in Iraq.”

But then, of course, this is precisely the point, to fool the easily fooled, that is to say an appreciable number of voters who can’t find Iraq on a map, let alone make distinctions between Sunni and Shia Muslims. It does not matter there is very little credible evidence “al-Qaeda” is in Iraq, never mind the incessant propaganda declaring otherwise effusing from the corporate media. In fact, there is very little credible evidence “al-Qaeda” is what the government says it is and yet millions of people, a majority here in the United States, believe the elusory terrorist cave dwellers are a threat to America.

McCain, Guiliani, and Romney “have recently echoed Bush’s longstanding assertion that Iraq is the ‘central battlefront’ in the worldwide war against Al Qaeda and have declared that Al Qaeda would make Iraq its base of operations if the United States withdraws,” thus extending the neocon fabulist ruse, designed to carry out war against ill-defined enemies for generations, as promised. But then, as Winston Smith discovered when he read Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.”

Bush supporters, soon enough to lend support to McCain, Guiliani, or Romney, are so inculcated with impossible and fantastic Brothers Grimm stories about turban-wearing terrorists they have completely surrendered their higher reasoning faculties, that is if they had any to begin with. “The belief that there is a clear connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks has been a key determinant of support for the war. A Harris poll taken two weeks before the 2004 presidential election found that a majority of Bush’s supporters believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks—a claim that Bush has never made. Eighty-four percent believed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ’strong links’ with Al Qaeda, a claim that intelligence officials have long disputed…. But critics have maintained that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney encouraged these ideas by using misleading terms to describe the threat posed by Iraq before the war.”

Of course, this is simply the Boston Globe playing nice. In fact, Bush and Cheney, that is to say the neocons, told numerous lies, not simply used “misleading terms,” and these lies led to the death of more than 750,000 Iraqis.

Following up the duplicitous rhetoric of the neocons as verbalized through Bush and Cheney and thus telegraphed to their stepfordized followers, we are told “some GOP presidential candidates refer to ‘the terrorists’ as one group, blurring distinctions between Al Qaeda, which has attacked the United States repeatedly, and groups that former intelligence officials say have not targeted the United States.”

Again, there is no evidence “al-Qaeda” has “attacked the United States repeatedly,” but never mind, if the Boston Globe declares such things, going on the absurd Alice in Wonderland pronouncements of the neocons, they must be true.

“No point has been emphasized more strongly at GOP debates than the link between the Iraq war and Al Qaeda. During the debates about war funding, GOP leaders have downplayed the role of sectarian violence in Iraq and emphasized the role of Al Qaeda,” the globe tells us. “On Friday, McCain called any attempt to cut Iraq war funding, ‘the equivalent of waving a white flag to Al Qaeda.’”

“Romney’s national press secretary, Kevin Madden, said the former governor’s linking of Shia, Sunni, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood was based on their common hostility to the West. ‘I think [Romney’s statement] was much more directed at intent—they all share a common ideology or intent to bring down Western governments,’ Madden said. ‘There’s a shared attempt to fight any beachhead of democracy in that region.’”

Never mind that this “common hostility” was directly funded by intelligence agencies for specific political reasons, namely to oppose Arab nationalism. “According to CIA agent Miles Copeland, the Americans began looking for a Muslim Billy Graham around 1955… When finding or creating a Muslim Billy Graham proved elusive, the CIA began to cooperate with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim mass organization founded in Egypt but with followers throughout the Arab Middle East… This signalled the beginning of an alliance between the traditional regimes and mass Islamic movements against Nasser and other secular forces,” writes Said K. Aburish, a Palestinian journalist. As well, according to Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies, Israel “aided Hamas directly—the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization).” Israel’s support for Hamas “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” according to another senior CIA official (see Analysis: Hamas history tied to Israel, Richard Sale, United Press International).

“All of the bad actors in the Middle East get mixed up in people’s minds,” Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, which has polled extensively on views on Iraq, told the Boston Globe “That’s why it was easy to play on the perception that Saddam Hussein got together with Osama bin Laden and said ‘Let’s fly some planes into buildings.’ Saddam Hussein was seen as a bad guy in the Middle East, and so it all gets jumbled up in people’s thinking.”

Undoubtedly, it “gets jumbled up in people’s thinking,” as the purpose here is to demonize all Arabs and Muslims and thus continue the clash of civilizations paradigm, a scheme that will naturally continue into the next administration, regardless who is in the Oval Office. McCain, Guiliani, and Romney are simply reading from a script provided by the people who control the vertical and horizontal, an oligarchy with a vested interest in keeping the war against recalcitrant Muslims front and center, as the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East represent one of the final frontiers for the neoliberal plan to break down societies and cultures and thus render the planet into one big slave gulag based on the China model.

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Podhoretz: Bush to Bomb Iran Before Leaving Office

In normal, non-Bushzarro times, a man calling for mass murder would be held in contempt, not held up as an example of the political mainstream and heralded as a “distinguished author.” However, as we are well astride of the Bushzarro era, Norman Podhoretz is provided with a venue—for the proper audience, of course—to advocate the destruction of Iran and the murder of possibly thousands of its citizens. “I believe,” Podhoretz told the Israel Broadcast Authority on May 24 (see video below), “contrary to what many people assume, that [Bush] will [attack Iran] before he leaves office, possibly shortly before he leaves office,” thus leaving the political fallout to the incoming president, more than likely a Democrat. “I think he agrees with the analysis that I offer that there is no alternative to military action.”

Of course, in order to sell this invasion of a sovereign nation, based on illusory claims the mullahs of Iran are in the process of building a nuclear bomb to use against Israel—a crackpot theory but one that remarkably has gained a degree of credence in the United States—Podhoretz and the neocons have erected an elaborate if preposterous edifice to support their Brothers Grimm fable about Iran.

“As the currently main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11, and as (according to the State Department’s latest annual report on the subject) the main sponsor of the terrorism that is Islamofascism’s weapon of choice, Iran too is a front in World War IV. Moreover, its effort to build a nuclear arsenal makes it the potentially most dangerous one of all,” Podhoretz writes for the June issue of Commentary Magazine. “I call this new war World War IV, because I also believe that what is generally known as the cold war was actually World War III, and that this one bears a closer resemblance to that great conflict than it does to World War II. Like the cold war, as the military historian Eliot Cohen was the first to recognize, the one we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of Communism; it is global in scope; it is being fought with a variety of weapons, not all of them military; and it is likely to go on for decades.”

In March, Eliot Cohen was appointed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to serve as Counselor of the State Department, thus the very contagion of the neocon disease now resides at the highest office. It was Cohen, shortly after the new Pearl Harbor event of September 11, 2001, who characterized the long anticipated neocon plan to destroy Muslim society and culture as World War IV. At the time, Cohen claimed “regime change” in Iran could be accomplished with a focus on “pro-Western and anticlerical forces” in the Middle East, a plan now obviously chucked by the wayside, as indicated by Norman Podhoretz.

In order to telegraphic the notion that the Iranians are implacable Muslim fanatics and the only way the United States (at the behest of Israel) can deal with them is by preemptively attacking the country, Podhoretz drags out the neocon doyen, Bernard Lewis. “MAD, mutual assured destruction, [was effective] right through the cold war,” Podhoretz quotes Lewis.

Both sides had nuclear weapons. Neither side used them, because both sides knew the other would retaliate in kind. This will not work with a religious fanatic [like Ahmadinejad]. For him, mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know already that [Iran’s leaders] do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. We have seen it again and again. In the final scenario, and this applies all the more strongly if they kill large numbers of their own people, they are doing them a favor. They are giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all its delights.

In short, according to Podhoretz and Lewis, there really is no alternative short of bombing the dickens out of the country and killing untold numbers—especially if nuclear weapons are used, as the neocons suggest. Naturally, this unspeakable task will be much easier and less burdensome on the conscience of the average American—who is not a psychopath like Podhoretz and his neocon ilk—if all the old moth-eaten artifices and stratagems are employed, even if they are less than effective for people who go beyond the programmed talking heads and crawling lower third ticker on Fox News.

“Like Hitler, [Ahmadinejad] is a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism. Like Hitler, too, he is entirely open about his intentions, although—again like Hitler—he sometimes pretends that he wants nothing more than his country’s just due. In the case of Hitler in 1938, this pretense took the form of claiming that no further demands would be made if sovereignty over the Sudetenland were transferred from Czechoslovakia to Germany. In the case of Ahmadinejad, the pretense takes the form of claiming that Iran is building nuclear facilities only for peaceful purposes and not for the production of bombs.”

But here we come upon an interesting difference between then and now. Whereas in the late 1930’s almost everyone believed, or talked himself into believing, that Hitler was telling the truth when he said he had no further demands to make after Munich, no one believes that Ahmadinejad is telling the truth when he says that Iran has no wish to develop a nuclear arsenal. In addition, virtually everyone agrees that it would be best if he were stopped, only not, God forbid, with military force—not now, and not ever.

It is of course very convenient for Mr. Podhoretz to leave out the International Atomic Energy Agency. Last March, the IAEA “revealed that it has not found any evidence that Teheran had diverted material towards making atomic weapons…. In its report which has been circulated to its 35 board members, the IAEA said that its three years of investigations had not shown ‘any diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices’, the Associated Press reported.”

“A recent U.S. intelligence estimate found that Iran is further away from making bomb-grade uranium than previously thought, according to U.S. officials,” the Washington Post reported in August, 2005. “The IAEA, in its third year of an investigation in Iran, has not found proof of a weapons program.”

None of this matters—or does the fact Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” a calculated mistranslation now accepted fact, thanks to the unscrupulous folks over at the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Mossad front. For Podhoretz and the neocons, the attack against Iran is a crown jewel of the larger agenda, even if they must wait until the very end of the Bush decidership to realize their goal.

Finally, the Podhoretz appearance on Israeli television and his avowed declaration Bush will certainly invade Iran arrives less than two weeks after out-going United Nations ambassador John Bolton told the Daily Telegraph “Iran would be as dangerous as ‘Hitler marching into the Rhineland’ in 1936 and should be prevented by Western military strikes if necessary…. The Pentagon has drawn up contingency plans for military action and some senior White House officials share Mr Bolton’s thinking.”


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Dems Make Excuses for Neoliberal Pelosi Sell Out

I remain flabbergasted over folks, and there appears to be no shortage of them, who believe there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans, who declare the Democrat party to be the anti-war party—or incipient anti-war party, provided the right degree of activism and populist wizardry turning the conscience of the Democrat leadership and thus Congress—no matter the Iraq occupation is still in motion even though the Democrats regained control of Congress more than six months ago.

“Having won the leadership of both houses of Congress in the 2006 congressional elections thanks to a groundswell of antiwar sentiment, the Democratic Party leadership has now provided all the money and more that President Bush requested for the continuation and escalation of a criminal war, and it has done so under terms dictated by the White House,” writes Bill Van Auken. “In the six months since the November elections, the Democrats have sought to placate and deceive the voters who handed them the reins of power in the House and Senate by posturing as opponents of the war, while at the same time pledging to ’support the troops’ by funding that war and continuing to support the geo-strategic goals that underlay the March 2003 invasion in the first place.”

I’d say these blinkered voters were chumped outright. Indeed, a few “patriots,” urging your humble blogger to vote Democrat last November on the absurd hope the Democrats might actually impeach Bush, followed this obviously flawed line of reasoning with pollyannaish hope against hard-bitten political reality. It was as if the stolen election of 2004 had disappeared into the vapors, right behind the stolen election of 2000.

As for the libs, they wasted no time falling all over themselves in an effort to excuse House majority leader Pelosi, who sold the taken for granted anti-war faction of the Democrat party down the proverbial river. “It would appear that the current issue of the Nation, dated June 11, went to press after the Democratic leadership in Congress had formalized its abject surrender to the White House—accepting a war-funding measure without even the pretense of a timetable for withdrawing US troops from Iraq—but before the actual votes in the House and Senate to approve the legislation,” Van Auken continues.

The thrust of this statement is an argument that “disunity” and “defections” by a relative handful of right-wing Democrats have undermined the valiant efforts of the party’s leadership in the House and Senate to legislate a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

Thus, the magazine’s readers are told, the likes of Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Congressman Steny Hoyer, the Democrats’ House majority leader, have “prevented House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid from forcing a timeline on the Administration.”

“The Democratic majority in Congress is so razor-thin that in late May it finally gave up the attempt to pass a funding bill establishing a timeline for withdrawal,” the editorial explains.

The magazine’s editors write as if they were part of a public relations firm hired to massage the images of Pelosi and Reid.

“At least Pelosi and Reid are voting right,” the editorial declares. It cites the House speaker’s and Senate majority leader’s votes on a pair of resolutions that were doomed to defeat from the outset, both calling for a cut in funding for “combat troops” in Iraq.

Here, the timing of the Nation’s editorial served to underscore the fraudulence of its entire thesis. The supposedly principled opponent of war Harry Reid joined 37 other Democrats in the Senate in voting for the war-funding bill. Only 10 Democrats voted against.

As for Pelosi, while personally voting against the measure in the House, she carefully packaged the legislation to ensure its passage by a nearly unanimous Republican minority and 86 Democrats. This was accomplished by means of an adroit parliamentary maneuver, which split a domestic funding portion of the legislation—opposed by some Republicans—from its war spending core, thus assuring that the latter received a solid majority. More importantly, 216 Democrats voted in favor of this procedure—with only seven voting “no”—making the approval of the war spending inevitable.

Of course the war spending was inevitable, as the majority of Democrats are essentially no different than a snake oil salesman who will say anything to gain the trust of the easily blinkered. Pelosi and crew have no intention of ending the occupation of Iraq and less intention of impeaching the Commander Guy and his neocon handlers.

“The US political and economic system, ruled by consensus, is deeply criminalized. It thrives on war and oppression. It is an elite racket, sustained by resource conquest, collusion, fraud, lies, cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. ‘The people’, whose votes never count, are viewed with contempt,” writes Larry Chin.

The Republicans and Democrats are factions of the same criminal New World Order, funded by the same criminal interests, beholden to the same think tanks, foundations, corporations and military-intelligence-industrial interests, following the same geopolitical script, written by bipartisan consensus.

Given this reality, it is no surprise that the Democratic leadership has kept its promise to keep the impeachment of Bush and Cheney “off the table” and reach “across the aisle”. Consensus interests are at stake.

The vast majority of the Democrats, particularly the corrupt Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), want the war and bloodshed to continue.

The vast majority of Democrats are, and have always been, enthusiastic and willing partners in the “war on terrorism” and are co-architects of an ever-expanding “homeland security” apparatus.

The vast majority of Democrats do not oppose the war in the Middle East. They support its expansion and the deepening of the occupation, as long as it is “managed” properly, and under the control of a US-led international consensus.

In addition to selling out anti-war Democrats, Pelosi and crew have sold out the American worker. “Besides ending the Iraq war, the top priority of American voters in November 2006 was fair trade. A Gallup Poll showed that the economy, health care, fuel prices and the energy crisis were the top priority of 47 percent of Democrats (after 61 percent demanding an end of the Iraq debacle), and 42 percent of independent voters shared the same concerns. In the same poll, the immigration issue was in single digits for Democrats and independents,” writes Tom Hayden.

Nevertheless, on May 10 Pelosi, White House officials and pro-corporate Democrats announced a surprise “bipartisan” agreement on trade, without revealing any details.

As the package is rushed to a vote, it appears to be a “freshened” version of NAFTA (the phrase is that of Mickey Kantor, trade czar under President Bill Clinton). This would fall far short of what the voters expected and most Democratic elected officials promised last fall. Pelosi faces strong opposition from most members of her caucus, labor leaders and environmental activists.

She will be promoting the common agendas of Wall Street, Hollywood and the “new Democrats” led by Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek. Like the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, this trade bill will probably pass with a minority of Democrats lending votes to the Republicans.

Back in November, besieged with emails imploring your humble blogger to at minimum urge Americans to vote for Democrats, in order to grease the skids to get rid of Bush and the neocons, I responded by declaring my long held belief there is absolutely no difference between Democrats and Republicans—a vote for either side is a vote for tyranny and feudalism—a fact left out in the open for all to see. Now we have Nancy Pelosi pedaling a “freshened” version of NAFTA, that is to say a brand of neoliberal globalism that will eventually turn the planet into a slave labor gulag based on the Chinese “economic miracle” (or a miracle for loan sharks and financial sector swindlers).

Finally, I implore the street level Democrat to read Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s mentor, who wrote: “The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.”

Naturally, come 2008, the blinkered masses will once again be allowed to “throw the rascals out,” a Democrat will be “elected,” and the Nation magazine and its sanctimonious gaggle of libs will go around tooting their little partisan horns—horns passed out by Katrina vanden Heuvel who is, when not cozying up to Chris Matthews and MSNBC, sitting on the board the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute (FERI), a foundation connected to the election throwing National Endowment for Democracy through FERI Director Brademas (see Bob Feldman, The Nation’s NED Connection).

Some of us will urge people not to vote, except on local issues of importance.

For your humble blogger, the idea of participating in the act of turning the planet into a slave labor gulag and hellish war zone is really too much to stomach.

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The Neocon No Employment List

Now that the Senate is mulching over the “immigration” bill—i.e., legalizing the illegals—there are a few aspects to consider for those of us gainfully employed, or employed for the moment.

For instance, the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office wants to “ensure that the legislation adheres to the values of our country and our Constitution” and worries about a “hostile bureaucracy” in Washington. “The proposed legislation would require every job applicant in America to have their eligibility to work verified by the DHS, using the error-plagued Employment Eligibility Verification System (EEVS). EEVS creates a massive government database containing extraordinary amounts of personal information on everyone in America, tied to each individual’s Social Security number. If DHS makes a mistake in determining work eligibility, there will be virtually no way to challenge the error or recover lost wages due to the bill’s prohibitions on judicial review.”

As should be expected, this EEVS scheme, according to the ACLU, mandates “every person in America would be forced to carry a hardened Social Security card perhaps containing biometric information about the cardholder—essentially a national ID—and present a Real ID-compliant driver’s license to get any new job.” Timothy Sparapani, ACLU Legislative Counsel, added: “Under this already flawed program no one would be able to work in the U.S. without DHS approval—creating a ‘No Work List’ similar to the government’s ‘No Fly List.’ We need immigration reform, but not at this cost.” In other words, the EEVS system will not only sneak in a biometric ID for all citizens, but it also opens the door to punish political enemies, the same way the so-called “No Fly List” arbitrarily punishes political enemies.

As Dave Lindorff noted back in 2002, the “Transportation Security Administration targets political activists for harassment” and the “selectee lists” for this harassment are provided by “federal agencies, such as the FBI, Secret Service or INS.”

As it turns out, on occasion select dissidents end up on the “Terrorist Watch list,” as professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University, discovered earlier this year. “On 1 March 07, I was scheduled to fly on American Airlines to Newark, NJ, to attend an academic conference at Princeton University, designed to focus on my latest scholarly book, Constitutional Democracy, published by Johns Hopkins University Press this past Thanksgiving,” Murphy told Mark Graber. “When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list…. I confess to having been furious that any American citizen would be singled out for governmental harassment because he or she criticized any elected official, Democrat or Republican. That harassment is, in and of itself, a flagrant violation not only of the First Amendment but also of our entire scheme of constitutional government.”

Is it possible selected dissidents will, as well, end up on a “no employment list” in the near future? Considering the actions of the Bush administration—from the Patriot Act to the Military Commissions Act to the unitary decider crowning himself dictator by way of the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive signed with virtually no fanfare earlier this month—the possibility hundreds, if not thousands of people will be denied the authorization to work, simply because they disagree with Bush and his neocon handlers, is a very real prospect.

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Bush Pens Dictatorship Directive, Few Notice

It is hardly surprising not a single corporate newspaper reported the death of the Constitution. Go to Google News and type in “National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive” and hit enter. Google returns ten paltry results, not one from the New York Times, the Washington Post, or related corporate media source. Google Trends rates the story as “mild,” that is to say it warrants nary a blip on the news radar screen. Of course, another death blow to the Constitution, already long on life support, is hardly news. Few understand we now live in a dictatorship, or maybe it should be called a decidership.

“The Bush administration has released a directive called the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive. The directive released on May 9th, 2007 has gone almost unnoticed by the mainstream and alternative media. This is understandable considering the huge Ron Paul and immigration news but this story is equally as huge. In this directive, Bush declares that in the event of a ‘Catastrophic Emergency’ the President will be entrusted with leading the activities to ensure constitutional government. The language in this directive would in effect make the President a dictator in the case of such an emergency,” writes Lee Rogers for Global Research. “The language written in the directive is disturbing because it doesn’t say that the President will work with the other branches of government equally to ensure a constitutional government is protected. It says clearly that there will be a cooperative effort among the three branches that will be coordinated by the President. If the President is coordinating these efforts it effectively puts him in charge of every branch. The language in the directive is entirely Orwellian in nature making it seem that it is a cooperative effort between all three branches but than it says that the President is in charge of the cooperative effort.”

