Propaganda Alert

Speaking frankly about Israel and Palestine

2006-12-11T19:08:00.000-07:00

By Jimmy Carter
LA Times
December 8, 2006

I signed a contract with Simon & Schuster two years ago to write a book about the Middle East, based on my personal observations as the Carter Center monitored three elections in Palestine and on my consultations with Israeli political leaders and peace activists.

We covered every Palestinian community in 1996, 2005 and 2006, when Yasser Arafat and later Mahmoud Abbas were elected president and members of parliament were chosen. The elections were almost flawless, and turnout was very high - except in East Jerusalem, where, under severe Israeli restraints, only about 2% of registered voters managed to cast ballots.

The many controversial issues concerning Palestine and the path to peace for Israel are intensely debated among Israelis and throughout other nations - but not in the United States. For the last 30 years, I have witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts. This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices.

It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians. Very few would ever deign to visit the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza City or even Bethlehem and talk to the beleaguered residents. What is even more difficult to comprehend is why the editorial pages of the major newspapers and magazines in the United States exercise similar self-restraint, quite contrary to private assessments expressed quite forcefully by their correspondents in the Holy Land.

With some degree of reluctance and some uncertainty about the reception my book would receive, I used maps, text and documents to describe the situation accurately and to analyze the only possible path to peace: Israelis and Palestinians living side by side within their own internationally recognized boundaries. These options are consistent with key U.N. resolutions supported by the U.S. and Israel, official American policy since 1967, agreements consummated by Israeli leaders and their governments in 1978 and 1993 (for which they earned Nobel Peace Prizes), the Arab League's offer to recognize Israel in 2002 and the International Quartet's "Roadmap for Peace," which has been accepted by the PLO and largely rejected by Israel.

The book is devoted to circumstances and events in Palestine and not in Israel, where democracy prevails and citizens live together and are legally guaranteed equal status.

Although I have spent only a week or so on a book tour so far, it is already possible to judge public and media reaction. Sales are brisk, and I have had interesting interviews on TV, including "Larry King Live," "Hardball," "Meet the Press," "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," the "Charlie Rose" show, C-SPAN and others. But I have seen few news stories in major newspapers about what I have written.

Book reviews in the mainstream media have been written mostly by representatives of Jewish organizations who would be unlikely to visit the occupied territories, and their primary criticism is that the book is anti-Israel. Two members of Congress have been publicly critical. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for instance, issued a statement (before the book was published) saying that "he does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel." Some reviews posted on Amazon.com call me "anti-Semitic," and others accuse the book of "lies" and "distortions." A former Carter Center fellow has taken issue with it, and Alan Dershowitz called the book's title "indecent."

Out in the real world, however, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. I've signed books in five stores, with more than 1,000 buyers at each site. I've had one negative remark - that I should be tried for treason - and one caller on C-SPAN said that I was an anti-Semite. My most troubling experience has been the rejection of my offers to speak, for free, about the book on university campuses with high Jewish enrollment and to answer questions from students and professors. I have been most encouraged by prominent Jewish citizens and members of Congress who have thanked me privately for presenting the facts and some new ideas.

The book describes the abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine's citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank. An enormous imprisonment wall is now under construction, snaking through what is left of Palestine to encompass more and more land for Israeli settlers. In many ways, this is more oppressive than what blacks lived under in South Africa during apartheid. I have made it clear that the motivation is not racism but the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize choice sites in Palestine, and then to forcefully suppress any objections from the displaced citizens. Obviously, I condemn any acts of terrorism or violence against innocent civilians, and I present information about the terrible casualties on both sides.

The ultimate purpose of my book is to present facts about the Middle East that are largely unknown in America, to precipitate discussion and to help restart peace talks (now absent for six years) that can lead to permanent peace for Israel and its neighbors. Another hope is that Jews and other Americans who share this same goal might be motivated to express their views, even publicly, and perhaps in concert. I would be glad to help with that effort.

By Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States. His newest book is "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," published last month. He is scheduled to sign books Monday at Vroman's in Pasadena.

Pentagon Fomenting the "Civil War" in Iraq

2006-12-07T21:15:00.000-07:00

by La Voz de Aztlan

Global Research, December 7, 2006
La Voz del Aztlan

The Pentagon's "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)" is behind many of the terrorist attacks in Iraq. The car bombings, assassinations, sabotage, kidnappings and attacks on mosques are designed to cause violence and discord between Sunnis and Shiites. P2OG in collusion with Israeli IDF and MOSSAD operatives are responsible for a series of secret covert operations whose purpose is to create an all out civil war in Iraq. The ultimate purpose is to dismember the country, achieve complete control and make it easier for the USA and Zionist Israel to profit from Iraq's vast oil resources.

As part of the Pentagon's well funded programme, the CIA and Israeli MOSSAD have been training and arming the Kurds for terror raids inside Iraq. The Israeli operatives are also helping train US special forces in aggressive counter-insurgency operations, including the use of assassination squads against guerrilla leaders, prominent Iraqi academics, scientists, politicians and religious leaders. .