In short, Bush may now declare himself absolute ruler at any moment and Congress can like it or lump it. Naturally, this act of betrayal is of so little importance and consequence, the corporate media believes you are better served knowing Justin Timberlake is in love.

“This directive on its face is unconstitutional because each branch of government the executive, legislative and judicial are supposed to be equal in power,” Lee continues. “By putting the President in charge of coordinating such an effort to ensure constitutional government over all three branches is effectively making the President a dictator allowing him to tell all branches of government what to do.”

So much for the first three articles of the Constitution, designed to make sure there remains a separation of power between branches of government. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” declared James Madison in the Federalist Papers. Madison, in his original draft of the Bill of Rights, included a proposed amendment that would make the separation of powers explicit, but this proposal was rejected, primarily because his fellow members of Congress thought the separation of powers principle was obvious in the Constitution. There was no way for them to read the future, or predict the wholesale selling and buying of Congress, a judiciary stacked with reactionary troglodytes from the Federalist Society, and a largely brain dead public apparently more interested in Britney Spears lip-sync concerts than preserving the Constitution, let alone comprehending it.

Bush, of course, takes his marching orders from higher up on the food chain, more specifically the World Economic Forum, the club of billionaires and transnational corporations that meet annually in Davos, Switzerland, where they plot our future. In January, the Forum, “with numerous links to business networks, policy-makers and government, NGOs and think-tanks,” at the behest of Merrill Lynch, Swiss Re and the Center for Risk Management and Decision Processes, and Wharton School, produced Global Risks 2007, a report containing various dire “global risk” scenarios, including “a full-blown [influenza] pandemic, with one million deaths worldwide.” Other possible “global risk” scenarios include “international terrorism” and “climate change.”

But what does all of this have to do with Bush and the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive?

“The Directive slipped out relatively unnoticed by the mainstream media, yet it has important and positive implications for the future resiliency of public sector operations in the United States,” reports Continuity Central. “The concepts of a National Continuity Coordinator and a centrally directed National Continuity Implementation Plan are to be welcomed in principle and are something which other countries should look seriously at emulating.”

Earlier in the year the World Economic Forum called for such a position to be set up in every government in its ‘Global Risks 2007’ report. This championed the appointment of ‘Country Risk Officers’ who would provide a focal point in government for mitigating global risks across departments, learning from private-sector approaches and escaping a ‘silo-based’ approach.

As for the position of National Continuity Coordinator, it went to Frances Fragos Townsend, chair of the Homeland Security Council, who reports to Bush, or rather the neocons and a scattering of neolibs who tell Dubya what to say and do every morning.

“Townsend, as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, by virtue of the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive signed May 9, 2007, by President Bush, is also National Continuity Coordinator,” notes SourceWatch. The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive states: “The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government. In order to advise and assist the President in that function, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (APHS/CT) is hereby designated as the National Continuity Coordinator. The National Continuity Coordinator, in coordination with the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), without exercising directive authority, shall coordinate the development and implementation of continuity policy for executive departments and agencies. The Continuity Policy Coordination Committee (CPCC), chaired by a Senior Director from the Homeland Security Council staff, designated by the National Continuity Coordinator, shall be the main day-to-day forum for such policy coordination.”

In essence, the globalist oligarchy, from on-high in Davos, through “business networks, policy-makers … NGOs and think-tanks,” are driving policies designed to reduce the Constitution to an irrelevancy. Of course, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are but the last impediment to establishing a globalist soviet in the United States, soon to be merged into a North American Union, itself but a component of larger “trading” blocs carved out by the globalists.

Considering all of this, it makes perfect sense the corporate media ignored the rollout of the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, same as they ignore the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, even though the latter involves the direct participation of Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Naturally, any talk of conspiracy to sell out the nation and dismantle the Constitution and the Bill of Rights relegates one to the tinfoil hat brigade, for if such things are not reported upon or discussed at Fox News, they naturally fall in the province of kooky conspiracy theories.

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Daily Kos: Will Most Certainly Be Fooled Again

As Albert Einstein supposedly quipped, the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Thus, using Daily Kos as an example, we may consider street level Democrats insane.

“I’ve never been under any illusion that this war would end before the next Democratic president took charge. But when a party wins control of Congress on ending the war, I thought they would at least work to make that happen,” writes the popular blogger. “That way, they’d show the American people that hey—these guys will really fight for what they were elected to do!”

In fact, the “elected,” who are of course selected to win, are doing precisely “what they were elected to do,” and it has nothing to do with ending the “war” against the people of Iraq but rather extending and expanding the agenda, per the meticulously arranged script. Democrats are entirely oblivious to this process and the Daily Kos blogger, a person many folks consider politically savvy, demonstrates amnesia, a common enough malady, as he fails to remember Lyndon Johnson, who escalated the Vietnam war, or FDR, who tricked the United States into the Second World War, and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson before him, a one-worlder who not only manipulated the country into the First World War but also gave us the Federal Reserve System, that is to say selling out the nation to a cartel of international bankers.

One does not need a crystal ball or tea leafs to predict “disappointing” political events, as Mr. Kos characterizes the inevitable. Problem here is faith in the left side of the one party system, a brigade sent in after the right side fulfills its assigned set of tasks and thus earns the enmity of the people, who are so effortlessly tricked by tag team politics. “Congressional Democrats made a promise to force change in Iraq. Had they done their job, Bush would’ve found a way around it—signing statements, ignoring them, spurring a drawn-out Constitutional crisis, whatever.”

Never mind that so-called signing statements go back to Monroe and the darling of the Democrats, Bill Clinton, produced his share, along with his predecessors, Bush Senior and Reagan (in total, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton signed 247 signing statements, trumping Bush Junior’s so far record of 108 signing statements).

It is, as well, simply amazing that apparently mature adults believe—over and over, thus eliciting Einstein’s observation—the fallacious and designed to be broken promises of Democrats, or Republicans for that matter. How many times do these adults need to be betrayed and made fools before they get a clue?

“But at least people would have a clear distinction between the Bush party, and those trying to clean up the mess,” the Kos Meister continues. “But today, that trust of the voters was betrayed. Democrats proved that they won’t fight for what is right, nor will they fight to keep the promises they made the electorate.”

Au contraire, the Democrats are doing “what is right,” just not “right” for the American people, but rather for their masters, the bankers and transnational corporations that own and run the country, indeed much of the world, with the exception of Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and a few other hold-outs to the neoliberal nightmare. Democrats and Republicans agree on this, however the Democrats are far more polished, preferring “covert action,” that is to say murder and mayhem in the dark, and “color revolutions” to the testosterone driven and country club armchair antics of the neocons, who purposely violate polite and time honored protocol stipulating a smile while a knife is stuck in the back. At the end of the day, both “parties” stand for the same thing and it is incumbent street level Democrats make distinctions, lest they go through yet another selection, er election cycle with blinders firmly attached.

“They proved that they are as weak, as unprincipled, and as ineffective as Republicans and the media have claimed they are. They reinforced myriad negative talking points, and gave voters a new reason to distrust them.”

But of course, although it is not accurate to declare congressional Democrats weak, unprincipled, and ineffective—they never intended to put an end to the carnage and misery in Iraq, it was simply a pose to get the forever chumped street level Democrats to vote them back in office, it was nothing but yet another dog and pony show and one would think even the most dullard of Democrat would be able to recognize a dog and pony show by now.

Come 2008, very little will change. No doubt, as well, we can expect the street level Democrats, with Kos and his comrades leading the charge, to accept the latest and greatest scam, dressed up as an “anti-war” Democrat, and turn out at the polls, as they did in 2006, expecting to end the engineered carnage in Iraq. Once again, Einstein’s maxim will come into play, as will that of Wilhelm Reich—to paraphrase: the slave-master relationship leads to predictable results, terminating in the elevation of the worst sort of dictators and psychopaths, from Hitler and Stalin to Bush down to the next hand-picked ruler, probably Hillary Clinton.

I’ll bet a dollar to a donut Kos and crew will be onboard with Hillary, as they were with John Kerry, a Skull and Bones distant cousin to the current Commander Guy.

Some things, lamentably, never change—that is until people are reduced to picking tubers out of the scorched earth for dinner.

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Romney, Tancredo “Shocked” CIA Outed, Not So Shocked Over “Peaceful” Plan to Destabilize Iran

“I was shocked to see the ABC News report regarding covert action in Iran,” Mitt Romney told reporters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Meanwhile, Tom Tancredo, the Colorado Republican who likes the idea of water boarding kidnapped sheep herders and dirt farmers, called for an investigation into who leaked the information and “condemned” ABC News for “running the story which could jeopardize American lives.”

Of course, for Romney, Tancredo, and a whole lot of other Republicans and Democrats, there is nothing wrong with “covert action” in Iran, that is to say destabilizing the country through terrorism and funding outlaw political groups. “The ABC News story reported that President Bush had given the CIA authorization to conduct a nonlethal covert action against Iran involving propaganda, disinformation and the manipulation of Iran’s international banking transactions,” reports Brian Ross.

No word on the other stuff Bush has authorized, or the fact reported earlier this month that the “governments of Saudi Arabia and the United States are working with other states in the Middle East to sponsor covert action against Iran,” including “covert attacks … against Iran’s oil sector,” according to Michael Roston. In fact, as Seymour Hersh reported in early 2005, Bush gave a wink and nod to the Pentagon, allowing them to run “operations off the books,” unchecked by supposed legal restrictions imposed on the CIA. Under “new rules,” the “Special Forces community” have created “action teams” in “target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations,” no problem if said “terrorist organizations” were elected by the people of the “target countries.”

It was the New York Post headline, however, that really took the cake: “CIA Launches ‘Peaceful’ Plot to Take Down Iran’s Maniac,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “The plan is designed to peacefully pressure Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map—to cease the enrichment program, which could lead to the development of nuclear weapons, and stop aiding terrorists fighting in neighboring Iraq,” never mind Ahmadinejad never called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” it is fully within its rights under the NPT to engage in nuclear enrichment, and there is no convincing evidence Iran is “aiding terrorists,” i.e., freedom fighters, in Iraq.

The CIA, naturally, does very little by way of “peaceful” intervention, as John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola, under then director Bush Senior, revealed in 1987. According to Stockwell’s estimation, the CIA, as of the late 1980s, was responsible for killing around six million people in “secret wars” against third world nations, that is to say “covert action” of the sort we are assured is now peacefully carried out against the elected government of Iran. Add to the total the million or so killed through medieval sanctions against Iraq under Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush the Junior, and Junior killing an additional 700,000 over the last few years, and you have crimes approaching those of the Nazis, responsible for killing 15 million, although “Uncle Joe” Stalin apparently rivaled this number by killing over 20 million people, and Mao Ze-Dong’s “cultural revolution” claimed nearly 50 million human souls. At any rate, the CIA, under various presidents, is a top drawer organization when it comes to killing people off in large numbers.

Since one needs to be a psychopath to rule the nation, or be considered to be selected to rule the nation, it is hardly surprising Mitt Romney and Tom Tancredo are “shocked” over ABC News decision to run this story.

Imagine, however, if the shoe was on the other foot, if a news story had slipped out revealing Iran launched “peaceful” covert action designed to destabilize the Bush administration. Every yahoo in the country would be in the streets demanding Iran be reduced to a glass parking lot.

But then, it was Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State, who declared: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

In other words, if we have to kill seven or eight million people, including babies and grandmothers, and overthrow elected governments, target hospitals and water purification plants with cruise missiles, spread around cancer by way of depleted uranium, so be it.

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Horowitz Scrivener Castigates Millions of Americans as Fifth Column Traitors

Let us consider FrontPage magazine, the website run by former Marxist turned neocon David Horowitz, where the old stale one-dimensional political spectrum, otherwise known as the false left-right paradigm, remains in full swing, primarily due to the fact such dialectic blather attracts neocon wannabes with checkbooks.

On May 21, John Perazzo played the left-right paradigm for all it is worth—that is to say not much—and attacked your humble blogger and a handful of others, including Dave Lindorff, Jason Miller, Mark Dice, the late Edward Said, and even the venerable target of opportunity for self-described “conservatives” and “liberals” alike, Noam Chomsky, as well a favorite target of the Horowtiz clan and a target, no doubt, they have turned more than a few bucks on, not that they need the bucks considering all the money Horowitz has received from the documented CIA asset, Richard Mellon Scaife.

“Consider Kurt Nimmo, a resident of Las Cruces, New Mexico and publisher of the political blog ‘Another Day in the Empire.’ Nimmo also writes for CounterPunch, a website run by Alexander Cockburn, the adoring scion of one of Stalin’s most notorious journalistic agents, a supporter of the Soviet empire to the end of its days, and in the present conflict a self-declared enemy of his adopted country in its effort to defend itself against Islamo-fascism,” writes Perazzo, after prefacing his screed by comparing dissidents to Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose. “In a June 2006 article, Nimmo predicted that the United States would soon launch a frivolous, unwarranted invasion of peaceful Iran. This warning was issued from the platform of Uruknet.info, an Italy-based, Baathist-run website that honors Saddam Hussein and depicts the United States as the world’s leading terrorist state. Nimmo describes Uruknet as ‘one of my favorite web sites… indispensable, one of the best web sites out there for news focused on Iraq and the Middle East.’”

First, I no longer write for Counterpunch and have not done so for a couple years, not that I expect Mr. Perazzo to do his homework, as he is determined to link your humble blogger to Alexander Cockburn, who we are told is a Stalinist, a term about as relevant today as Luxemburgist. It is, however, interesting Perazzo would mention the political persuasion of Cockburn’s ancestors while not doing the same in regard to his boss, David Horowitz, who was begat by a couple dyed-in-the-wool Stalinists, as Mr. Horowitz has readily admitted. But never mind, the idea here is guilt by association.

I have never espoused communism—although Horowitz did a few decades ago, that is before the magic went out of the “New Left” and David took note of the neocon pasture on the other side of the fraudulent left-right divide where the grass is greener, that is to say the color of greenbacks, watered by reactionary foundations and the CIA. As a reminder of this, every few days I receive a boilerplated email from David angling for cash, lest the “fifth columnists” take over the neighborhood college. I have sent several emails asking politely to be removed from this spam email list, but to no avail. Is it possible David Horowitz is like the disgraced preacher Robert Tilton, who ferreted through in-coming mail in search of checks while letters went not only unread but were unceremoniously dumped in the trash?

Neocons of Perazzo’s caliber love to play the guilt by association card. As I have noted here on numerous occasions, I am not associated with Uruknet, or for that matter any other website or publication. It is true, however, that Uruknet, and in fact hundreds of other websites and blogs, repost my material, a practice I encourage, although this does not mean I support each and every website reposting my articles. Neocons seem to have a problem understanding this very easily understood concept, one practiced millions of times each and every day. It is true, as well, that Uruknet posts articles less than condemnatory on the subject of Saddam Hussein and the editor of the website disagrees with my characterization of Hussein as a dictator nurtured by the CIA and various U.S. presidents. Even so, Perazzo is correct, I have described Uruknet as indispensable and for a very good reason—as a new site, it posts articles the corporate media refuses to publish. As the neocon concentration camp apologist and Fox News regular Michelle Malkin realizes, Uruknet educates a lot of people to the truth and that’s why she spearheaded a campaign to get the site delisted over a Google, an effort that ultimately failed.

As for Iran, I no longer gaze into crystal balls. I have no idea if the neocons will attack that country before the Commander Guy leaves office, although I do know, and it is public knowledge, Iran is at the top of the neocon to-do list.

Mr. Perazzo spends the rest of his time lumping in Joseph Massad, Al-Ahram, Hamid Dabashi, Al Jazeera, in addition to the above enumerated, and making certain to mention “Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaeda terrorists” in the same breath. In fact, the whole point of Perazzo’s article is to draw attention to what he calls “the mixed bag of fifth column leftists whose pathological hatred for the United States inspires them not only to promote America’s defeat at the hands of the Islamo-fascists, but to do so from the media platforms of enemy camp. These are not critics who wish to see America find a better way to win the war and secure the peace. Rather, hatred towards their country and countrymen inspires in them a wish to see both suffer unconditional, total defeat.”

People of Mr. Perazzo’s ilk, that is to say fascist neocons, are certainly not determined to find “a better way to win the war and secure the peace,” but rather promise to wage an interminable and open-ended war of destruction for generations to come—as Dick Cheney is fond of telling us—and thus harm, if not destroy more than a billion Muslims, much to the horror and disgust of the world at large, not that we should expect John Perazzo to mention such an unbecoming fact revealed continually in worldwide polls and surveys. In other words, it is the “pathological hatred” demonstrated by the neocons and their fellow travelers such as the snake oil salesman David Horowitz that pose a threat to America, not those opposed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Finally, if we are to use Perazzo’s yardstick to measure treason, most Americans, who overwhelmingly oppose the occupation of Iraq and continually express when asked their desire to bring the troops home, are guilty of wanting their country to “suffer unconditional, total defeat.”

Apparently, John Perazzo considers the vast majority of his countrymen and women as little more than “an internal fifth column…. conducting their unpleasant business from the bowels of the enemy camp.”

Talk about pathological hatred.

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Papers Please—and Your Biometric Data

According to the New York Times, by way of Raw Story, the immigration bill currently wending its way through Congress “would require employers to re-verify the identity of every single person currently employed in the United States. Not only would it place a considerable burden on both government and business, but the verification system currently being tested has shown a significant rate of error.”

Of course, the New York Times does not bother to suggest a solution for this supposed problem. Congress critter David Bonner, however, has proposed that the Social Security Administration require SS cards “contain an electronic signature strip that contains an encrypted electronic identification strip, unique to that individual,” according to Bonner’s web page. Neither Bonner’s scheme or the one included in the “immigration proposal with traction in Congress” specifies “what the biometric would be, but it could range from a simple digital photo to a fingerprint or even an iris scan,” notes Wired News.

As to be expected, the American Civil Liberties Union is clueless. “Do we really think the migrant workers are going to show up at the pickle farm and the farmer is going to demand ID and have a laptop in the field to check their ID?” said ACLU legislative counsel Tim Sparapani. It has nothing to do with pickle farmers or illegals streaming across the border in search of jobs that pay such dismal wages precious few Americans will take them. Rather, it has to do with eventually making sure every American—indeed, every person on the planet—has his or her papers in order. Of course, papers are so yesterday, so the idea is to capture biometric data on every person, beginning with workers. It will begin with an SS card and eventually a subdermal microchip, as cards are easily lost or stolen.

It appears the effort to attach a biometric SS ID card to current “immigration reform” (i.e., across the board amnesty for illegal immigrants) is a way to cut off Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy at the pass, as Leahy plans to introduce a bill to repeal the Real ID Act. “Under the Act, states and federal government … would share access to a vast national database that could include images of birth certificates, marriage licenses, divorce papers, court-ordered separations and medical records for more than 240 million Americans with no requirements or controls on how this information might be used,” writes James Parks on the AFL-CIO Now Blog. “The database also could contain detailed information on the name, date of birth, race, religion, ethnicity, gender, address, telephone, e-mail address and Social Security numbers for every American.” Mr. Parks neglected to mention such cards would likely also contain biometric information such as retinal scans, fingerprints, DNA data and RFID tracking technology.

As Orwellian as retinal scans, fingerprints, DNA data, and RFID tracking technology sounds, it is simply a matter of selling the scheme to the docile, fear-conditioned masses. Get them used to swiping a biometric card in order to get a job or a driver’s license and it will only be a matter of time before they will be convinced an identity theft proof biochip for the same purpose is the next logical step. “Over half of the population now supports some form of national identification,” writes Charlotte Twight for the Cato Institute. “If Americans accept a National ID system as they accepted SSNs, and if the intrusiveness of such a system expands as did government-mandated SSN usage, ten years from now the idea of a national microchip system may not seem as alien and repugnant as it does today. As with SSNs, people will get used to it.”

And for those unable to get used to it, there is the prospect of starvation, as no doubt a “smart” microchip will eventually be used for financial transactions—or more to the point, if you refuse to be scanned, you will not be allowed to buy food in the Brave New World envisioned by our neoliberal corporate rulers.

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Email to Chris Cook

Chris, I don’t understand how you or Al Rycroft can be held responsible for opinions posted on the PEJ website. Of course, I don’t claim to understand the arcane laws in Canada. It appears, in Canada, you have human rights as opposed to natural rights, the former of course dispensed at the whim of the government, while the latter are considered our birthright, or at least they were once upon a time here in America.

Obviously, the Deputy Secretary General of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Center for Human Rights of B’nai Brith cannot tell the difference between racial hatred and criticism of the national policies of a foreign state, itself guilty of racism—indeed, predicated on racism, as a cursory reading of historical Zionist writings reveals. It is beyond me why Canada feels obliged to protect a foreign nation and finds it expedient to persecute Canadians holding politically incorrect opinions, that is to say politically incorrect for the likes of B’nai Brith, essentially a sentinel and attack dog for the state of Israel.

In Israel, they call these folks “sayanim,” basically a fifth column. As a gentile, of course, I’m not supposed to mention such things.

On the Complaint Form, Harry Abrams of the Center for Human Rights of B’nai Brith indicates he has “reasonable grounds for believing that I have been discriminated against.” Did PEJ slander or defame Mr. Abrams? No, it appears the alleged “discrimination” enumerated on the complaint form is directed against the policies of the state of Israel, not Mr. Abrams. Am I to assume Mr. Abrams works for the Israeli government? Or is it possible the B’nai Brith works for the Israeli government?

In fact, Mr. Abrams tells us he is Canadian. “My name is Harry Abrams, I am a Canadian citizen of Jewish faith, and the British Columbia representative for the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada, who wishes to co-join me as a fellow complainant in this action…. The premise of this complaint is a contention that both individually and collectively, editors, management and directors of the Prometheus Institute and the internet publication known as Peace Earth and Justice News contrive to promote ongoing hatred affecting persons identifiable as Jews and/or citizens of Israel.”

I do not of course claim to speak for the other writers mentioned in this politically motivated complaint. However, in regard to my writing, characterized by Mr. Abrams as “hatred,” I can emphatically state it is not directed at “persons identifiable as Jews and/or citizens of Israel,” certainly not Canadian Jews such as Mr. Abrams.

No, that is not exactly correct—the writing in question is a criticism of certain Israeli citizens, namely the political and military leadership of the Israeli state. If it is “hatred” to oppose the illegal invasion of Lebanon, the wanton and criminal dispersal of more than a million cluster bombs in the southern part of that country, and the long term and apparently endless persecution of the Palestinians by “Jews and/or citizens of Israel,” so be it, I am a hate criminal, according to the distorted logic of the Israeli special interest group, the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada, once again accurately described as sayanim.

Finally, I hope for the best in this case, even though the odds are stacked against PEJ and the Prometheus Institute, as Canadians have allowed, as Americans have also allowed, their government to be hijacked by people who have the best interest of a foreign country at heart.

See Cook’s Regarding Israel: An Hateful Weekend.


B.C. B’nai Brith: Your Humble Blogger is a Hate Criminal

Earlier today, I received an email from Chris Cook, the assistant editor of Atlantic Free Press and host of the Gorilla Radio program in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. According to Chris, the British Columbia branch of the B’nai Brith has accused the PEJ News website of hate crimes for posting eighteen articles, including at least one your humble blogger. In my case, the B’nai Brith apparently took exception to Israel Plans Torture Center for Abducted Lebanese, an article detailing the fact, reported by Yedioth Internet, that Israel “started constructing a temporary detention center designed to hold the Lebanese prisoners” during the invasion of Lebanon last July.

Of course, it is not a hate crime for Yedioth Internet to report such things, but it is a hate crime for a blogger to write about the facts, especially when he mentions the indisputable fact Israel violated the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment during its previous invasion and occupation of Lebanon. It is also a hate crime to mention a 1999 Human Rights Watch report that stated Israel had imprisoned hundreds of Lebanese arbitrarily in the Khiam torture facility. “Many of the detainees, including women, have been tortured during interrogation and subjected to abysmal conditions of confinement,” Human Rights Watch stated in the report.

It is probably more hateful to cite Arjan El Fassed and Electronic Intifada. “Prisoners have been routinely tortured [at Khiam], three times a day. Torture included beatings, being prodded with electrical cables in sensitive parts of the body and being hung from painful positions…. Detainees were given inadequate food rations and beaten when they prayed…. Among the prisoners were Lebanese journalist Cosette Ibrahim, kidnapped while reporting in southern Lebanon.” No doubt Cosette Ibrahim is a hate criminal. “Some of the detainees were children…. Between 1987 and 1995 prisoners in Khiam were not allowed access to their families. They were denied the right of prompt judicial review of the lawfulness of their detention. A number of detainees have died in Khiam, some of them after torture, others because of lack of medical treatment.”

As well, it is a hate crime to mention the Ketziot prison in Israel. “The soldiers used bulldozers to push the dunes up like mountains around it. The sun there felt like someone was pouring fire on you. It was a place with no buildings, only tents with cells,” a Palestinian, Abed Khalil, told the Inter Press Service Newswire. “The floors of the cells at Ketziot did not sit on concrete but directly on the desert. At night when you slept, the scorpions and black snakes came in through the sand…. If you did not give information about people in your camp, the soldiers beat you. If you did give information, they said it proved you were a terrorist, so they kept you longer. And they beat you.”

Abed Khalil is not only a terrorist, but a hate criminal to boot.

However, it is especially hateful and antisemitic to write the following: “In Israel, with racist and sociopathic Zionists at the helm, it will be business as usual in regard to the Lebanese people, who are considered little more than untermenschen.”

Of course, here in America, we have our very own sociopaths, more accurately described as psychopaths, at the helm, although they are not particularly racist, as they slaughter people of all races and creeds—as millions of Iraqis, Serbs, Vietnamese, Latin Americans, and others can attest. I write about the American version of psychopath as well, but that’s not the business of B’nai Brith in British Columbia.

If you think the B’nai Brith is nothing to worry about in Canada, consider they have worked closely with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal and played an instrumental role in the arrest and deportation of Ernst Zundel to Germany. Zundel now sits in a German prison, convicted of Holocaust denial. Another writer, the late Doug Collins of the Vancouver area North Shore News, was targeted by the B’nai Brith in 1994 for infringing “human rights”—specifically, he had criticized the film Schindler’s List—an accusation summarily dismissed by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.

In 2000, before “everything changed,” the B’nai Brith told CBC News “anti-Semitism is on the rise in Canada,” even though statistics demonstrate “there were 42 reported incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism in 1998, down a significant 28 per cent from the 58 incidents reported last year. This trend is consistent with police reports across the country and may be the result of crackdowns by the police Hate Crimes Units” of the sort B’nai Brith apparently want to sic on PEJ News for the hate crime of posting articles critical of Israel.

“I have received some pretty disgusting hate mail over the last several years,” Frank Dimant, Executive Vice President of B’nai Brith Canada, told the CBC, “but I must admit it was particularly terrifying to be the target of a death threat on the Internet.”

Join the club, Frank. I get death threats and harassing telephone calls at my place of work. One particularly violent mental case, who describes himself as a Zionist, urges his demented friends to grab their guns and execute me for “treason,” that is to say for the crime of criticizing Israel and the Bush neocons. Soon enough, no doubt, engaging in such political speech will be a punishable crime here in America, too.

In the old days, B’nai Brith going after writers and a Canadian website would not necessarily put an American writer in danger. But all of that will soon be water under the proverbial bridge, because our rulers are working steadily toward a North America Union, that is to say they are “harmonizing” not only trade but law as well. Soon enough we will be one big happy Neoliberal World Order family and thought crimes committed in what was once considered the United States will be thought crimes in what was once Canada and Mexico.

As it turns out, the government here in the United States, soon to be the middle section of the North American Union, has done a mighty fine job of selling our very own hate crime legislation. “A new Gallup poll shows an overwhelming majority of Americans support the hate-crimes bill now before Congress,” reports the homosexual website, Advocate.com. “The bill would expand federal hate-crimes law to cover crimes committed against people because of their sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity. According to the poll, conducted May 10–13, support for the bill cut across partisan, ideological, and religious lines.”

Of course, the hate crimes bill now rolling through Congress is all gussied up with the politically correct veneer of “gender identity and disability,” but this is simply sugar-coating on a bitter and destructive pill designed to gut what remains of the Bill of Rights and national sovereignty, as our rulers don’t give a whit about gender, disability, or so-called sexual orientation. Our rulers are far more determined to punish thought crime, specifically the crime of opposition to rule by the global and transnational corporate elite.

“Hate crimes legislation is really a Trojan horse,” writes Chris Stovall, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund. “Essentially, everywhere that hate crimes laws have been passed, it inevitably and eventually leads to prosecution of speech and expression. There is one interpretation in reading the bill that would allow state attorney generals to ask the federal government to come in and take over the prosecution of an alleged state hate crimes offense…. Canada has had several examples in the last couple of years of people who have been convicted or at least prosecuted and investigated under a law that criminalizes basically as hate propaganda any speech that’s critical of homosexual behavior. That can be anything from writing an editorial to a newspaper to possibly preaching a sermon.”

As PEJ News is in the process of discovering, hate crimes are not limited to speech critical of homosexuals. In the case of PEJ News and your humble blogger, it is all about the B’nai Brith and criticism of Israel.

Addendum

Chris Cook wrote while I was writing the above. As it now appears, I am a hate criminal in spades, as the B’nai Brith considers four of my posts on PEJ News site to be scurrilous and hateful.

Here are the additional three articles:

Christian “AIPAC” Supports Palestinian Starvation
Starving Babies and Making Lebanon Dark
London Mayor Attacked for Opposition to Islamophobia

In regard to the powers of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, consider the following, delivered by Mary Gusella, retired Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, on December 16, 2005 in Ottawa:

The Tribunal has the power to order a respondent to cease and desist from the spreading of hate messages and to not engage in similar activity in the future. Compensation of up to $20,000 can be awarded to individuals named on a hate site and civil penalties of up to $10,000 can be imposed. Most importantly, decisions of the Tribunal can be made Orders of the Federal Court. Failure to comply with a Federal Court Order can lead to a finding of contempt. On three occasions, twice with regard to [white-supremacist John Ross Taylor], contempt of court proceedings have resulted in the imprisonment of a respondent.

Opening Address: Hate on the Internet Conference

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Corporate Media Embraces 9/11 Blowback Theory

Now that Ron Paul has reaffirmed the neocon fantasy version of nine eleven events, stating during the so-called debate earlier this week that we were attacked by “al-Qaeda” and Osama bin Laden, when in fact there is no evidence to validate this fairy tale, the “liberal” corporate media, as represented by CNN’s Roland S. Martin, has decided to give the “blowback” theory legs.

“Granted, Americans were severely damaged by the hijacking of U.S. planes, and it has resulted in a worldwide fight against terror,” writes Martin. “Was it proper for the United States to respond to the attack? Of course! But should we, as a matter of policy, and moral decency, learn to think and comprehend that our actions in one part of the world could very well come back to hurt us, or, as Paul would say, blow back in our face? Absolutely. His real problem wasn’t his analysis, but how it came out of his mouth.”

In fact, the problem was indeed “his analysis,” as it accepts as conclusive the mendacious fairy tale contrived by the neocons. From the obvious demolition of Building Seven, not mentioned in the official “faith-based” 9-11 Omission Report, to the plethora of scientific evidence indicating it was impossible for jets alone to bring down the WTC buildings, and beyond to the glossed over testimony of Norman Mineta implicating Dick Cheney and the highly unlikely NORAD and National Reconnaissance Office exercises and war games coinciding with the events, it should be apparent to a grade school kid there is something rotten with the official version.

And yet both Ron Paul and Roland S. Martin accept it as fact.

Both Paul and Martin tell us it was “proper for the United States to respond to the attack,” even though the government offered no compelling evidence of who might be the culprit. In a matter of a couple hours after the attack, Senator Orrin Hatch told the media, after a briefing “by the highest levels of the FBI and of the intelligence community … that this looks like the signature of Osama bin Laden, and that he may be the one behind this.” General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO and mad bomber of Serbia, told the media: “Only one group has this kind of ability and that is Osama bin Laden’s.” Meanwhile, an aide to Donald Rumsfeld wrote a now infamous note, declaring: “Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].… Need to move swiftly.… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” Bush supposedly scribbled in his diary, “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.… We think it’s Osama bin Laden.” It is hardly coincidental this is the same “Pearl Harbor” event, required to unleash war in the name of Pax Americana, mentioned prior to nine eleven by the PNAC boys, including William Kristol, John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, Dick Cheney, Frank Gaffney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and other key neocons.

On September 23, 2001, Colin Powell declared the neocons would “put before the world, the American people, a persuasive case that … it is al-Qaida, led by Osama bin Laden, who has been responsible” for the attacks. “He said the evidence will embrace new information gathered by law enforcement and intelligence agents on the attacks, as well as material used in indictments against bin Laden in the bombing of U.S. embassies in east Africa in 1998. It may also cite leads developed in the investigation of the bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen last October,” the Seattle Post Intelligencer reported at the time.

Of course, this so-called “evidence” was not shared with “the American people,” as Powell promised. “Since the first demands for ‘evidence,’ the U.S. government has busied itself preparing a laundry list of suitable accusations and diplomatically correct labels to hurl at bin Laden and his terrorist cells. The mysterious ‘proof’ of his guilt has been shared, we’re told with Allied leaders in Europe, as well as with various Pakistani and Afghan (rebel) authorities. NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson later characterized a secret U.S. briefing as offering ‘clear and compelling evidence,’ while Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced he was ‘quite satisfied’ the information ‘proves’ bin Laden’s involvement,” Time Magazine reported on October 30, 2001. “To date, very little evidence has been made public, for obvious security reasons, so any discussion has been necessarily relegated to the realm of speculation.” Moreover, the “evidence” is not “of the type that would stand up in an American court of law.”

Indeed, the “realm of speculation” is the only “evidence” we have, and it was offered by a coterie of neocons who have since demonstrated their skill at manufacturing lies and cobbling together fantastic fabrications in order to invade and occupy Iraq, killing nearly a million human beings in the process. It is, to say the least, remarkable Ron Paul would believe such people.

It is also remarkable the so-called truth and patriot movements have not bothered to call Ron Paul out on any of this. It would seem they are so desperate for a presidential candidate, one who plays footsy with the likes of the nine eleven criminal Rudy Giuliani, they have swept aside the glaring incongruities of the “blowback” theory.

But then, I suppose, elections do funny things to the best of us, including the spectacle of having good people once again allow themselves to be so easily played for fools by our rulers.

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Hate Radio’s Gunny Bob Newman: GPS All the Muslims

Apparently mindful of his ratings at 850 AM KOA radio in Denver, the radio talk show host “Gunny Bob” Newman has demanded that “all Muslim immigrants admitted to the U.S. to wear GPS units and have the FBI bug their homes and monitor their telephone calls and e-mails,” according to WorldNetDaily.

“Newman, on his talk show on a station that also carries Rush Limbaugh, the nation’s most-listened-to radio talk show host, said he was fed up with attacks by Muslims on the U.S. and its interests,” a reference to the Pizzeria Six, arrested for supposedly plotting, with the help of an FBI informant, an attack on a military base in New Jersey, an absurd and cartoonish plot that prompted Jerry White to note that “the various terrorist ‘plots’ exposed by the Bush administration have virtually without exception been characterized by a similar lack of any real preparation for violence combined with the central role of a covert informant/agent provocateur.”

But never mind, Gunny, as a neocon wannabe, has an agenda, and it includes non-Muslim Americans as well.

Back in February, 2005, as the bull dog corporate media was taking Ward Churchill to task for the crime of exercising his First Amendment right to free speech, I wrote for Press Action: “According to Bob Newman, host of the ‘Gunny Bob Show’ on Newsradio 850 KOA and the ‘Inhuman Newman’s Anger-Management Hour’ on 630 KHOW, both in Denver, Ward Churchill has violated U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2381, which states in part that citizens convicted of treason ’shall suffer death’ or imprisonment. Newman wants Churchill charged under this law archaic law, not used since the days of Joe McCarthy.”

“Many Americans do not understand that the First Amendment does not overrule laws like Sections 2381 (treason) and 2385 (advocating the overthrow of the government) of Title 18 of the United States Code,” Gunny wrote for the neocon website, MensNewsDaily, on February 27, 2005. “Ward Churchill’s acts are treasonous (they aid and comfort the enemy) and he publicly advocates the overthrow of the government and total destruction of America…. The dodo became instinct (sic) when it could not deal with new threats to its existence. A mere 81 years passed from the time those threats were introduced to the dodo’s habitat to the day the last of the dodos walked in the denuded forests of Mauritius…. There’s a movement afoot among liberals to change our national bird to the dodo…. Who among us will stop them?”

Ward Churchill and deluded Muslim patsies working at pizza joints, of course, do not threaten to make Bob and his ilk go the way of the dodo, although, if they keep up their incessant drumbeat of paranoid, fascistic, warmongering hysteria, and such continues to receive the blessing of Clear Channel and Fox News, thus infecting a large number of easily influenced Americans, sooner or later a country on the neocon target list—China and Russia come to mind—may take measures to put an end to the pathology encouraged by the likes of Gunny Bob Newman.

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Hillary and the Blue Pill Democrats

Sure, Democrats will argue, as the 2008 selection closes in, Hillary Clinton is less than perfect—but she’s better than the mob boss stand-in Rudy Giuliani or the Manchurian candidate, John McCain. In fact, we can bet the farm Democrats will once again take the blue pill, believing whatever they want to believe. Democrats will vote en masse, not unlike lemmings stampeding to the precipice, for Hillary or Obama, most likely Hillary as not so subtle indicators reveal she is the One.

Ari Berman, writing for the Nation, attempts to whack Democrats out of their blue pill slumber, for all the good it will do:

Her lengthy support for the Iraq War is Clinton’s biggest liability in Democratic primary circles. But her ties to corporate America say as much, if not more, about what she values and cast doubt on her ability and willingness to fight for the progressive policies she claims to champion. She is “running to help and restore the great middle class in our country,” Wolfson says. So was Bill in 1992. He was for “putting people first.” Then he entered the White House and pushed for NAFTA, signed welfare reform, consolidated the airwaves through the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (leading to Clear Channel’s takeover) and cleared the mergers of mega-banks. Would the First Lady do any different? Ever since the defeat of healthcare reform, Hillary has been a committed incrementalist, describing herself as a creature of the “moderate, sensible center” whom business admires and rewards. During her six years in the Senate, she’s rarely been out front on difficult economic issues. Given her proximity to money and power, it’s not hard to figure out why she keeps controversial figures close to her—even if their work becomes a liability for her campaign.

Indeed, Berman is correct on all points, but none of this matters much to Democrats, as simply being Democrats reveals the depth and severity of their stepfordized condition.

Come the 2008 selection, when voters are allowed to vote for the selected, it will not matter Hillary Clinton attends Bilderberg meetings, along with Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, daughter of the SS officer Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, “life member” David Rockefeller, fellow Democrats Dianne Feinstein and John Edwards, George Soros, Alan Greenspan, Melinda Gates, former World Bank loan shark James Wolfensohn, and no shortage of Council on Foreign Relations members, transnational corporate CEOs, international banksters, and other lovers of one-world government.

“Clinton’s rarely been the threat to the business community that many on the right typically allege,” Ari Berman continues. “She’s often partnered with Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Bill Frist. In 2002 she backed a harsh position on welfare reform reauthorization that put her at odds even with conservative Republicans like Orrin Hatch. She persuaded her husband to veto the bankruptcy bill in 1997, voted for a similar version in 2001 and missed the vote in 2005, when Bill was in the hospital. She advocated weakening the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, telling Feingold to ‘live in the real world.’ Unlike Edwards and Obama, she accepts campaign contributions from lobbyists and corporate PACs.”

Of course, for Hillary and her corporate backers—including Rupert Murdoch, who is fond of throwing fund-raisers for Clinton—all of us must “live in the real world,” that is to say a one-world as envisioned by the WTO, IMF, Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, the so-called global financial services sector, the entire neoliberal panoply of thievery, looting, fire sales, and other criminal aspects of the “market fundamentalist” religion.

Democrats want ever so much to believe—and that is why they overlook the fact a “bevy of current and former Hillary advisers, including her communications guru, Howard Wolfson, are linked to a prominent lobbying and PR firm—the Glover Park Group—that has cozied up to the pharmaceutical industry and Rupert Murdoch. Her fundraiser in chief, Terry McAuliffe, has the priciest Rolodex in Washington, luring high-rolling contributors to Clinton’s campaign. Her husband, since leaving the presidency, has made millions giving speeches and counsel to investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. They house, in addition to other Wall Street firms, the Clintons’ closest economic advisers, such as Bob Rubin and Roger Altman, whose DC brain trust, the Hamilton Project, is Clinton’s economic team in waiting. Even the liberal in her camp, former deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, has lobbied for the telecom and healthcare industries, including a for-profit nursing home association indicted in Texas for improperly funneling money to disgraced former House majority leader Tom DeLay.”