Their first major operation was the bombing on February 22, 2006 of the Shiite Askariya shrine in Samarra, also known as the Golden Mosque. The mosque was a very well thought out target that holds the tombs of two revered 9th-century imams of the Shiite branch of Islam. The attack on the Golden Mosque began at 7 a.m., when a dozen men dressed in paramilitary uniforms entered the shrine and handcuffed four guards who were sleeping in a back room. The attackers then placed a bomb in the dome and detonated it, collapsing most of the dome and heavily damaging an adjoining wall.

The covert operation against the Golden Mosque was designed to provoke Shiite groups into committing violent acts and retaliations against the Sunnis. Sunni political leaders said retaliatory attacks hit more than 20 Sunni mosques across Iraq with bombs, gunfire or arson. Authorities reported at least 18 people killed in the aftermath, including two Sunni clerics. In one incident, in Basra in southern Iraq, police said gunmen in police uniforms broke into a jail, seized 12 Sunni men and later killed them. These attacks against the Sunnis were also carried out by operatives under the Pentagon's "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group".

The Pentagon blamed the bombing of the Golden Mosque on al-Qaeda but cleric Abdul Zara Saidy had another explanation. He said the mosque attack was the work of "occupiers," or Americans, "and Zionists".

U.S. tracks Canadians for terror traits

2006-12-02T10:29:00.000-07:00

Monitoring system stores data on flights, licence plates, credit cards, addresses

Dec. 2, 2006. 08:47 AM
TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON—The U.S. government knows where you sat on your last cross-border flight, how you paid for your ticket, your email address, your phone number, even your special meal requests in the past.

They won't let you look at the information but they can share it with law enforcement agencies, foreign governments, even public health agencies and they can keep the dossiers compiled on millions of Canadian travellers for up to 40 years.

It's all in the name of assigning you a score as a potential terrorist under a program known as the Automated Targeting System (ATS).

U.S. privacy advocates and some legislators promised to fight to kill the program yesterday, but the Department of Homeland Security was unapologetic, saying the ATS is really just a continuation of a program overseen by another agency for more than a decade.

Every traveller from every nation, arriving by land, air or sea, is screened under the program.

There was no official reaction from Ottawa to the U.S. program yesterday.

A consultation period inviting comments on the plan ends Monday at which time Washington will determine whether it needs to modify it before publishing the final rules, said homeland security spokesperson Jarod Agen.

Details of the program were placed on the electronic Federal Register here in early November, but the department did nothing to publicize it, Agen said, because it was not seeking new information, merely bringing existing programs under the homeland security umbrella.

The information remains in the government's possession for up to 40 years, he said, because it can sometimes take 10 years or more for terrorist plots to develop.

"If you booked your flight by cellphone and that cellphone shows up at a terrorist's safe house, you will be under greater scrutiny," he said.

Privacy advocates say the Bush administration was trying to hide the program.

"The Automated Targeting System mines a vast amount of data to create a `risk assessment' on hundreds of millions of people per year, a label that will follow them for the rest of their lives, as the data will be retained for 40 years,'' said the Electronic Privacy Information Centre.

"Yet the system is deeply flawed, and the funds spent turning ATS into a citizen profiling program would be better spent in perfecting its cargo screening process, so that port security can be stronger than a `house of cards,'" the privacy centre says.
The centre's executive director, Marc Rotenberg, said if the information is used for any other reason than to assess security risks, and it cannot be accessed by its subjects, "then I think the program should be shut down.''

Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, the judiciary committee chair in the new U.S. congress, said data banks such as ATS are due for oversight.

"That is going to change in the new congress,'' he told the Associated Press, which first revealed the existence of ATS.

David Sobel, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the proposal "frightening'' and urged homeland security to "allow for an informed public debate on this dangerous proposal.''

The program was used to screen cargo in the early 1990s under the supervision of the American treasury department, then expanded to include passengers in the mid-1990s.

Following the 2001 terror attacks, however, the scope of information sought by the U.S. was greatly expanded and was the subject of much debate in Ottawa because it involved Canadian air carriers.

In its detailed privacy posting on its website, homeland security said data must be retained for up to 40 years "to cover the potentially active lifespan of individuals associated with terrorism or other criminal activities.''

It said, however, it would delete files if they are no longer relevant. But you won't know whether your file is active or deleted because the proposed rules also prevent any access to the data the U.S. has stored.

Most of the information comes from air carriers, Amtrak, the U.S. national rail carrier, chartered sea vessels and information provided by motor vehicle registration when your licence plate is scanned as you drive across the border.

According to the homeland security proposal, the information collected on you includes:

The date of your reservations and your travel dates.

Your name and the names of your travelling companions.

Your address, your credit card information, your billing address, your cellphone number and email address.

Where you like to sit on the plane and any special services — meals or otherwise — you request.

Your frequent flyer points and your travel agency.

The number of times you have booked one-way tickets.

How many bags you check and their tag numbers, and whether you have ever booked a flight and not shown up.