Never mind the blue pill Democrats are steadily losing grip on that once hallowed ground known as the Great Middle Class. Instead, they are tilting toward the New Serfdom, enforced by a scientific dictatorship and monitored by panopticon industries.

Not to worry. Because there will be any number of placards to hoist and shiny balloons to unloose come 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, never mind the venue or its all too appropriate name.

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Educating Ron Paul

Ron Paul may be the only viable presidential candidate in a horse race fixed by the elite, but he is seriously mistaken about “al-Qaeda” and the role this phantom, CIA-ISI created “terror organization” plays in the highly profitable (for death merchants) WOT and the events of September 11, 2001. Mr. Paul told Ze’ev Barak—er Wolf Blitzer (the CNN anchor used the pen name Ze’ev Barak back in the day, when he reported for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth)—that he would go after “the threat” (as Blitzer characterized the dead nemesis, Osama bin Laden) and “we didn’t do what we were supposed to do” when the Pentagon invaded Afghanistan (see video below).

Of course, as we know, Osama bin Laden’s residency in Afghanistan—initially set up and bankrolled by the CIA and its Pakistan helper, the ISI—served as an excuse to invade the country.

As French authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie have documented, the United States threw its support behind the fanatical Taliban regime, itself a creation of the CIA-ISI alliance. According to Brisard and Dasquie, “the U.S. government saw the Taliban regime ‘as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia’, from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean,” however, “confronted with Taliban’s refusal to accept U.S. conditions, ‘this rationale of energy security changed into a military one’…. At one moment during the negotiations, the U.S. representatives told the Taliban, ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs,’” Julio Godoy writes for Inter Press Service.

Congressman Paul is absolutely correct when he states that “we ignored” the supposed threat of Osama bin Laden, as the real target was not Bin Laden or his fellow cave dwellers but rather the Taliban, who were soon dislodged by way of cruise missile and bunker-buster, allowing the former Unocal employee and sock puppet Hamid Karzai to take up residency (on 27 December 2002, with the Taliban out of the way, the leaders of Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan signed a pipeline deal).

However, it appears Mr. Paul buys into the obviously contrived “threat” of the “al-Qaeda” bogeyman, as he admits he “voted for the money” to “go after” Osama bin Laden. Moreover, on November 29, 2001, Ron Paul told the House of Corporate Whores, er Representatives, that Congress knows “a lot about the terrorists who spilled the blood of nearly 4,000 innocent civilians. There were 19 of them, 15 from Saudi Arabia, and they have paid a high price. They’re all dead. So those most responsible for the attack have been permanently taken care of. If one encounters a single suicide bomber who takes his own life along with others without the help of anyone else, no further punishment is possible. The only question that can be raised under that circumstance is why did it happen and how can we change the conditions that drove an individual to perform such a heinous act.”

In short, Mr. Paul buys into the official, neocon-contrived version of events and attributes the attacks to a misguided foreign policy. As we know, there is no evidence hijackers were aboard the planes of September 11, 2001, and even less evidence there “were 19 of them, 15 from Saudi Arabia.” As the BBC reported days after the attacks, several of the alleged hijackers were alive and well, including Waleed Al Shehri, who protested his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco.

As well, Ron Paul makes the erroneous declaration that Osama bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan—erroneous because there is no evidence of this either. Even the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post, admits there is scant evidence of Osama’s presence in the country. “The clandestine U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years,” Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson wrote last September. “Nothing from the vast U.S. intelligence world—no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image—has led them anywhere near the al-Qaeda leader, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials,” even though we are assured Bush “flooded the zone” and “the CIA … sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden.”

Of course, the United States has no intention of capturing Osama—never mind he died in late December, 2001, as reported by the Egyptian newspaper, al-Wafd—and in fact the FBI has not officially accused him of masterminding the September 11, 2001, attacks (the “Most Wanted Terrorist” poster on the FBI’s website mentions “Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya,” and “other terrorist attacks throughout the world,” although not specifically the terrorist attacks against the WTC and the Pentagon).

I find it remarkable Ron Paul either does not know these things or has decided to remain silent in an effort to shelter his political image, although the latter is now seriously under attack by the Republican-neocon establishment for the crime of stating during the “debates” he believes the attacks are essentially blowback related to the foreign policy of the United States, an assertion also made by the academic Ward Churchill (to his credit, Paul didn’t compare the victims to “little Eichmanns,” as Churchill did).

Finally, I will find it difficult to vote for a presidential candidate who is either unaware or unwilling to level with the American people about the true nature of the events that transpired on September 11, 2001. Indeed, on other issues, particularly in relation to the tyrannical nature of government and the Constitution, Ron Paul is spot on. However, it will be difficult to enter a voting booth on Election Day, 2008, and pull the lever for Ron Paul. I expect nothing less than the truth, and the whole truth, from candidates courting my vote.


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Number of Climate Change Skeptics Grows

Bummer for the United Nations, Al Gore, and Rupert Murdoch. It appears a growing list of meteorologists, climate researchers, astrophysicists, geophysicists, botanists, and other scientists are reversing course on so-called climate change. “Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics,” writes Marc Morano.

However, over at the United Nations, the growing tide of skepticism is considered little more than heresy. “A former chief of the U.N. World Health Organization who also is a former prime minister of Norway and a medical doctor has declared an end to the climate-change debate,” reports United Press International. “Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, one of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s three new special envoys on climate change, also headed up the 1987 U.N. World Commission on Environment and Development where the concept of sustainable development was first floated.”

“This discussion is behind us. It’s over,” Brundtland declared. “The diagnosis is clear, the science is unequivocal—it’s completely immoral, even, to question now, on the basis of what we know, the reports that are out, to question the issue and to question whether we need to move forward at a much stronger pace as humankind to address the issues.”

In other words, dissent—or even common sense—will not be tolerated by the emerging class of “sustainable development” autocrats, determined to usher in once and for all a one world government.

It’s not enough that Brundtland and her colleagues have managed to scare the dickens out of grade schoolers, as many of them believe “global warming is the atomic bomb of today…. Fears of an environmental crisis are defining their generation in ways that the Depression, World War II, Vietnam and the Cold War’s lingering ‘War Games’ etched souls in the 20th century,” notes the Washington Post. Thanks to Al Gore’s propaganda film, many 8-year olds are paralyzed by “obsessions with dying polar bears,” while “psychologists say they’re seeing an increasing number of young patients preoccupied by a climactic Armageddon.” In order to keep this fear-mongering on a roll, Brundtland and the “sustainable development” crowd are declaring the climate change argument is nothing less than a fait accompli.

“Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so,” Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus recently said during an interview. “It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it’s a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It’s neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment.”

Tim Booth, posting on the Meetup messageboard in response to criticism of my Climate Change: An Inconvenient Globalist Scam, is spot on when he writes: “The point is that the globalists are using something we do not know to be true as a reason to increase tyranny.”

Indeed, climate change and “sustainable development” are frauds designed to herd us into “sustainable” high-tech panopticon ghettos while the vast majority of the world is “re-wilded,” that is to say held off limits to all but a very small number of elite who, like Ted Turner and Prince Philip, want us culled down to a manageable number, say 500 million or so worldwide.

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Dobson Hallucinates Iranian “Existential Threat”

Calling the ding-a-lings together, Bush sketched out the “existential threat to the United States from a nuclear Iran,” as Max Blumenthal explains it. “I was invited to go to Washington DC to meet with President Bush in the White House along with 12 or 13 other leaders of the pro-family movement,” James Dobson, chairman of the board of Focus on the Family, told his radio audience. “I heard about this danger [from Iran] not only at the White House but from other pro-family leaders that I met during that week in Washington,” he said. “Many people in a position to know are talking about the possibility of losing a city to nuclear or biological or chemical attack. And if we can lose one we can lose ten.”

I’m experiencing that old déjà vu feeling again. Iraq has nukes or biologicals. Saddam is Hitler. Saddam and al-Qaeda will unleash a fury against the United States. Kindergarten children and old ladies will suffer and die. We have to do something. We have to mass murder a whole lot of people. Turn the place into a glass parking lot.

It’s not just Iran this time, though. “If we can lose ten we can lose a hundred,” warned Dobson, “especially if North Korea and Russia and China pile on.” Of course, this is imbecilic, as China, Russia and especially North Korea are not about to nuke anybody, but as we know this sort of inanity works like a charm, as a few million Iraqis can attest.

During his radio show, Dobson discussed this Iran bad hallucination and “existential threat” with “prophecy expert” Joel Rosenberg, a novelist who likes to speculate that the “crisis” in the Middle East is a prelude to the end of the world. For Rosenberg, it’s all about Gog and Magog and the end times, the sort of mental flatulence neocons love. “The world looked at Hitler and just didn’t believe him and tried to appease him the way we’re hearing in Washington today,” Dobson said. “You know, the President seems to me does understand this, as I told you from that meeting I had with him the other day, but even there it feels like somebody ought to be standing up and saying, ‘We are being threatened and we are going to meet this with force—whatever’s necessary.’”

Once again, Hitler is dragged out on the set like a bad character actor appearing in a series of B-movies, repeating the same predictable and inane lines over and over. You’d think these guys would find another villain to exploit, maybe Stalin or Pol Pot, but no, we have to endure the Hitler and Neville Chamberlain comparisons again. How soon we forget, or maybe we never bothered to take note in the first place.

“Some of our listeners might not like that but I tell you, if we didn’t stand up to Hitler, we’d be speaking German today,” Dobson continued, exhibiting the intellectual clarity of a schizophrenic. Nazi Germany, of course, never invaded the United States, or was such realistic. In fact, there was no shortage of bankers and industrialists supporting Hitler before the war, including members of the Bush family. US senator Prescott Bush, Dubya’s grandfather, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany and his assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

Dobson’s “existential threat to the United States from a nuclear Iran” comes a few days before U.S. and Iranian officials hold meetings in Baghdad. In order to set the correct tenor, Dick Cheney stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis parked in the Persian Gulf and rattled his saber. “With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we’re sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike,” Cheney declared. “We’ll keep the sea lanes open. We’ll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. We’ll disrupt attacks on our own forces. We’ll continue bringing relief to those who suffer, and delivering justice to the enemies of freedom. And we’ll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.”

Of course, Iran is not a maritime threat, and it does not pose “strategic threats,” especially not against the armada of U.S. war ships in the neighborhood. In fact, if we are to believe Seymour Hersh, the Pentagon has “been on the ground inside Iran” for some time. “This is a war against terrorism and Iraq is just one campaign,” Hersh quoted a former U.S. 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.”

Back in January, Bush “made it clear that Iran was also a key concern by ordering a second aircraft carrier strike group and Patriot missiles to the Gulf while promising to disrupt the republic’s activities in Iraq,” MSNBC reported. “The diplomatic community in Washington suspects that escalation is what Dick Cheney, the vice-president, wants. But with the recent departure of several leading ‘hawks’ from the administration—and the guilty verdict against ‘Scooter’ Libby, his former chief of staff—Mr. Cheney’s powers are not what they used to be.” Substitute “hawks” for chicken hawk neocons, who are determined to make Muslims everywhere suffer, and you have a more accurate description of the situation. Regardless of what Guy Dinmore writes for the Financial Times, it should be obvious Cheney’s powers are not diminished, as there is no shortage of neocons shuttling through the revolving doors at the White House and Pentagon.

“There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change,” writes Dana G. Smith for the American Chronicle. “There is no doubt that this President and those who share power with him, surely will go to war. They have invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran is on the marker.” Smith cites intelligence analyst Vincent Cannistraro, who told the Guardian: “Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place…. We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous.”

In preparation, Bush calls James Dobson to the White House, as Dobson’s radio program, Focus on the Family, reaches more than 220 million people in 164 countries. Dobson, however, is not alone. Pastor John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel, told AIPAC last month that “Iran poses a nuclear threat to the State of Israel that promises nothing less than a nuclear Holocaust” and, sticking to the shopworn script, “Iran is Germany and Ahmedinejad is the new Hitler.” Bruce Wilson, the co-founder of Talk To Action, told Bill Berkowitz: “Hagee’s appearance at AIPAC indicates the growing organizational strength of the Christian Zionist lobby for apocalyptic war and the rise of corresponding Jewish factions both within AIPAC and within Israeli politics that are pushing for dramatically expanded war in the Mideast.”

As Joel Rosenberg views it, the coming “War of Gog and Magog” will go down this year, as “time is short, and the stakes are high.” Iranian Christians, according to the Ezekiel entranced novelist, “see a showdown with Iran coming, and they feel passionately about reaching their fellow Iranians with the good news of Christ’s love.”

Rosenberg’s strange love of Jesus is apparently connected to the Christian Zionist belief that Jesus cannot return until Israel and the United States kill millions of heretical Muslims. “The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West… a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation… and [the] Second Coming of Christ,” Hagee declared last July. “Every Christian should remember the debt of gratitude the Christian community owes to the Jewish community. The Jewish people do not need Christianity to explain their existence or their origin. But Christians cannot explain their existence without Judaism.”

Naturally, all of this nonsense works dandy for the neocons, determined to attack not only Iran but Syria and in fact undermine the whole of the Muslim Middle East. If it takes absurd radio broadcasts by fanatical Christian Zionists and prophesy-reading novelists to push their mass murder message, so be it.

In the demented realm of Bushzarro world, where up is down and black is white, it is all good.

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Modernizing the Destruction of the Fourth

Go to Google News search and type in the following: “FISA Modernization Act.” It will return 10 meager results, only but one offered by the corporate media. Of course, you should not be surprised.

Bush and the neocons want to deep six FISA, itself a violation of the Fourth Amendment, not that it matters as the Fourth died an ignoble death some time ago. But even FISA is not acceptable to the authoritarian psychopaths running the government. Even as “the administration asks Congress to expand its leeway under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the White House continues to insist on the president’s inherent power to disregard even his preferred version of that law. No wonder J. Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, received a skeptical reception from Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee when he testified last week in favor of ‘modernizing’ FISA,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

It figures, as well, that a Los Angeles Times op-ed didn’t really find McConnell’s suggestions abhorrent. “But some of what McConnell requested makes sense. The threat of domestic terrorist attack does require greater flexibility, as do changes in technology. FISA was enacted at a time when most international communications traveled by radio or satellite and thus were outside the law’s regulation of wire transmissions; today, those same communications move along fiber-optic cables. Likewise, a court order should not be required just because a phone call or e-mail from one foreign location to another happens to pass through the United States.”

Of course, “modernizing” FISA has nothing to do with a “domestic terrorist attack.” It has to do with surveilling the public at large.

Now for the shell game. It appears there are two versions of this bill—a secret one and yet another sanitized version for public consumption. “The ‘unclassified’ version of this legislation was released only after numerous protests by several organizations with which we work in coalition,” notes Downsize DC. “Our coalition partners have been invited to make ’statements’ about this ‘unclassified’ version but have not been afforded an opportunity to rebut the secret testimony of the Bush administration. How could they, it’s secret.”

In regard to the details:

All we know is that the bill deals with what the Executive Branch can and cannot do with regard to spying—particularly on the American people. And we’re a lot less sure about the “cannot” part than we are about the “can” aspects of this. In other words, this bill may legalize widespread spying on Americans by the President of the United States.

Did you think the Democrats were going to protect you against the lawless Bush administration? You should have heard Intelligence Committee Chairman, Senator Jay Rockefeller, at the “public” portion of their hearings. He didn’t seem resolved to hold the administration accountable for its past civil liberties violations. His was a voice of bi-partisan reconciliation with government lawlessness.

And why not? The Democrats like power too. Perhaps they like the fact that if they give more power to Bush now, they’ll get to use that power too when they get their turn at the wheel, which they expect to happen soon.

The code name for this bill seems to be the “FISA Modernization Act.” The old, supposedly primitive, version of the FISA law at least provided some tissue-thin protections against government spying on innocent Americans. We would prefer NOT to have those protections “modernized” out of existence, thank you very much.

Democrat Bill Nelson of Florida almost reached the promised land, but not quite: “The trick is, we want to go after the bad guys. We want to get the information that we need, but we’re a nation of laws and we want to prevent the buildup of a dictator who takes the law into his own hands, saying I don’t like that. So now we have to find the balance.”

Bill, the balance is in the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

No tricks, just simple, easily understood language.

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Murdoch to “Revolutionize” Climate Change Propaganda

Regardless of what you think about so-called climate change—if it is real or a scam—the corporate media is taking it seriously, including the neocon graven image, or at least the media medicine man of neoconism, “Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation, the media empire that encompasses Fox News, 20th Century Fox, HarperCollins, MySpace.com, and dozens of newspapers in Australia, the U.K., the U.S., and beyond,” as Grist puts it.

“At an event held this morning in midtown Manhattan and webcast to all News Corp. employees, Murdoch launched a company-wide plan to address climate change that includes not only a pledge to reduce the company’s emissions (which has come to be expected at such biz-greening events) but also a vow to weave climate messaging into the content and programming of News Corp.’s many holdings.”

In other words, soon enough, the neocons, including Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, will be preaching a green message, that is to say the now fashionable epistle of sacrifice and ultimately surrender to authoritarian control. Instead of scary Muslims crouched in the shadows clutching radiological devices, we will be presented with the visage of melting polar icecaps, flooded coastal cities, aberrant weather patterns, crop failures, gloom, doom and destruction. In order to fight against this horrific stuff, all indubitably the direct result of you driving a car and selfishly flicking on the air conditioner, not only will sacrifice be required, but a scientific police state will need be implemented to enforce sacrifice, lest we obtusely kill off not only the polar bear but future generations.

“The challenge is to revolutionize the [climate change] message,” Murdoch told News Corp. employees. “He emphasized the need to ‘make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior.’” In other words, the same old systematic manipulation of public opinion will be employed, especially now that Osama and his terrorist cave dwellers have outlived their usefulness, as Osama does not possess the staying power of coastal flooding, starvation, and mass climate-induced die-off not only of Bambi, but humanity writ large. No doubt the message will be dramatic and vivid, although it remains to be seen how crowding into an Agenda 21 “habitat,” i.e., green ghetto, will be fun—well, it may be fun for the psychopathic and sadistic control freaks in charge, but not the rest of us.

“These might be surprising observations coming from any media titan, but all the more so from a man who has long worn his conservative politics on his sleeve and whose company owns outlets like Fox News and The New York Post, which are widely considered right-leaning.”

Of course, Murdoch leans in the direction of control and “right” and “left” are démodé, obsolescent and worthless political abstractions, still useful however in fooling the public, especially the “conservative” lemmings lined up behind Bush, a blinkered mass of zombies unable to discern the obvious fact Bush is a lower echelon member of a decadent and indeed psychopathic ruling elite that has employed slippery politics and out-moded political concepts for decades, if not centuries.

It should come as no surprise the sort of irrational and fanatical nonsense once pedaled by fringe groups such as Earth First is now a comfortable fit for Republicans and so-called conservatives. It will be even less surprising when the “conservatives” accept it and attribute “eco crimes” to their political enemies, the “liberals,” whatever that means. In short order, Rush Limbaugh will be green as the rest, accusing Democrats of secretly burning incandescent light bulbs well past midnight.

Finally, in order to demonstrate how the neocons, in league with their neolib brethren, will do whatever it takes to cinch control over the masses, consider the “pragmatic rapprochement,” as the New York Times calls the alliance between the onetime Bilderberg doorstop Hillary Clinton and Murdoch.

The “developing relationship between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Murdoch—who has built an empire in part on the strength of media outlets like Fox News and The New York Post that delight in skewering the Clintons—has drawn special attention, perplexing some political analysts and infuriating some liberals already suspicious of Mrs. Clinton’s centrist positioning,” the newspaper reported last year.

Indeed, such a supposedly unheard of development is “perplexing” for “political analysts” of clueless bent, that is to say political analysts unable to grasp a glaring and persistent reality right in their faces—power, no matter of “liberal” or “conservative” vestment, will adopt whatever tactic, no matter how outwardly incongruent, in order to remain in power and ultimately consolidate that power.

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Neocon Whines About Wolfowitz’s Fate

Scott Sullivan, billed as a “conservative,” actually a neocon apologist, tells us the allegations against the “seasoned bureaucrat,” and I might add war criminal, Paul Wolfowitz are “baseless.”

Sullivan, treading the tried and unfortunately true neocon path, does not bother to provide any rationale for arriving at this conclusion, but rather simply states: “Most likely, the World Bank’s ethics regulations are contradictory and confusing.” Mr. Sullivan does not know anything about the “ethics regulations” of the World Bank—attributing ethics to a murderous loan sharking operation is an exercise in absurdity, but never mind—and admits as much, not that it matters, as neocons are not required to provide rational argument, let alone facts.

In lieu of a convincing argument, Sullivan drags out an old threadbare canard: the World Bank is going after Wolfowitz because he is Jewish. Moreover, Germans are behind the effort. “Wolfowitz is most likely innocent, like Captain Dreyfus in late 19th century France, who was falsely accused of treason,” writes Sullivan. In other words, the Germans want Wolfowitz out because he is a Jew, not because he exploited his position and promoted his girlfriend. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, you may remember, was a French artillery officer charged with passing military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris in 1894. Dreyfus was eventually exonerated and the case became a cause célèbre for Zionists, thus demonstrating to their way of thinking the perpetual reoccurrence and danger of anti-Semitism.

“Germany’s motives in pushing these allegations against Wolfowitz are suspect,” writes Sullivan. “Reverting to form, Germany is hounding the Jews in order to take political power.” In other words, Germans will always be Nazis, they invariably hate Jews and will exploit them for political purposes, never mind the people of Germany have forked over around 80 billion marks in reparation to Israel since the end of the Second World War, even though the vast majority of the people currently paying this burden were not alive during or before the Second World War.

“As his legacy, Bush wants to make a strategic partnership with Iran’s Nazi President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Firing Paul Wolfowitz is the down payment on Bush’s strategic partnership with Iran,” writes Sullivan.

This is utter nonsense, as the United States has long attempted, over numerous administrations, to isolate and punish Iran for the sin of wresting the country away from the CIA and Mossad client, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In fact, Sullivan’s facile allegation Bush wants to make a “strategic partnership” with Iran would be delusional if indeed Sullivan and the neocons actually believed it. If anything, they are frustrated by the fact the United States, weathering hysterical and histrionic demands on the part of Israel and the neocons, has yet to shock and awe the Islamic nation into submission.

“What can US Jews do on behalf of Paul Wolfowitz? First, they can insist on a fair World Bank hearing for Wolfowitz, with no rush to judgment. The World Bank is now discussing a final decision on Wolfowitz’s future,” Sullivan declares.

But, of course, as a Likudnik fanatic, Sullivan believes this is hardly enough. In addition to making “Germany pay for hounding Wolfowitz and helping advance Ahmadiejad’s agenda,” Sullivan demands U.S. Jews “protect US national security by insisting that President Bush clarify his policies on Germany and Iran. Bush, by picking Germany and Iran as strategic partners, may have picked the wrong side, the losing side, in the Middle East.” In other words, Sullivan and the neocons are displeased with the fact senior officials from the five permanent U.N. Security Council member states and Germany met in Berlin to discuss Iran’s “defiance of U.N. demands and continued uranium enrichment,” uranium enrichment guaranteed to Iran under the NPT. Nothing short of shock and awing the people of Iran—with nukes, if need be—is acceptable to the neocons and their Israeli collaborators.

“In conclusion, if Wolfowitz is purged from the World Bank, US Jews—again in the interests of US national security—should insist that President Bush appoint Wolfowitz as Special Envoy to Iraq and the Middle East, with his first task one of brokering an agreement on the future of Kirkuk and the Kurds with Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Wolfowitz would be perfect for the job, and his appointment would signal Germany and Iran that the US is still looking after its own interests.”

This has nothing to do with the World Bank or Wolfowitz’s malfeasance—not that we should expect anything less from the monomaniacal neocons, no matter the excuse, who are determined to make millions of Muslims and Arabs suffer for the crime of resisting the criminal hegemony of Israel.

Moreover, the neocons don’t give a whit about the Kurds beyond using them as a wedge against Iran, never mind any ostensible Kurdish state would assuredly infuriate the Turks and likely result in yet another bloody conflict in the neighborhood. As well, the U.S. is not “looking after its own interests” in the Middle East, but the interests Israel’s Likudniks, the neocons, and AIPAC. None of them will be satisfied until they trick the United States into bombing the dickens out of Iran and Syria.

Finally, after Wolfowitz is booted out of the World Bank, if justice is to prevail, he should be immediately arrested for war crimes, as he eagerly served as a key player in the criminal invasion, occupation, and genocidal mass murder campaign launched against the people of Iraq. Indeed, as a minor propagandist, Scott Sullivan should not be allowed to write for “conservative” publications henceforth, sort of like a convicted pedophile not being allowed near grade school playgrounds. For Mr. Sullivan, community service in Baghdad may very well be in order.

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Pizza Delivery Guy and Cohorts Planned Fort Dix Attack

How many of us put any credence into this stuff, let alone pay attention? “Federal authorities announced Tuesday that they had foiled a terrorist plot to attack Fort Dix. Six men were charged with planning to kill as many soldiers as they could,” the Associated Press would have us believe. “One of the suspects, Serdar Tatar, had delivered pizza on the base and said he knew it like the back of his hand,” according to the government, never mind the “post has had especially tight security since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

According to the FBI, the United States “dodged a bullet”—or maybe extra cheese and Italian sausage—thanks to paid informants who apparently had little trouble penetrating the group and videotaping them. “What we witnessed here was a brand new form of terrorism,” that is to say terrorist plots cooked up in pizza delivery joints by delusional patsies who apparently believed it was possible to attack a military installation with weapons to be provided by “a confidential government witness.”

“The charging documents, filed in federal court in Camden yesterday and unsealed today, portray an ambitious and cold-blooded—but somewhat bungling—cadre who hoped to kill at least 100 soldiers, but also dropped training videos off at a local store to be copied, and spoke openly to a Philadelphia police sergeant about obtaining maps of Fort Dix,” the Washington Post, reports.

Naturally, the key word here is “bungling,” although it appears these hapless patsies are, more than anything, delusional in the true psychiatric sense of the word, i.e., the would-be (with the promise of “confidential government witness” assistance) perps entertained an erroneous belief it was possible to attack a military base with “three AK-47 automatic assault rifles and four semi-automatic M-16 rifles,” going up against hundreds of trained soldiers, and actually “kill as many soldiers as possible.”

“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department database has served as the key source of statistics on the status of terrorism investigations in the United States and has been cited frequently in official speeches and testimony to Congress,” the Washington Post reported in June, 2005. Out of 361 cases, the Washington Post “identified 180 cases in which no connection to al Qaeda or another terrorist group could be found in court records, official statements, the 9/11 commission report or news accounts. Even some of the terrorism-related cases featured early allegations of terrorist connections that were later dropped.”

Of the 142 individuals on the list linked to terrorist groups, 39 were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security. More than a dozen defendants were acquitted or had their charges dismissed, including three Moroccan men in Detroit whose convictions were tossed out in September after the Justice Department admitted prosecutorial misconduct.

Not surprisingly, these minor crimes produced modest punishments. The median sentence for all cases adjudicated, whether or not they were terrorism-related, was 11 months. About three dozen other defendants were given probation or were deported. The most common convictions were on charges of fraud, making false statements, passport violations and conspiracy.

[…]

“What we’re seeing over time is the equivalent of mission creep: Cases that would not be terrorism cases before Sept. 11 are swept onto the terrorism docket,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former Clinton administration Justice official who heads the national security program at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “The problem is that it’s not good to cook the numbers. . . . We have no accurate assessment of whether the war on terrorism is actually working.”

In other words, the government is not particularly interested in detecting, arresting, and prosecuting supposed “homegrown” terrorists, but rather making a big headline splash with initial arrests and hyperbolic allegations, as the WOT is all about propaganda, not actual threats.

It seems to hardly matter if the alleged plots are completely ludicrous.

Would you like crazy crust with that?

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Debunking Climate Change Hysteria

In particular, note the completely and utterly shameful fear-mongering and propaganda pedaling—and censorship of research debunking the junk science of global warming—attributed to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at 56 minutes into this excellent documentary.

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Sarko Wins One for the Global Elite

EU ConstitutionNow that Nicolas Sarkozy has won the French election and appears to be the favorite of the French people—who are apparently as easily brainwashed as Americans, but of course with typical if oft satirized arrogant French élan—we can expect the idea of a supranational Europe, previously rejected by the people of France, to take center stage.

“One thing that both candidates recognize is that Europe needs to be united to be influential on the world stage. The French referendum on the EU constitution produced a shocking ‘no’ in a nation that has always supported EU integration,” opines Germany’s Deutsche Welle. “It is a top priority to get the European bicycle rolling again, according to Pierre Lellouche, Sarkozy’s foreign policy advisor…. The differences between the candidates is more one of approach rather than substance, with Sarkozy being the better strategist.” According to Lellouche, even the top dog socialists in France “admit they’ll vote for Sarkozy,” as their primary focus is globalization. Ségolène Royal’s big mistake, obviously, was her election campaign promise to seek a referendum on selling France and Europe out to the one-worlders.

In 2005, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso described the French rejection as “a very serious problem,” while insisting it was premature to say “the treaty is dead.” Indeed, Sarko in France, in league with Merkel in Germany and the European Commission, will keep pushing until the globalist “super state” is firmly and irrevocably in place.

In hindsight, it was really quite stupid to allow the French and Dutch people to vote on the dismantlement of their national sovereignty. In North America, slipping in world government by stealth is all the craze, mostly notably with the hush-hush creation of the “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America” in 2005, a much less burdensome process than the European experience, as the people are methodically excluded.

In fact, to this day, if you make noise about this exclusionary, indeed totalitarian process of world government by drib and drab under cover of stealth, you’re considered a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy nut, never mind the very real existence of the so-called NAFTA highway currently under construction in Texas and a flurry of “white papers” and “recommendations” on creating under the cover of darkness a “North America Community” issued by the likes of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America, the Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales, and other conspirators lurking in the shadows.

Sarkozy’s immediate task will be to make sure there are no more silly mistakes and one world globalization remains unflinchingly on track. “The European Commission believes that rightist Sarkozy offers a better plan for the revival of the European Constitution, which would be placed for voting in the Parliament, while Segolene Royal wants to update the constitutional accord and hold another referendum which causes a risk that the constitution will not pass the referendum voting,” Javno explains. “Critics of Segolene Royal consider she did not manage to adequately present her program and that she is not feisty enough to become the future president of France, while on the other hand Sarkozy has showed more edge and feistiness, and his program was more substantial.”

In other words, Sarko was more effective than Royal at insisting France be rolled into the EU—never mind the opposition of a few million French citizens—and that’s why he was selected to “win” by the transnational business elite, the international bankers, the kings and queens and princes, and all their bought or compromised chancellors, prime ministers, ambassadors, secretaries of state, ad nauseam.

It certainly helps, as well, that enough people in France were bamboozled—as the Americans were bamboozled twice running—to put a dull shine of legitimacy on this phase of what will soon enough become one world tyranny and global slavery.

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Appearance on Vyzygoth’s Grassy Knoll

Kurt Nimmo: Another Day in the Empire 1970, 1 hour 7 minutes:

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Climate Change: An Inconvenient Globalist Scam

Rajendra Pachauri and the United Nations have issued a solemn “deadline” on “climate change,” otherwise we face “a worldwide disaster,” according to the Telegraph. Ban Ki-Moon, the recently installed secretary general of the UN, dispatched envoys to the four corners where they seek “advance agreement from heads of state on the principles of a post-2012 climate change treaty, negotiations for which begin at a meeting in Indonesia in December,” resulting in a cobbled together “son of Kyoto” treaty.

Of course, you and I will not have a say in this treaty, as it will be determined behind closed doors by the likes of Rajendra Pachauri and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). IPCC reports, issued by a “2,000-strong network of UN scientists and energy experts” (i.e., they are bankrolled by NGOs, foundations and corporations) are “authoritative” and “widely cited in almost any debate related to climate change.”

Naturally, these “scientists and energy experts” know best, and so it makes sense IPCC meetings are open only to members of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program. As usual, the United Nations will be dictating to us, the squalid (and over-populated) commoners.

Well, this commoner has big problems with the United Nations, the IPCC, and its gaggle of bureaucrats and scientists sucking on the foundation grant teat. First and foremost, the United Nations is dedicated to world government, thus any solution to any number of problems, more than a few contrived in advance, will necessitate more globalism, more authoritative government, more orders haughtily issued from on-high. Second, the IPCC’s scientists, to my satisfaction, have yet to demonstrate climate change is the result of human activity and carbon emissions.

“Those of us who study the pre-human history of the Earth find the current debate over global warming difficult to fathom,” writes Martin Keeley, a geologist. “To expect permanent stability in climate patterns displays a fundamental lack of understanding of the complexity and instability of weather…. If the global climate were not getting warmer, it would be getting cooler; stasis is not an option.” Keeley takes issue with the IPCC’s “hockey stick” temperature curve for the last millennium, a set of statistics the IPCC used as the foundation for Kyoto.

“In every other science when such a drastic revision of previously accepted knowledge is promulgated, there is considerable debate and initial skepticism, the new theory facing a gauntlet of criticism and intense review. Only if a new idea survives that process does it become broadly accepted by the scientific peer group and the public at large,” writes John L. Daly. “This never happened with [Dr. Michael] Mann’s ‘Hockey Stick’. The coup was total, bloodless, and swift as Mann’s paper was greeted with a chorus of uncritical approval from the greenhouse industry. Within the space of only 12 months, the theory had become entrenched as a new orthodoxy.”

Al Gore used this “hockey stick” data in his film, An Inconvenient Truth. It is now widely accepted as gospel truth, never mind schlocky research passed off as fact, even though two Canadians with expertise in statistical analysis, Stephen McIntyre and economics professor Ross McKitrick, “found considerable errors in the way the data was collated,” according to the Cooler Heads Coalition.

McIntyre and McKitrick, in a paper published by Geophysical Research Letters, “were unable to replicate Mann’s results either by re-running his calculations once the errors were corrected or by constructing their own data set from the original sources. Their reconstruction of the Mann et al. data set from the original sources shows clearly that there was a period of greater warmth than the last century in the 15th century, and that the spike is not unprecedented. They have suggested that Mann should account for the discrepancies.” In response, Mann accused the Canadians of engaging in a “political stunt” and dismissed their research.

As Bjørn Lomborg discovered, criticism to this entrenched orthodoxy will not be tolerated. Lomborg is adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and a former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. Lomborg authored The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, a book arguing that certain aspects of the global warming orthodoxy—including overpopulation, declining energy resources, deforestation, species loss, water shortages, and a variety of other global environmental issues—are unsupported by analysis of relevant data. In response, the IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri compared Lomborg to Adolph Hitler.

Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, notes that taking a stand against the IPCC dominated orthodoxy can be a career killer. “Twenty years ago, climate research became politicized in favor of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases,” Calder writes for the Times Online. “As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.”

Of course, the “rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science” are not invited, as the point here is to stampede people into accepting global government, lest we all fall victim to “a worldwide disaster” of biblical proportion. “For complete control of the masses a dictatorship is not necessary, although it does expedite the process. The collective moulding begins early in life, sustained and refined throughout one’s formal education; a universal curriculum of manipulation can transform and achieve a complete paradigm shift for a whole generation,” writes Terry Melanson.

Climate change, now making the rounds with increasing urgency and no shortage of fear mongering, represents a “control of the dialogue” that will ultimately lead to the “inevitably to hegemony; defined, succinctly, as the power of ideas exercised by a dominant or privileged social group over subordinate social groups. Hegemony is the aftermath of the Hegelian Dialectic, the outcome of the ‘ends justify the means’ maxim. The people have not submitted to this power, ‘they consent to it—though it is clearly not in their own best interest. Hegemony is a form of control in which those who have power maintain their position, not through force, but through the elaboration of a particular ideology or world view. This form of social control is long lasting, it is an effective, and patient, tactic,’” Melanson continues, citing the late Antony Sutton.

Mary Burdman is a bit more blunt: “The real agenda of what can only be called climate ‘terrorism,’ will be using this hoax to impose the kind of ’state of emergency’ used when the Nazis took power in Germany, as the German newspaper Die Welt has just warned. This crew is not only after everyone’s pension; they are using green propaganda to target a generation of children, as Godzilla was used to frighten young Baby Boomers about the atomic age. The Scotsman reported Feb. 23 about a recent study which revealed that half of over 1,000 British children between the ages of 7 and 11 lose sleep because of exaggerated fears about global warming. It is no coincidence that the British government is sending Al Gore’s film hoax ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ to all schools in the country.”

Quoting the UN’s Biodiversity Treaty, Tom DeWeese writes: “The goal of Sustainable Development is to transform the world into feudal-like governance by making NATURE the central organizing principle for our economy and society…. The plan is to change your way of life to fit into the new global society. According to Sustainable Development policies, air conditioning, convenience foods, single-family housing and cars are among the products, habitats and modes of transportation that have already been determined to be ‘unsustainable’… There has never been a single vote in Congress to create Sustainable Development. It’s all done through cleverly rearranged wording of existing programs and budgets, using UN treaties as guidelines.”

Steven Yates adds:

Agenda 21 is the bible of the sustainable development movement. A horribly written, longwinded tract consisting of 40 chapters of various lengths covering everything from land, water and waste management to urban planning to biotechnology, it purports to offer a comprehensive new paradigm for life on planet Earth. The basic idea behind sustainable development was spelled out back in 1987 by the little-known Brundtland Commission. The Bruntland Commission definition: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This innocent sounding phrase came to carry with it the implication that there are too many people living and working in an environment of finite resources to permit “unsustainable” economic freedoms. Behind the idea of sustainable development is the idea that we have a choice: adopt “voluntary” central planning (with the UN at the helm) to integrate economics and ecology within a globalist perspective or face ecological disaster a few decades down the pike…

According to Angus Reid, all the scary propaganda, much of it based on junk science (as noted above), is working like a charm, although not fast enough for green careerists over at the World Wildlife Fund, an NGO that receives funding from the Ford Foundation, a “philanthropic” organization connected to the CIA.

“Many adults in the United States are willing to make some economic sacrifices in order to help reduce global warming, according to a poll by the New York Times and CBS News. 75 per cent of respondents would pay more for electricity if it were generated by renewable sources like solar or wind energy,” the polling organization reports. “In addition, 92 per cent of respondents favor requiring car manufacturers to produce cars that are more energy efficient, but only 38 per cent support an increased federal tax on gasoline.”

“They are the biggest culprit and they are the biggest offender of climate,” complained World Wildlife Fund member Stephan Singer. “The United States should take climate change seriously.”

No doubt most of us here in America will “take climate change seriously” after we are crowded into Malthusian “sustainable” ghettoes resembling something out the dystopian science fiction film Soylent Green.

Addendum: Sunday, May 6

I admit borrowing the “Soylent Green” analogy from Alan Watt and Cutting Through the Matrix. Alan releases more or less daily audio “blurbs” on a variety of subjects, mostly related to the ongoing and long term effort to impose world government on an unsuspecting and dumbed-down public at large. Below is a link to his talk containing the “Soylent Green” reference.

Please visit Alan’s web site and give him your support: Cutting Through the Matrix.

Kyoto’s Crisis Creation = Conservation = Capital’s Elation and Public Starvation, April 27, 2007:

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Lou Dobbs Targeted as Hate Speech Propagandist

In the mistaken belief the House passed the so-called Hates Crimes Act strictly to go after people who speak out against homosexuals or say mean and hurtful things about other government protected minority groups, consider an effort by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to get CNN anchor Lou Dobbs fired.

“A Jewish group is calling for the firing of an outspoken CNN anchor, Lou Dobbs, after he accused advocates for illegal immigrants of using propaganda techniques employed by Nazi Germany,” reports the New York Sun. “Mr. Dobbs has crossed the line between responsible television commentary and hate-speech propaganda of his own. Keeping him on the air is essentially sanctioning by CNN—which is why we’re asking CNN to remove Dobbs from his very public platform,” complained Gideon Aronoff. “Comparisons to Nazis—especially in this day and age—are abhorrent.”

On the other hand, it is perfectly legitimate to compare Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler and the Iranian government to a gaggle of Nazis. Dobbs made the mistake of saying something hurtful—never mind the truth of his statement—against a government protected minority group.

It is no mistake Mr. Aronoff used the words “hate-speech propaganda” in his denunciation. Indeed, in the weeks ahead, as the Senate passes the “Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act,” also called the “Gay Hate Bill,” we can expect additional targets to come under attack for the egregious crime of speaking their minds. Prosecuting preachers and Christians opposed to homosexuality is but the useful veneer of this draconian legislation, as the government, of course, does not give a whit about the supposed rights of homosexuals—or, in fact, the rights anybody but a small number of bankers and transnational corporations.

Moreover, it stands to reason CNN “has removed a link from its Web site to an organization that is raising money to fight illegal immigration,” lest the easily insulted and politically motivated take offense and scream too loud and thus penetrate CNN’s thin skin. It is hardly a coincidence the CNN web site in question is connected to Lou Dobbs, who is reviled by the pro-illegal immigration movement. “An advocacy group, the National Institute for Latino Policy, protested that Dobbs’ on-air advocacy was expanding to include an endorsement of raising money for an organization,” reports the Associated Press. “After getting a letter from the group, CNN chief executive Jim Walton agreed to remove the link, CNN spokeswoman Christa Robinson said Friday.” As to be expected, well before Jim Walton removed the link, he removed any trace of his spine.

“In calling for Dobbs to be kicked off the air for simply using an analogy about Nazi Germany, the Jewish group are behaving like Nazis themselves, attempting to chill free speech and create a climate where nobody is allowed to say anything in case it offends someone,” notes Prison Planet. “Since Don Imus made an ignorant off-hand comment about a black female basketball team, enemies of free speech everywhere have crawled out of the woodwork in an attempt to exploit the controversy and silence anyone who dares challenge political correctness or simply makes a statement that some would consider controversial.”

In the case of Dobbs, however, it is not simply controversy, as the anchor strikes at the heart of the concerted effort to reduce the American worker to carefully engineered pauperism and usher in a New Serfdom through open borders and ongoing currency devaluation.

It is really quite remarkable Lou Dobbs was allowed to righteously complain for so long on CNN’s dime about open borders and illegal immigration.

Of course, all of that will change now that he has bruised the inflated and politically expedient sensibilities of those who will benefit mightily from the Gay Hate Bill.

Expect prosecutions and witch hunts to commence forthwith, especially against truth tellers.

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Misery, Disease, Death: Mission Accomplished

As the corporate media reminds us, we are weathering the fourth anniversary of Bush’s “mission accomplished” declaration, an opportunity for self-righteous Democrats to make political points on the fact no mission, as described, was accomplished.

I beg to differ, as usual.

In fact, Bush and the neocons did indeed accomplish a mission, albeit not the one initially advertised after Bush, reveling like a school boy at the chance to play fighter pilot with a Lockheed S-3 Viking, delivered his nauseating victory speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003—coincidentally, as well I’m sure, the founding date of the Order of the Illuminati.

So, what mission did Bush and crew accomplish?

“Poverty is rampant throughout Iraq with more than half the population lacking basic means to survive, a government survey shows,” notes Kamal al-Basri.

The survey by the Central Statistical Bureau says that 43 percent of Iraqis suffer from ‘absolute poverty’ and another 11 percent of them live in ‘abject poverty’.

Both terms are measures aid organizations use to quantify poverty in the world and they refer to people below poverty level.

People in absolute poverty lack the necessary food, clothing or shelter to survive and 43 percent of Iraqis now fall into that category, the survey says.

People in abject poverty lack a minimum income or consumption level necessary to meet basic needs and 11 percent of Iraqis are in that category, according to the survey.

The study is the result of a nation-wide survey of families across the country and takes into consideration the millions of Iraqis who have been displaced or forced to flee abroad.

The survey is the largest and most comprehensive the bureau has conducted in the past four years. Hundreds of researchers and civil servants working in its offices in Iraq were involved.

Before the one-worlder Bush Senior invaded Iraq, the United Nations noted: “Advances in provision of health care have been notable. Major hospital construction projects have given the country a first-class range of medical facilities, both in the larger towns and through a series of clinics in rural areas…. In the constitution of Iraq, it is stated that health is the right of every citizen. Iraqi health policy is in line with the goal of health for all, with special emphasis on care of infants and mothers. Attention has also been given to equitable distribution of services and on community participation.”

“The Iraqi healthcare system was one of the most advanced of its kind in the 1970s and 1980s,” William Aaronson, associate professor of healthcare management at The Fox School, told Sunita Kaul of the Daily Star. “But the current war, coupled with the 1990 UN-imposed sanctions, the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent periods of lawlessness and looting, have left the healthcare system in total shambles. It has been set back almost 50 years,” precisely as planned. “During and immediately after the recent conflict, some 12 percent of hospitals were partially damaged and seven percent were looted. More than 30 percent of the facilities that provided family planning services were destroyed. The country’s two major public health laboratories, in Baghdad and in Basra, were destroyed.”

Of course, the real mission is to wipe the slate clean in Iraq and, indeed, much of the Arab and Muslim Middle East, and if that requires killing a few million people, so be it because, as Donald Rumsfeld said before he was shown the door, democracy is messy and stuff happens.

Stuff like typhoid, dysentery, hepatitis, cholera, polio, poverty, and starvation.


Wolfie Shakes Down Global Loan Shark Outfit

According to Steven C. Clemens, not only does the war criminal Paul Wolfowitz want “some acknowledgment” that the world-class loan sharking operation known as the World Bank shares “complicity in the messy circumstances surrounding his and Shaha Riza’s situation,” but it appears Wolfie will attempt to ride it out until June 1st, when he is “eligible for some large financial bonus—for performance and time on the job. One estimate puts this figure at about $400,000. Wolfowitz wants to make sure those funds are credited to his private bank account before saying farewell to an institution that has come to despise him.”

It is saying something when a criminal organization responsible for starving to death countless numbers of people and inflicting brutal and merciless poverty on millions of others reaches the conclusion a psychopath of Wolfowitz’s caliber is despicable. One has to wonder at the standard employed.

Wolfowitz, of course, should be arrested immediately—and not for the tawdry business of making sure his girlfriend received a cushy job. No, Wolfowitz should be arrested for plotting to invade Iraq and for his part in the slaughter of a million or more Iraqis. He should be tried by a jury of his peers—and I don’t mean a jury of neocons, Israel Firsters, and loan sharks—and then marched to the gallows, preferably the same scaffold where Saddam Hussein met his fate.

Of course, Cheney and Bush should proceed him, and Wolfowitz’s neocon compatriots, including Libby and Feith, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, William Bennett, Peter Rodman, et al, traitors all, should follow.

But why stop there? Let’s arrest all the members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rockefeller family and its numerous toadies, everybody over at the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century, and all their associated colleagues, the lot of them scurrilous mountebanks and psychopaths. It might be a good idea to burn these “think tanks” to the ground and dump salt by the truckload over the ashes, lest a single tendril emerge from the charred remains.

Naturally, I may as well wish for a pony.

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Missouri Mall Shooting: Bonanza for Gun-Grabbers

Another day, another “deadly shooting spree,” this time at a mall in Kansas City, Missouri. But not to worry. The Inter-Parliamentary Union is on the case. “Parliamentarians around the world should press for urgent action on gun control, particularly in view of recent tragedies,” reports Reuters. “The statistics are damning. There are currently an estimated 640 million small arms and light weapons in circulation, from handguns and assault rifles to shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles,” Anders Johnsson, secretary general of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and Martin Griffiths of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue said. “Most of this arsenal, or about 60 percent, is in the hands of civilians. Recent dramatic events have proved the urgent need for action,” in other words, pushing for “gun control through drawing up national laws, improving implementation and enforcement, and leading public debate,” or maybe that should be orchestrating “public debate,” as usual. Naturally, part of the “debate” is to equate small arms, designed for self defense, with “shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.”

The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) is another globalist scheme, connected at the hip to the United Nations. “The IPU supports the efforts of the United Nations, whose objectives it shares, and works in close co-operation with it. It also co-operates with regional inter-parliamentary organizations, as well as with international intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations which are motivated by the same ideals,” explains the IPU web site. It fosters “Democratic mundialization,” that is to say globalism (”mundialization” is the English version of the French “mondialisation,” or globalism).

According to Wikipedia, “Democratic mundialization” is “a different way to economic globalization and [would] ‘make people closer, more united and protected’ though what this means in practice is only vaguely defined.” Of course it is “only vaguely defined,” because “mundialization” cannot “make people closer, more united and protected,” or is it the goal of the IPU or the United Nations to protect people from supposedly random violence at shopping malls.

IPU is associated with UNESCO, according to that organization’s “community” portal. “Sir” Julian Huxley was the first Director-General of UNESCO. Huxley was a eugenicist, that is to say he believed world population is in serious need of culling, a goal shared by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Population Council, the latter formed with the participation of John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State under Eisenhower. John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen Dulles (the first director of the CIA), “believed the government should use mass psychology” and “social control … the control of human behavior” to impose world government, according to Dennis L. Cuddy. Obviously, “mondialisation” cannot be imposed so long as people possess firearms. “One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offense to keep arms,” Constitutional scholar and Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story wrote in 1840.

“For more than a decade the United Nations has waged a campaign to undermine Second Amendment rights in America,” wrote Texas representative Ron Paul in June, 2006, as a United Nations gun-grabbing conference commenced in New York. “UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has called on members of the Security Council to address the ‘easy availability’ of small arms and light weapons, by which he means all privately owned firearms. In response, the Security Council released a report calling for a comprehensive program of worldwide gun control, a report that admonishes the U.S. and praises the restrictive gun laws of Red China and France!” The United Nations believes “in global government, and armed people could stand in the way of their goals. They certainly don’t care about our Constitution or the Second Amendment. But the conflict between the UN position on private ownership of firearms and our Second Amendment cannot be reconciled. How can we as a nation justify our membership in an organization that is actively hostile to one of our most fundamental constitutional rights? What if the UN decided that free speech was too inflammatory and should be restricted? Would we discard the First Amendment to comply with the UN agenda?”

Is it coincidental “lone nuts” are embarking on shooting rampages at the same time the United Nations and the IPU are pushing their gun-grabbing agenda? Maybe. One thing, however, is certain—such incidents, widely sensationalized by the corporate media, are perfect tools for “mass psychology,” ultimately resulting in “social control … the control of human behavior” of the sort formerly advocated by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Dulles Brothers and not so coincidentally brought into the present by the likes of Anders Johnsson and the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

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Cryptome Shut Down. National Security Letter Issued?

John Young
John Young, Cryptome webmaster
John Young’s controversial web site, Cryptome, has received a letter from its hosting service, Verio, indicating it will terminate service due for violation of its Acceptable Use Policy. Cryptome has until May 4 to find another service provider.

“Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance—open, secret and classified documents—but not limited to those,” the site explains.

“You’d think that websites like Young’s would be illegal, especially since the Internet is one of the most critical battlegrounds in our war against radical Islamists. Terrorists not only use encrypted online messages to communicate, but they scan the Web for intelligence,” Michael Crowley wrote for Readers Digest in March, 2005. “Perhaps if more of us complain, that could change. One thing’s for certain: We can’t persuade the people who get a thrill exposing dangerous facts to sober up.”

According to Cryptome, the people who complained may work for the FBI. “This notice of termination is surprising for Verio has been consistently supportive of freedom of information against those who wish to suppress it,” a note on a mirror site states. “Since 1999 Cryptome has received a number of e-mailed notices from Verio’s legal department in response to complaints from a variety of parties, ranging from British intelligence to alleged copyright holders to persons angry that their vices have been exposed (see below). In every case Verio has heretofore accepted Cryptome’s explanation for publishing material, and in some cases removal of the material, and service has continued…. In this latest instance there was no notice received from Verio describing the violation of acceptable use to justify termination of service prior to receipt of the certified letter, thus no opportunity to understand or respond to the basis for termination… It may be wondered if Verio was threatened by an undisclosable means, say by an National Security Letter or by a confidential legal document or by a novel attack not yet aired.”

“A National Security Letter (NSL) is a form of administrative subpoena used by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation,” explains Wikipedia. “It is a demand letter issued to a particular entity or organization to turn over various record and data pertaining to individuals. They require no probable cause or judicial oversight. They also contain a gag order, preventing the recipient of the letter from disclosing that the letter was ever issued.”

The ACLU adds:

National Security Letters (NSLs) allow the FBI to obtain certain kinds of sensitive personal records without obtaining any kind of court order… The absence of judicial oversight means that, when it comes to the use of NSLs, the FBI has a free hand…

Before the PATRIOT Act became law in October 2001, the FBI could issue an NSL against you only if it had reason to believe that you were a foreign spy. Now, however, the FBI can issue an NSL against you even if it knows you are completely innocent of any such activity. The only requirement is that the NSL be ’sought for’ an ongoing investigation…

Does it really serve national security to allow the FBI to engage in such aggressive surveillance—including surveillance of ordinary, law-abiding Americans—without any judicial oversight whatsoever?

Barton Gellman, writing for the Washington Post, adds:

[National Security] letters—one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people—are extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans… National security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress.

Finally, it should be noted that earlier this month Cryptome reported “that the US Department of Homeland Security is demanding the master key for DNS root zone, a demand that has other nations deeply alarmed. With the master key, DHS would have control over the Internet,” writes Bob Chapman of the International Forecaster.

In short, with control of this “key-signing key” and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers out of the way, spooks would be able to effectively turn the web into a large snoop apparatus.

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Corporate Media Ignores Durbin’s Admission Iraq Invasion was Predicated on Lies

Majority Whip Richard Durbin, number two Democrat in Congress, “knew that the American public was being misled into the Iraq war but remained silent because he was sworn to secrecy as a member of the intelligence committee,” according to the Washington Times. “The information we had in the intelligence committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn’t believe it,” the Congress critter admitted. “I was angry about it. [But] frankly, I couldn’t do much about it because, in the intelligence committee, we are sworn to secrecy. We can’t walk outside the door and say the statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that is being given to this Congress.”

Sworn to secrecy and responsible for the murder of nearly a million Iraqis and three thousand, possibly ten thousand U.S. soldiers, thus making not only Mr. Durbin a war criminal but the whole of Congress. Senators John D. Rockefeller IV and Carl Levin, members of the same intelligence committee as Durbin, are at the head of the war criminal list, right after Bush, Cheney and the neocons, because these “two Democrats said publicly before the war that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was intent on pursuing nuclear weapons,” that it to say they had the same information as Durbin.

In a somewhat more equitable and just world, the lot of them would be doing the perp walk in orange jumpsuits. Unfortunately, we live in a world nowhere near equitable and just, a world where men of Durbin’s caliber make statements indicating he knew, and obviously a lot of other Congress critters knew, the neocon invasion of Iraq was predicated on “intelligence failures,” i.e., absolute and calculated lies, and yet Durbin did not try to stop the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis because he was “sworn to secrecy.”

Beyond the Washington Times, this news is apparently not worth the light of day, as a Google News search produces a mere handful of results, most notably Fox News, which gave it a predictable spin, namely that Congress digested and embraced the engineered neocon lies about Saddam and his illusory weapons of mass destruction and the fairy tale that Saddam held tea and biscuit parties for “al-Qaeda” in Baghdad. All of this was plainly obvious at the time, but the corporate media eagerly disseminated neocon fabrications to a mostly indifferent and distracted American public, a can’t be bothered public almost as complicit in war crimes as Durbin.

Meanwhile, a “left-leaning, activist crowd,” according to the Boston Herald, enthusiastically welcomed war criminal Hillary and would-be war criminal Obama in California. “Obama, who has made his early opposition to the Iraq conflict a central theme of his campaign, told delegates he was proud to have bucked popular opinion at the time. It was a subtle but direct jab at Clinton, who voted in 2002 to grant Bush authority to invade Iraq.”

Plan Obama, however, does not set a withdrawal date and in fact would keep troops in Iraq for “counter-terrorism,” that is to say they would continue killing Iraqis opposed to the occupation of their country. Of course, Iraq is not Iran or Pakistan, two countries Obama affirms may need to be on the receiving end of “surgical missile strikes,” even though such would “further strain relations between the U.S. and the Arab world,” as the Chicago Tribune reported back in September, 2004. Apparently, this is not a big deal for the “left-leaning, activist crowd,” so long as it is a Democrat doing the killing and not a Bush neocon.

But then, of course, Democrats, even “left-leaning” Democrats, are not opposed to mass murder campaigns, as they supported Bill Clinton’s criminal bombing of Yugoslavia. “Democrats prefer Clinton wars and Republicans prefer Bush wars. But in the end, they almost unanimously come together to support all wars. The differences concern the choice of official rationale,” writes Diana Johnstone.

And, in regard to Iran, this “official rationale” differs little from that of the neocons. Speaking before AIPAC last month, Obama “said global leaders must do whatever it takes to stop Iran from enriching uranium and acquiring nuclear weapons,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times, and never mind there is no evidence of this dreaded acquirement. “Our job is to renew the United States’ efforts to help Israel achieve peace with its neighbors while remaining vigilant against those who do share this vision,” Obama told AIPAC.

In addition, Obama the “antiwar candidate” told AIPAC the “consequence of the Administration’s failed strategy in Iraq has been to strengthen Iran’s strategic position; reduce U.S. credibility and influence in the region; and place Israel and other nations friendly to the United States in greater peril.” In order to right this perceived wrong—that is, a wrong perceived by AIPAC, not the American people—Obama issued a “gloves-are-off memo” stating the United States, if he is selected as ruler, “wouldn’t rule out force” because job one of the neolib elite is “to never forget that the threat of violence is real.”

Indeed, the “threat of violence is real,” and it will continue to be so long as Democrats and Republicans lord over the political process, as they will come 2008.

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Kucinich’s Constitution, Minus Second Amendment

It was an eminently forgettable event at South Carolina State University. “No runs, no hits, no errors,” joked Democratic consultant Erik Smith about the “debate” between Democrat presidential hopefuls. “Nobody made any significant mistake, but nobody distinguished themselves.”

Dennis Kucinich “distinguished” himself, however, when he pulled out a pocket Constitution and called for the impeachment of Dick Cheney. Of course, this was a less than meaningless gesture, as Kucinich picks and chooses what sections of the document he favors. Kucinich is “drafting legislation to ban civilian ownership of handguns,” according to Sabrina Eaton, a direct affront to the Constitution. Naturally, the commoners shall not be allowed to defend themselves, even though Dennis “kept a pistol in his house after police learned of a Mafia plot to kill him during his tumultous stint as Cleveland’s mayor during the 1970s.”

“I have friends who both hunt and shoot. These are good people, they are not criminals, and they lock up their guns when not using them. I support their right to their hobbies, and I support the right to bear arms,” declares the politico from Cleveland on his web page. “By helping to develop a society which does not look to violence as a method of solving problems, my proposed Department of Peace will play a key role in this. Conflict resolution and alternatives to violence will constitute major areas of responsibility within this new Department, so that we can begin to lead by examples as well as by words.”

Let us dissect this nonsense. First and foremost, the Second Amendment was not drafted to protect the rights of duck hunters or tin can plinkers. It was included because the framers understood well enough that an unarmed and defenseless populace are chumps for tyranny. “No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in draft of the Virginia Constitution in 1776. The Constitution, James Madison noted in the Federalist Papers, provides “the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation,” other nations where “governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” As Kucinich understands, the protection afforded by firearms not only makes tyrannical government think twice, it also makes Mafia hit men reconsider as well. Dennis was not thinking about target practice or hunting when he packed a piece back in the 70s.

Is it possible Dennis’ “Department of Peace” will be on hand when a thug attempts a home invasion or, more pertinently, the next time an armed mental case enters a classroom? Unfortunately, violence, or rather self-defense, is the only way to solve problems in certain situations. Dennis may naively believe his Peace Department will “lead by examples as well as by words,” never mind the criminals and predators among us, ready and able to take advantage of a disarmed public. Criminals love this sort of touchy-feely nonsense, as they prefer unarmed and defenseless fawns waving peace signs to men and women versed in the use firearms and willing to do so should the situation arise.

Regardless of all the idle chatter on impeachment and his apparent willingness to consider a re-investigation of the events surrounding September 11, 2001, Dennis Kucinich should not be trusted, as he is obviously just another neolib angling for the White House, albeit with a unique game plan to set him apart from the field crowded with other despicable one-worlders, such as Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Biden, Dodd, Richardson, and Gravel (who?).

Turn them upside down, they’re all gun-grabbers.


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Human Collapse Disorder: Send the Neolib Pathocrats to Gliese 581

Our scientists, putting their technology to good use, have discovered a potentially habitable planet, according to Science News, “just 20.5 light-years from Earth.” It circles about the red dwarf Gliese 581, a star one-third as heavy as the sun. Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution believes the planet is “arguably the first habitable planet” ever identified.

It’s too bad we don’t have the technology to visit this planet and determine its habitability. According to the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, if we developed a way to enter a wormhole, it might be possible to “travel from one side of the galaxy, to the other, in a week or two,” and thus it would not take 40,000 years to reach Gliese 581 with the space travel technology currently available—the space shuttle maxes out at 17,000 miles per hour—or rather the space travel technology we are told is currently available. As it now stands, we are able to shuffle around photons and atoms by way of quantum teleportation, and only over the distance of a few millimeters, so a “beam me up, Scotty” scenario is out of the question, and that is really too bad.

It’s too bad because, the way things are going, we will make this planet uninhabitable in short order. It’s not simply tons of depleted uranium wafting on the trade winds, or the floating nuclear waste processing plants dumping in the oceans, or the startling increase in morbidity rates worldwide from cancer, but the decimation of the bee population, said to be at 70 percent. It is said a quote attributed to Albert Einstein—”If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left”—is an urban myth, as researchers cannot nail down a reference to the theoretical physicist’s supposed remark. Even so, it does not take a rocket scientist, or even a theoretical physicist, to conclude that without the pollination provided by bees a lot of people will go hungry, indeed millions will likely starve to death. Colony Collapse Disorder in beehives may very well lead to Human Collapse Disorder on a global scale. According to the National Academy of Sciences, three-quarters of the world’s fruit, vegetable and seed crops need pollinators like bees to reproduce.

“Research is only beginning and hard data is still lacking, but beekeepers suspect everything from a new virus or parasite to pesticides and genetically modified crops,” reports Wired Science. Not to worry, others say, nature provides as many as 4,500 potential alternate pollinators—such as butterflies, wasps, and other bees—and the bee disappearance phenomenon is overblown, little more than media sensationalism, just another flip of the news cycle, sort of like Paris Hilton getting the Bronx Cheer at a Dodgers/Giants game in Los Angeles.

However, as Wired Science notes, these alternate pollinators are disappearing as well, and the “blame for that sits squarely on human activity,” including “habitat loss, pesticide use, and imported disease,” as well as franken food with pesticide engineered in the mix at the genetic level. Other scientists put forward “the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets” is responsible, according to the Independent.

If starvation doesn’t get us, cancer from depleted uranium will. It is not simply Iraqis, Afghans, Lebanese, and Serbians at risk after exposure to DU, but in fact the entire planet, as nano-size DU particles find their way into the atmosphere. “Environmental scientists who uncovered the figures through freedom of information laws say it is evidence that depleted uranium from the shells was carried by wind currents to Britain,” Times Online reported last year. “Government officials, however, say the sharp rise in uranium detected by radiation monitors in Berkshire was a coincidence and probably came from local sources.”

But of course. And not to worry about the bees, either, as Monsanto will save us, never mind all the Roundup herbicide, DEKALB and Agrow seed products, monster biotechnology, and the “agricultural” corporation’s legacy of Agent Orange and now ubiquitous PCBs, DDT, recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone and Aspartame, etc.

Is it possible DU, and maybe the decimation of the bee pollinators as well, is an engineered plot to reduce the world’s population? In regard to the former, Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab whistleblower Leuren Moret seems to think so.

“When I asked Vietnam Special Ops Green Beret Capt. John McCarthy, who could have devised this omnicidal plan to use DU to destroy the genetic code and genetic future of large populations of Arabs and Moslems in the Middle East and Central Asia—just coincidentally the areas where most of the world’s oil deposits are located—he replied: ‘It has all the handprints of Henry Kissinger,’” writes Moret.

But it is not simply Arabs and Muslims, but humanity as a whole.

“DU radioactive dust will be carried around the world and deposited in our environments just as the ’smog of war’ from the 1991 Gulf War was found in deposits in South America, the Himalayas and Hawaii,” she continues. “In June 2003, the World Health Organization announced in a press release that global cancer rates will increase 50 percent by 2020. What else do they know that they aren’t telling us? I know that depleted uranium is a death sentence for all of us. We will all die in silent ways.”

“Depopulation policy became the top priority under the NSC agenda, Club of Rome and U.S. policymakers like Gen. Alexander Haig, Cyrus Vance, Ed Muskie and Kissinger. According to an NSC spokesman at the time, the United States shared the view of former World Bank President Robert McNamara that the ‘population crisis’ is a greater threat to U.S. national security interests than nuclear annihilation,” Moret writes elsewhere. “It is no surprise that this policy was established under President Carter with help from Kissinger and Brzezinski—all with ties to David Rockefeller. The Bush family, the Harriman family—the Wall Street business partners of Bush in financing Hitler—and the Rockefeller family are the elite of the American eugenics movement. Even Prince Philip of Britain, a member of the Bilderberg Group, is in favor of depopulation.” Recall Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund, declaring in 1995: “If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”

I have no idea if the decimation of the bee population has anything to do with Prince Philip, David Rockefeller, Kissinger, Brzezinski, and the rest. I do know for certain, however, these folks are pathocrats, that is to say psychotic world leaders, a serious threat to most of us, considered not only commoners, but often useless eaters. I know, as well, in 1974, the U.S. National Security Council under Henry Kissinger completed a classified 200-page study, National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests, and this report called for depopulation strategies, that is to say engineered genocide against so-called “Lesser Developed Countries.”

Anyway, back to the allegedly habitable planet circling the red dwarf Gliese 581, some 20.5 light-years distant. If ever they perfect quantum teleportation, able to span immense distances instead of a few millimeters, and humans may be teleported without being reduced to a puddle of molecularly disassembled goo, I will enthusiastically volunteer to be teleported off this planet, as our pathocratic rulers and industrialists have reduced the “orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits,” as described as paradise in the Song of Solomon, to a simmering cauldron of death and misery.

Conversely, we can save this planet by packing off the pathocrats to the supposedly inhabitable orb distant. It remains my fondest wish to see these psychopathic criminals arrested, decked out in orange jumpsuits and chains, marched before a tribunal and thus sentenced to banishment. At one time I figured a small island located in a remote area of the Pacific would suffice, but now I believe a distant planet would be all the better for our protection, for as Steve McQueen demonstrated in Franklin J. Schaffner’s film Papillon, determined criminals may escape internment, even from Devil’s Island, an isolated penal colony located off the coast of French Guiana.

Of course, if there is organized and civilized life on the planet orbiting Gliese 581, it will likely not take kindly to the likes of criminal eugenicists dumped in their midst. If they are indeed civilized, as we here on Earth seem not up to the task, they may dispatch with these pestiferous pathocrats in short order, same as one would quite rational dispatch with any infestation of destructive pest.

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Fredy Perlman’s Anti-Semitism & the Beirut Pogrom

Last weekend, digging through boxes in storage, I cam across Fredy Perlman’s Anti-Semitism & the Beirut Program, a 16-page chapbook I bought in the late 1980s at the Fifth Estate newspaper offices, located in an old dilapidated manorial home in Detroit, the onetime mansion of an industrialist or real estate baron. Perlman, and the editors of the Fifth Estate I had befriended, were anarchists, and although I wasn’t necessarily an anarchist, I agreed with their critique of government and the sorry state of civilization, or rather what civilization has become.

Fredy Perlman was a Czechoslovakian Jew who’d escaped the Nazis as a child and this experience, later in his short life, had shaped his worldview. “The individual deprived of meaning chooses to take the final leap into meaninglessness by identifying with the very process that deprives him,” Perlman writes. “He becomes We the exploited identifying with the exploiter. Henceforth his powers are Our powers, the powers of the ensemble, the powers of the alliance of workers with their own bosses known as the Developed Nation. The powerless individual becomes an essential switch in the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing God, the central computer; he becomes one with the machine.” And as “one with the machine,” the corporatized Borg Hive, he or she consents to unspeakable crimes.

Perhaps Wilhelm Reich, who like Perlman escaped the Nazis, said it best in the years before the state indirectly sentenced him to death for the crime of telling the truth: “You give impotent people with evil intentions the power to represent you. Only too late do you realize that again and again you are being defrauded. You must come to realize that you make your little men your own oppressors, and that you made martyrs out of your truly great men.”

I spent this afternoon scanning and rendering into HTML Perlman’s chapbook. You can read it here.

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Neocon Sarko Poised to Win French Elections

Big choice for the French, as the 2007 election plays out with Nicolas Sarkozy on top, followed closely by Ségolène Royal. Sarkozy, billed as a “law and order” candidate, is considered the bête noire of the so-called Left, in France actually a gaggle of ineffectual and lukewarm socialists. Sarko, as he is both affectionately and derisively nicknamed, called for ethnically cleansing the banlieue of La Courneuve in June 2005 “with a Kärcher,” a well-known brand of pressure cleaning equipment, a rather remarkable comment, as he is Minister of the Interior. It is this attitude and his “circulaire Sarkozy” mandating a crack down on Muslim immigrants, that has won the favor of the neocons on the other side of the pond in America. It helps, as well, that Sarko supports the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Ségolène Royal, president of the Poitou-Charentes region, a member of the National Assembly, and a prominent member of the Socialist Party, also claims to be a “law and order” presidential candidate, but more significantly she supports the so-called “Third Way,” or “Radical Middle,” a centrist philosophy of rule that cobbles together “market” and interventionist philosophies, that is to say yet another variation, this one peculiarly French, of neoliberalism. In fact, the “Third Way” is nothing short of Fabian socialism, a construct nurtured by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in England and the Institute of International Affairs in the U.S., although in its modern version more or less the brain child (or bastard child) of brothers Aldous and Julian Huxley, the latter the first head of UNESCO.

In short, the French people have a choice between a neocon who likes to call Muslim immigrants voyous (thugs) or a graduate of the elite École nationale d’administration, in other words Ségolène Royal is one of a handful of énarques selected to become senior bureaucrats in France. For some reason, probably a throwback to their royal past, the French people accept this ironclad political monopoly with little question.

If the neocons and the Israel Firsters have their way, Sarko will come out the winner, as his well-established animosity toward Muslims—indeed, the whole of the Islamic Maghreb—is a more or less a perfect fit, whereas Royal’s socialist neoliberalism may result in flip-flopping disaster for the “clash of civilizations” game plan. In order to cinch the election, the neocons and Likudniks in Israel are tolling the “al-Qaeda” bell, as should be expected.

“The mass-circulation Spanish El Pais reported Monday, April 23, that al Qaeda is deep in preparations for mega-attacks in Spain and France,” reports the infamous Mossad front, DEBKAfile. “Aware of the threat, Sarcozy told Radio Europe 1 last Thursday, April 19: ‘The principal menace to France comes from Algeria, from the GSPC network that has transformed into al Qaeda. They have members in several European countries, including France’… Our counter-terror sources confirm the intelligence that the Algerian GSPC is working hard to repeat the “success” of al Qaeda’s 2004 Madrid rail bombings, which left 200 dead and hundreds more maimed—and turned Spain’s elections around. The ruling conservative Popular Party, one of the Bush administration’s foremost allies in Iraq, was consigned to defeat, and the Socialist Workers’ Party, opposite number of Segolene Royal’s Socialists, was elevated to power.”

Of course, this is nothing short of nonsense, as a two year Spanish investigation concluded last March determined no such “al-Qaeda” link, a fact reported at the time but since disappeared into the corporate media vapor. Moreover, Emilio Suárez Trashorras, alleged to have supplied 200kg of dynamite used in the bombs, was traced back to Los Técnicos Especialistas en Desactivación de Artefactos Explosivos (TEDAX), the bomb disposal experts of the Spanish Civil Guard (see Madrid 3/11 train bombing suspects linked to Spanish Security Services), a fact that has since found the memory hole. As well, and ever so conveniently, Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, said to be the ringleader of the attacks, and crew “may have been killed … when they blew themselves up as police closed in on their apartment” in April, 2004.

“The al Qaeda jihadists view Sarkozy as a dangerous enemy of radical Islamic organizations in France, who must be prevented from attaining presidential office, exactly like Spain’s Jose Maria Aznar,” DEBKAfile continues. “His foreign policy is likely to friendlier to the United States than that of Royal…. Sarkozy is viewed as foe by millions of Muslims living in France from his tough record as interior minister. Royal in contrast wooed the Muslim vote with promises of advantages. A terrorist attack that brings the Socialist contender to power will give al Qaeda a huge prestige boost with French Muslims.”

As usual, “al-Qaeda” will accomplish the exact opposite, making sure Ségolène Royal is trounced and Sarkozy elected. But then, of course, “al-Qaeda” was designed precisely for such occasions, making sure to underscore a threat that never materializes.

Finally, all of this is on cue, as we are told “al-Qaeda” has migrated to northern Africa, thus necessitating the creation of AFRICOM, announced by Secretary of Never-Ending War Robert “Iran-Contra” Gates.

“And thus the ‘al-Qaeda’ threat keeps on rolling, out of the Middle East and right into the midst of Africa, where there happens to be no shortage of strategic minerals and such,” I wrote here earlier this month. “Of course, for the neocons, the mineral wealth of Africa is secondary to making certain Muslims are demonized far and wide and making sure the WOT has a very long shelf life, maybe a hundred years or more.”

For Sarko, the job is to keep that demonization going strong in France.

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Demented Taliban Leader Evokes Dead Osama from Beyond the Grave

“A Taliban military commander says Osama bin Laden helped plan the deadly suicide car bombing outside Bagram Air Base targeting a ‘very important American official,’ apparently referring to Vice President Dick Cheney,” reports CNN. “Dadullah said al Qaeda leader bin Laden also is involved in planning attacks in Iraq. He offered no proof for his statements.”

Dadullah, who is demented, as most of the Taliban leadership suffers from dementia, does not offer proof for his statements because there is no proof, not that this would ever stop CNN from posting irresponsible headlines. CNN, while stating that Cheney was secreted away in a bomb shelter when the “attack” occurred, does not bother to mention Cheney was indeed a mile away, safe and sound even if he stood outside.

As evidence of Dadullah’s mental illness, consider the following:

Referring to bin Laden, Dadullah told the Arab-language network al-Jazeera, “Praise be to God he is still alive, and we have information about him and praise be to God he orchestrates plans in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

“You may remember the martyrdom mission in Bagram which targeted a very important American official. No Afghan can reach the Bagram base.

“This operation was a result of his blessed planning. He’s the one who planned the details of this operation and guided us and the operation was successful,” Dadullah said.

In other words, even though multiple sources reported the death of Osama bin Laden in late December, 2001, for some reason the Taliban, or a former CIA Mujahideen patsy who lost a leg fighting the Soviets for Zbigniew Brzezinski, would have us believe Osama is still alive, Allah be praised, and will attack Iraq soon, promise, right after “al-Qaeda” attacks the UK, France, Spain, and Israel from Gaza, that is if you believe a spate of recent news stories.

As for the “martyrdom mission in Bagram,” Cheney was never in danger, as he was squirreled away inside a bunker, and the bomb, a mile distant, must have sounded like a kid’s ladyfinger firecracker down the block on the Fourth of July. For the former CIA-ISI patsy who gave up his leg in exchange for eventually enduring a U.S. “carpet of bombs” instead of a “carpet of gold,” this absurd event passes for a successful operation. See what I mean by demented?

It is said the useful idiot Dadullah is operating out of Quetta, Pakistan, which makes perfect sense, as Pakistan’s ISI still runs the Taliban out of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. “The CIA has well-established links with the ISI, having trained it in the 1980s to ‘run’ Afghan mujahideen (holy Muslim warriors), Islamic fundamentalists from Pakistan as well as Arab volunteers by providing them with arms and logistic support to evict the Soviet occupation of Kabul,” Jane’s reported in October, 2001. “Trained by the CIA and the French SDECE, the ISI ‘ran’ the mujahideen in their decade-long fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported in September, 2001. “Opium cultivation and heroin production in Pakistan’s northern tribal belt and adjoining Afghanistan were a vital offshoot of the ISI-CIA co-operation.”

Funny how covert ops and addicting European and American kids to heroin go hand-in-hand.

At any rate, we can pretty much assume Dadullah is simply telling us what the ISI, and hence the CIA, want us to hear, as the show, er war, must go on, ad nauseam.

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Pat Tillman and the “Elaborate Lies” of Psychopathic Rulers

Lies. For the Bush neocons, they are second nature, as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning. Bush and crew lied about the events of September 11, 2001, about “al-Qaeda” in Afghanistan, about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

Pat Tillman, the football star who walked away from an NFL career to fight a manufactured enemy in Afghanistan, where he was shot dead by his own troops, was shamelessly exploited by the Pentagon, and became part of yet another lie.

“His family was initially misled by the Pentagon and did not learn the truth for more than a month. Tillman was awarded a Silver Star based on fabricated accounts—who fabricated them still isn’t clear after several investigations,” reports the Ledger Independent. “We don’t know what the secretary of defense knew, we don’t know what the White House knew,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “What we do know is these were not a series of accidents, these stories. They were calculatedly put out for a public relations purpose…. Even now there seems to be a cover-up.”

Of course there was a cover-up—that’s what government officials do. Pathological lies come easy and right as rain for the likes of the pathocrats who lord over us.

“I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were, in fact, legendary,” former Pvt. Jessica Lynch told the committee. “The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes, and they don’t need to be told elaborate tales.”

However, with all due respect to Ms. Lynch, the American people do need to be told “elaborate tales,” in fact elaborate and engineered lies designed to hornswoggle the commoners, who in the past were motivated to tar and feather government officials for lesser crimes, for instance levying excise taxes.

Now?

We are more outraged over celebrity actors with anger management problems yelling at their daughters. We can’t be bothered with illegal wars predicated on malfeasance and mendacity—not when Shyamalia the Hooters girl is showing cleavage one channel over. If indeed we are the least bit interested in politics, we can tune in to Sheryl Crow and producer Laurie David confronting Karl Rove over the issue of global warming, never mind there “is absolutely no convincing scientific evidence that human-produced greenhouse gases are driving global climate change,” as climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball, would have it.

The fact our rulers would lie and lie mightily should not come as a surprise, as they are mostly psychopaths, and psychopathy is defined as a condition characterized by lack of conscience and manipulative behavior. “The psychopaths, those human-looking predators without conscience, have no love for the rest of humanity,” notes Henry See, citing the work of Andrew Lobaczewski. “It is a life and death struggle between them and us because they know that if the true nature of their existence as humanity’s natural predator ever come to light, they would lose everything.”

Indeed, they would lose everything, but as it now stands humanity, at least the slice here in America, can’t be bothered with these “intraspecies predators,” not when rumors regnant offer details on Paris Hilton’s promenade with Kevin Federline in Las Vegas.

Pity the masses for their inability or unwillingness to call out the predators, for their ignorance carries an ultimately burdensome, if not fatal, result.

“President Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won’t. Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and network broadcasts pretend not to notice,” writes Eric Alterman, with obvious frustration. “In the one significant effort by a national daily to deal with Bush’s consistent pattern of mendacity, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank could not bring himself (or was not allowed) to utter the crucial words. Instead, readers were treated to such complicated linguistic circumlocutions as: Bush’s statements represented ‘embroidering key assertions’ and were clearly ‘dubious, if not wrong.’ The President’s ‘rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy,’ he has ‘taken some liberties,’ ‘omitted qualifiers’ and ’simply outpace[d] the facts.’ But ‘Bush lied’? Never.”

But of course, Eric, and for obvious reason—the corporate media is owned and operated by the same psychopaths, the Washington Post and the New York Times constitute their purview.

As Lobaczewski writes, “all ponerogenic associations have in common … their statistically high concentration of individuals with various psychological anomalies,” malformations shared by “gangs, criminal mobs, mafias, cliques, and coteries.”

Naturally, media owned by a psychopathic death merchant outfit such as General Electric, a megacorporation with a $43 billion media empire, will naturally engage “various psychological anomalies” in order to stay atop the dung heap—or, more accurately, a massive and stinking mountain of dead bodies, numbering in the millions—and it is quite naive, if not downright half-witted, for Mr. Alterman to think otherwise.

Dana Milbank, regardless of what Eric Alterman writes, is a Yalie, a member of Skull and Bones, and works for the CIA’s favorite newspaper. No doubt he is quite enthusiastic about his job as a corporate scrivener and doubtless as well he is well-compensated for the effort. But then the Nation magazine, where Mr. Alterman writes, is owned by Katrina vanden Heuvel, daughter of William J. vanden Heuvel, the onetime executive assistant to the founder of the CIA, William Joseph Donovan. Vanden Heuvel later became a board member of the Farfield Foundation, billed as a “philanthropic foundation,” in fact a CIA front organization.

If you can say anything about the media psychopaths and their pathocratic buddies in government, it is they are accomplished at manipulation, a hallmark of psychopathy. Frank “Wisner’s gang of weirdos,” as the closet queen J. Edgar Hoover described the CIA, was and is certainly accomplished at manipulation, as Operation Mockingbird, that is to say the wholesale compromise of corporate media, is a well-oiled machine going on some sixty odd years now. Thus it should come as no surprise criminal—indeed, genocidal—lies keep a tight ship.

Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, may call for the Oversight and Government Reform Committee to haul former Secretary of Forever War, Donald Rumsfeld, and Gen. John Abizaid, then-chief of the U.S. Central Command, before his committee to explain the lies surrounding the death of former NFL star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman, but this is an exercise in futility, at best a roadside spectacle, soon obviated by larger, more portentous news stories, for instance Courtney Love’s decision to keep her “butt in shape” through diet and exercise.

“How high up did it go?” Henry Waxman demands to know.

Well, Hank, if the truth be told—and even if it is, no doubt it will be preempted by the Sports Babes’ draft analysis—we can bet our bottom dollar it runs all the way to the top.

Finally, and sadly, considering the fact Mr. Waxman needs to ask is indication enough he will never get there.

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Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

By Naomi Wolf, published by the Guardian, Tuesday April 24, 2007.

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security - remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” - didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilisation”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2 Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal “outer space”) - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, “enemies of the people” or “criminals”. Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA “black site” prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can’t investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don’t generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: “First they came for the Jews.” Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People’s Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3 Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration’s endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for “public order” on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station “to restore public order”.

4 Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini’s Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5 Harass citizens’ groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 “suspicious incidents”. The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track “potential terrorist threats” as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.

6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a “list” of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela’s government - after Venezuela’s president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, “because I was on the Terrorist Watch list”.

“Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that,” asked the airline employee.

“I explained,” said Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.”

“That’ll do it,” the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of “enemy of the people” tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can’t get off.

7 Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not “coordinate”, in Goebbels’ term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically “coordinate” early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that “waterboarding is torture” was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were “coordinated” too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8 Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC’s Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9 Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death”, according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, dissidents were “enemies of the people”. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy “November traitors”.

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10 Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan’s militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state’s governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: “A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night … Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias’ power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life … How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war” - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the “what ifs”.

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the “what ifs”. For if we keep going down this road, the “end of America” could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … is the definition of tyranny,” wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

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Neolib Rulers Hail Dead Pathocrat Yeltsin

It’s enough to induce uncontrollable vomiting. “It is with sadness that I learned of the death of former president Yeltsin. He was a remarkable man who saw the need for democratic and economic reform and in defending it played a vital role at a crucial time in Russia’s history,” declared the neocon poodle, Tony Blair. “He is best remembered when standing up to the coup d’etat aimed at restoring a dictatorial regime in Russia. With great personal courage he had merit in defending freedom,” said one-worlder and president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso. “Boris Yeltsin was a great personality in both Russian and international politics, a brave fighter for democracy and freedom and a true friend of Germany. His contribution to the development of our relations between our two nations will never be forgotten. We will honor him in our thoughts,” added Angela Merkel, German chancellor.

On and on the sickening plaudits ensue, and quite predictably, considering the source. Not one word of truth from our mendacious rulers concerning the former construction boss from Butka, who assumed room temperature the other day. Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation, was a quite useful, if often drunk, tool for the international bankers and “free trade” looters who greedily carved up the former Soviet Union with the help of Mikhail Gorbachev, who “won” the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. In fact, due largely to his simian character, Yeltsin was a near perfect choice for the likes for the IMF, World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury Department as they went about carrying out the “Washington Consensus” or “shock therapy.” It hardly mattered Yeltsin’s cronies and toadies made off with most of the money, while other bureaucrats, mostly former communist party members gone neolib, engaged in record rates of bribery and corruption.

“Victor Ilyukhin, national security committee chair of the Duma (the lower chamber of the RF parliament), said that the last IMF loan to the RF government was stolen by ‘The Family.’ He meant the family of RF President Yeltsin, who a couple of years ago described his country as a ‘criminal state.’ Of course, Yeltsin distances himself from the criminal society of the country that he has led since late 1991,” Stanislav Lunev wrote in 1999. “In other words, all money coming into the RF from Western countries and international financial institutions has disappeared and reappeared a little later in the private bank accounts of the ‘new Russians,’ a corrupt government and political elite with close connections to Mafia-type criminal organizations. Only a small amount of these credits and loans is being used for the development of new types of mass-destruction weapons systems and for the fulfillment of “projects” like the restoration of the president’s residences in the Kremlin and elsewhere.”

And what did the Russian people, the “Great Proletariat,” get out of this fire sale? Vouchers, said to be worth the cost of a bottle of vodka. According to the history books, written naturally by the scriveners of the global elite, the Russian people so approved of this massive thievery and criminal behavior at the behest of the bankers they “re-elected” Yeltsin in 1996. In fact, thanks to the strong-arm tactics of the emerging “business oligarchs,” i.e., accomplished pilferers, Yeltsin successfully defeated his communist rival Gennady Zyuganov. Of course, Zyuganov never had a chance, as the deck was stacked in favor of the “business oligarchs,” who were in cahoots with the communist apparatchiks, all of them on the take to the bankers and loan sharks. A few years later, Putin would arrest a few of these oligarchs, if only on principle, most notably the former Komsomol activist Mikhail Khodorkovsky, much to the displeasure of the neocon and “Prince of Darkness,” Richard Perle. Others, including Leonid Nevzlin and Michael Brudno, escaped to Israel, where there is a flat chance in hell of them being brought to justice.

“Russia in the 1990s has witnessed a peacetime economic contraction of unprecedented scale. Many believe much of the blame for the social and economic catastrophe rests with the IMF, which has had a central role in designing and supervising Russia’s economic policy since 1992,” notes Double Standards. “The number of Russians in poverty has risen from 2 million to 60 million since the IMF came to post-Communist Russia. Male life expectancy has dropped sharply from 65 years to 57. Economic output is down by at least 40 percent.”

“Russia kept its economy functioning with an influx of foreign funds, lent at astronomically high interest rates because of the strong possibility of default. In 1998, with the Asian crisis still unfolding and with Russian default seemingly near, the IMF agreed to a $23 billion loan package to Russia, seeking to maintain the rubles overvalued exchange rate. An initial $4.8 billion portion of the loan left the country immediately […] some used to pay off foreign lenders, much of it stolen by Russian politicians,” explains Vladimir Shestakov (IMF versus Russia).

But never mind.

“On the day of his death it’s not worth concentrating on his mistakes,” Vladimir Ryzhkov, a dedicated Yeltsin bootlicker, told the Financial Times. “He himself spoke of his greatest mistake which he said was starting the war in Chechnya. I think the second great mistake was setting the precedent for a handover of power without free elections. He created the mechanism to appoint a successor.”

“I think history will judge Boris Yeltsin very positively. He was instrumental in the most important and positive transformation of our lifetime, which consists of the end of the Cold War, the end of the Soviet Union and the beginning of Russia’s integration into the west,” said the CFRite and former Clinton deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott.

“He put all his energy, all his generosity, all his will into undertaking the transformation of Russia to create a modern democratic state, re-establish human rights and liberty, and rebuild the economy,” mused French president Jacques Chirac.

Ack. I do believe that is quite possibly enough.

Now please excuse me while I reach for a Dramamine.

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They Don’t Call It “American Exceptionalism” for Nothing

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” –H. L. Mencken


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Bill Clinton: Ambassador of Death

“Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday that if she is elected president, she would make her husband a roaming ambassador to the world, using his skills to repair the nation’s tattered image abroad,” reports the Associated Press. “I believe in using former presidents, particularly what my husband has done, to really get people around the world feeling better about our country,” Hillary said. “We’re going to need that. Right now they’re rooting against us and they need to root for us.”

Of course, we shouldn’t expect Clinton or a fawning corporate media to mention the reason why “people around the world” are “rooting against us.” It wouldn’t have anything to do with invading small, defenseless countries, would it? “The war in Iraq is a continuing drag on opinions of the United States, not only in predominantly Muslim countries but in Europe and Asia as well,” notes the Pew Global Attitudes Project. “And despite growing concern over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.S. presence in Iraq is cited at least as often as Iran—and in many countries much more often—as a danger to world peace.” More specifically, the United States is a danger to the Iraqi people, as the United States, according to a study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and published in the esteemed medical journal Lancet, are responsible for the death of over 650,000 Iraqis. Lest we forget, Hillary voted for the illegal invasion of Iraq, thus she is party to mass murder.

Back in 2003, another poll indicated Bill Clinton “ranks as this nation’s third best chief executive,” right behind Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. “Silly Clinton. All you did was provide peace and prosperity—why would we ever want that again?” remarked the “liberal bomb thrower” Oliver Willis upon the publication of the poll results.

How soon we forget. Bill Clinton, according to Edward S. Herman, “has gone beyond the Bush [Senior] record of criminality, and has brought to the commission of war crimes a new eclectic reach and postmodern style. A skilled public relations person, he has refined the rhetoric of humanistic and ethical concern and can apologize with seeming great sincerity for our earlier regrettable sponsorship and support of mass murder in Guatemala while carrying out similar or even more vicious policies in Colombia and Iraq at the same moment…. Clinton’s crimes range from ad hoc bombings to boycotts and sanctions designed to starve into submission, to support of ethnic cleansing in brutal counterinsurgency warfare, and to aggression and devastation by bombing designed to return rogues to the stone age and keep them there.”

On June 26, 1993, Clinton bombed Baghdad, supposedly in retaliation for an assassination attempt against his predecessor. Clinton’s raid killed eight people, including the renowned artist Layla al-Attar. Later, Clinton bombed Afghanistan and the Sudan, the latter targeting a pharmaceutical factory, a major source of medical drugs in that impoverished country. As Herman notes, in Yugoslavia Clinton and NATO targeted civilians “in houses, hospitals, schools, trains, factories, power stations, and broadcasting facilities.” According to Yugoslav authorities, “60 percent of NATO targets were civilian, including 33 hospitals and 344 schools, as well as 144 major industrial plants and a large petro-chemical plant whose bombing caused a pollution catastrophe. John Pilger noted that the list of civilian targets included ‘housing estates, hotels, libraries, youth centres, theatres, museums, churches and 14th century monasteries on the World Heritage list. Farms have been bombed and their crops set afire,’” in other words, massive war crimes.

But all of this pales in comparison to Clinton’s complicity in genocide. “Bombs are merciful compared to what Clinton has done to the innocent children of Iraq, the most vulnerable of all, by maintaining ten years of the harshest sanctions in the history of mankind, begun on August 6, 1990, and kept in place at the insistence of the United States,” writes David L. Harten. “In 1989, the literacy rate [in Iraq] was 95%; and 93% of the population had free access to modern health facilities,” Anupama Rao Singh, UNICEF’s senior representative in Iraq, told John Pilger in early 2000. “Parents were fined for failing to send their children to school. The phenomenon of street children or children begging was unheard of. Iraq had reached a stage where the basic indicators we use to measure the overall well-being of human beings, including children, were some of the best in the world. Now it is among the bottom 20%. In 10 years, child mortality has gone from one of the lowest in the world, to the highest.”

In 1996, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, “567,000 Iraqi children had died as a direct consequence of economic sanctions,” and the following year UNICEF reported “that 4,500 Iraqi children under five were dying every month as a result of sanctions—induced starvation and disease.”

According to Shuna Lennon, in a paper presented to the International Law Association on February 29, 2000, Clinton’s “blockade/sanctions regime was illegal from its inception under the Geneva Protocol,” specifically the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions 1977, articles 48, 51, 54. “The blockade/sanctions regime is by its nature inherently illegal under the Geneva Protocol, for three reasons. First, it targets civilians in breach of Articles 48 and 51(2). Secondly, it constitutes indiscriminate attack, in breach of Article 51(3). Thirdly and most flagrantly, it employs starvation as a method of warfare, in breach of Article 54.” In addition to violating the Genocide Convention, Clinton’s medieval siege and embargo violated the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, 1950. In short, Bill Clinton is a war criminal by any standard and as such should face prosecution, not be assigned as his wife’s “roving ambassador,” that is if she is elected, excuse me selected to be president.

Finally, Hillary may as well appoint a Mob boss as her special ambassador. During the Clinton years, special prosecutors investigated the following: Bank and mail fraud, violations of campaign finance laws, illegal foreign campaign funding, improper exports of sensitive technology, physical violence and threats of violence, solicitation of perjury, intimidation of witnesses, bribery of witnesses, attempted intimidation of prosecutors, perjury before congressional committees, lying in statements to federal investigators and regulatory officials, flight of witnesses, obstruction of justice, bribery of cabinet members, real estate fraud, tax fraud, drug trafficking, failure to investigate drug trafficking, bribery of state officials, use of state police for personal purposes, exchange of promotions or benefits for sexual favors, using state police to provide false court testimony, laundering of drug money through a state agency, false reports by medical examiners and others investigating suspicious deaths, the firing of the RTC and FBI director when these agencies were investigating Clinton and his associates, failure to conduct autopsies in suspicious deaths, providing jobs in return for silence by witnesses, drug abuse, improper acquisition and use of 900 FBI files, improper futures trading, murder, sexual abuse of employees, false testimony before a federal judge, shredding of documents, withholding and concealment of subpoenaed documents, fabricated charges against (and improper firing of) White House employees, inviting drug traffickers, foreign agents and participants in organized crime to the White House. (See The Clinton Legacy.)

Of course, Americans have short memories, or are amnesiacs altogether, and most of them know nothing about Clinton’s record as a war criminal. For many Americans, all that matters is Clinton made them feel good because he is a more accomplished actor than his successor, the dysfunctional former alcoholic George W. Bush. In fact, last year, Bush referred to Clinton as “my new brother,” in part because of “shared experiences,” for instance killing off large numbers of Iraqis. Clinton “has found his surrogate family,” writes Peter S. Canellos for the Boston Globe. “He is part of a sprawling clan, legendary for its warmth and unity. It is a clan that is so accustomed to acquiring surrogate sons and daughters that adoption has become a part of its strength…. Clinton has become a member of the Bush clan,” or rather crime family.

Turn them upside down, they all look the same.

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State to Decide Who is a “Dangerously Unstable” Person

Recall the establishment of the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health in April 2002 and its “recommendations” issued in July, 2003. Bush’s commission found that “despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed” and the way to address this so-called problem was to screen “consumers of all ages,” especially preschool children, for mental problems, or what mental health “professionals” and drug company executives consider mental problems. “Each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviors and emotional disorders.” According to the commission, schools are in a “key position” to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adults who work at the schools.

The commission commended the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP) as a “model” medication treatment plan that “illustrates an evidence-based practice that results in better consumer outcomes,” in other words, more people on expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, the sort of drugs that worked so well in Cho Seung-Hui’s case. It should be noted, as well, that the “Texas project started in 1995 as an alliance of individuals from the pharmaceutical industry, the University of Texas, and the mental health and corrections systems of Texas. The project was funded by a Robert Wood Johnson grant—and by several drug companies.” Allen Jones, an employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General, “revealed that key officials with influence over the medication plan in his state received money and perks from drug companies with a stake in the medication algorithm,” reports BMJ, a medical journal. For his effort, Jones was fired.

Now we have Bush directing “federal officials to conduct a national inquiry into how to prevent violence by dangerously unstable people” in the wake of Virginia Tech, according to CBN News. Of course, in a free society, there are few ways to prevent “dangerously unstable people” from going postal, especially if they are law-abiding beforehand. No doubt we will see yet another commission recommending the widespread use of so-called antidepressants, never mind these SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) are reported to cause “anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania … in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric,” according to David Healy and David Menkes from Cardiff University, and Andrew Herxheimer from the UK Cochrane Centre. In other words, in certain individuals, presumably such as Cho, SSRI drugs act as a catalyst for violence, both “self-directed” (i.e., suicide) and outward toward the community. Apparently, Bush and the pharms want to make sure every Cho in the country goes postal. It is a small price to pay for record pharm industry profits.

“President Bush has directed three cabinet secretaries to huddle with educators, mental health experts and government officials across the nation to recommend ways to avoid a repeat of Monday’s shooting rampage at Virginia Tech,” reports the Washington Post. “The review—to be headed by Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings—comes as educational institutions debate how to deal with early warning signs that a student may be dangerous to himself and others.”

Here we have a gaggle of bureaucrats, including one who specializes in legalizing torture, directing “mental health experts and government officials across the nation,” in other words figuring out how get the government even more involved in the lives of ordinary people who, after all, might have another Cho or any number of Chos in their midst. Leavitt will “summarize what they learn and report back to me with recommendations about how we can help to avoid such tragedies,” Bush said. Asked how long the review will take, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said: “Not long. This is a new tasking by the president, and so a lot of the details are still being worked out. Secretary Leavitt said he plans to get started quickly.” Translation: expect “recommendations,” similar to those reached by the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, to drug the population at large, that is after mandatory “screening.” It should be noted that Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, a Democrat, has empanelled a gaggle of “experts” of his own, including former Ministry of Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge.

According to Universal Health, “people with chronic mental illness or with exacerbations of symptoms could be guided directly into supervised and therapeutic settings…. Nurses learn early on that just because a patient says ‘no’ to care, doesn’t mean that it goes unquestioned. When ‘no’ isn’t based on rational decision making, or when cognition and judgement are suspect, we have clear and ethical processes to use to determine substituted judgment.”

In other words, “mental health” experts, in league with government bureaucrats, will decide who is mentally ill. “There is, of course, a balance to be struck between civil liberties and treating the mentally ill,” writes Rich Lowry for the Salt Lake Tribune. “But that balance is now badly off-kilter. Cho Seung-Hui was basically abandoned to his private mental hell at Virginia Tech. While he hatched his lunatic and hateful plot, everyone tried to ignore the scary guy in class behind the sunglasses.” It was Cho’s “poetry” and “plays” that supposedly provided the tip-off to his insanity.

“Certainly in this sensitized day and age, my own college writing—including a short story called ‘Cain Rose Up’ and the novel RAGE—would have raised red flags, and I’m certain someone would have tabbed me as mentally ill because of them,” writes the novelist Stephen King. “For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do.”

Of course, in an era when “a balance” is “to be struck between civil liberties and treating the mentally ill,” there will be no tolerance for such “excretory” channels for violence. Is it possible, if now just coming up as a writer, Stephen King would be “guided directly into supervised and therapeutic setting” and force-fed massive quantities of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors? “On the whole, I don’t think you can pick these guys out based on their work, unless you look for violence unenlivened by any real talent,” King concludes.

Is it possible “Bush’s New Freedom Initiative, which recommends mental health screening for all Americans, could ultimately be used to institute ‘political psychiatry’ in this country”? muses blogger Mack White. “This practice is not without precedent, the most notorious examples being the Soviet Union and present-day China. Also, it is a fact that political psychiatry has been recommended by at least one psychiatrist working for the CIA. In 1974, MK-ULTRA scientist Dr. Jose Delgado, Director of Neuropsychiatry at Yale Medical School, stated in testimony to Congress: ‘We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.’”

In our brave new era, surgical mutilation is no longer required.

Instead, our government, working with the pharm industry and psychiatric “experts,” can “guide” the officially designated paranoids, be they deluded writers or political activists, into “supervised and therapeutic settings” where massive doses of Paxil will be administered.

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Small Corporate Media Lie Concerning VT Massacre

Although it may seem like a small, insignificant detail, the fact the VT killings are not the “largest domestic massacre in US history,” as the media tells us, says a lot about not only the laziness and shoddiness of corporate media journalists, but also the urgency of the effort to spin and pass off lies as truth, blow things out of proportion, and generally fear-monger in an attempt to kill off the Second Amendment.

In 1927, in Bath Township, Michigan, school board member Andrew Kehoe, who was upset by a property tax that had been levied to fund the construction of a school building, blew up the Bath Consolidated School, killing 45 people and injuring 58, mostly grade school children. Like Cho Seung-Hui, Kehoe killed himself after accomplishing his dastardly deed. “As rescuers started gathering at the school, Kehoe drove up, stopped, and detonated a bomb inside his shrapnel-filled vehicle, killing himself and the school superintendent, and killing and injuring several others,” notes Wikipedia.

In a now established pattern, the corporate media is working closely with the government to build the official story, never mind the inconsistencies, glaring omissions, and plain stupid explanations we are expected to accept as fact. If the Bath School disaster demonstrates anything, it is that the corporate media will omit certain facts in an effort to push the official version of events, as they did on September 11, 2001 and the years since. Now, closing in on six years out from that event, to question the official version is considered by many in the corporate media to be a form of treason and disrespect for the dead. In likewise fashion, to question or not sympathize with the victims of the VT incident is considered a punishable offense, as Colorado student Max Karson discovered soon after the event.


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