Conservative Party linked to pro-U.S. annexation cabal

2006-11-26T14:29:00.000-07:00

Activities tantamount to Treason, involving Breach of Parliamentary Oath and conspiracy to overthrow Her Majesty

by Peter Mackenzie

"Stand Up for Canada" appears to have been devised as a technique of mass deception, under the joint auspices of former ultra-right wing Alliance Party and U.S. Republican Party advisors.

In the last 2006 Federal Election, the Conservative Party kept trumpeting its slogan that it would "Stand up for Canada". Then, Opposition Leader Stephen Harper during that elected indicated that he would similarly "Stand Up" for Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic. Mr. Harper portrayed his party, as a party which would govern Canada with integrity and openness in a spirit of renewed democracy, in contrast with the 'corruption' of the Martin Liberals. As it turns out, these assertions by Mr. Harper could not be further from the truth.

Mel Hurtig, the founder of the Council of Canadians, and also a variety of other reliable sources including veteran CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, now reveal that senior elected representatives and advisors to the Conservative Party, are currently planning a scheme that would hand over Canada to the Bush regime by 2007. The official name for this scheme, is called "North American Union".

Mel Hurtig, a noted Canadian author and publisher who was the elected leader of the National Party of Canada, provided researchers with the agenda and attendee list of the so-called "North American Forum" at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, Alberta, Sept. 12-14, 2006.

Mr. Hurtig said the "secret meeting was designed to undermine the democratic process." In addition, the reported Agenda undermines the Statutory position of Her Majesty the Queen of Canada, as the constitutional expression of a Canada independent from the U.S.

"What is sinister about this meeting is that it involved high level government officials and some of the top and most powerful business leaders of the three countries and the North American Forum in organizing the meeting intentionally did not inform the press in any of the three countries," he said. "It was clear that the intention was to keep this important meeting about integrating the three countries out of the public eye," Mr. Hurtig further indicates.

The motive for U.S. participation, according to Mr. Hurtig, was "to gain access and control Canada's extensive natural resources, including oil and water."

Documents obtained by researchers associated with the Council of Canadians were marked "Internal Document, Not for Public Release." At least three current Ministers of Stephen Harper's Conservative Party minority government are cited in the Document as "ring leaders" so-to-speak, of an unlawful and anti-constitutional effort to hand Canada to the Bush regime.

Canadian constitutional and related law is quite clear that any such effort by elected members of a government to subvert the political authority of the Government of Canada, constitutes breach of a Parliamentary Allegiance of Office, and broadly treason.

This is because the reportedly directed efforts of Ministers in the Stephen Harper government, to hand over Canada to the political authority of Mr. Bush, as the American Head of State, without the consent of the diverse Canadian public, can only be executed by the seditious overthrowing of the Crown, i.e. Canadian Head of State.

Section 128 of the Constitution Act, 1867 indicates as follows:

Every member of the Senate and the House of Commons of Canada shall before taking his Seat therein take and subscribe before the Governor General or some Person authorized by him, and every Member of a Legislative Council or Legislative Assembly of any Province shall before the Lieutenant Governor of the Province or some Person authorized by him, the Oath of Allegiance contained in the Fifth Schedule to this Act; .

The oath set out in the Fifth Schedule reads as follows:

I, A.B. do swear, That I will be faithful and bear true Allegiance to Her Majesty... [Elizabeth II].

According to the Sixth Edition of Beauchesne's Rules & Forms of the House of Commons of Canada:

Should a member violate his oath he [or she] would be amenable to the penalty of not being allowed to sit in the House of Commons. He [or she] may be suspended from taking part in the sittings while still remaining a member of Parliament, or, in a case of extreme gravity, a Bill might be passed to annul his election...

The power of dealing with treason is inherent in the Parliament of every country.

The leaked document clearly substantiates that Ministers of the Stephen Harper Government are sharing information with representatives of the U.S. military-industrial-complex, for the purposes of "surrendering" Canada to a U.S.-based "non-democratic authority". This apparent government-sponsored effort is designed to destroy the sovereign authority of Canadians as co-owners of their society, in violation of all Canadian Constitutional Acts since 1867.

Pursuant to Section 46 (2) of the Canadian Criminal Codes "Every one commits treason in Canada, when someone (b) without lawful authority, communicates or makes available to an agent of a state other than Canada, military or scientific information or any sketch, plan, model, article, note or document of a military or scientific character that he knows or ought to know may be used by that state for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or defence of Canada;

Furthermore, pursuant to Section 52 of the Criminal Code of Canada, to the extent that the apparent efforts of the Stephen Harper government to surrender Canada to a non-democratic American political arrangement is seditious to "(a) the safety, security or defence of Canada," the Stephen Harper government has executed treason. If that has indeed occurred, then the Stephen Harper government, if it has any semblance of integrity, must surrender its authority to the Governor-General acting on behalf of Her Majesty the Queen of Canada, toward new Federal Election.

Make comments about this article in The Canadian Blog.

A new blog series about John F. Kennedy

2006-11-20T18:39:00.000-07:00

I just discovered an excellent series of essays about John F. Kennedy on this blog by Laura Knight Jadczyk. There are ten entries so far, with more on the way. The author does a great job on analyzing how the world might have been different if JFK had lived to fulfill his term in office. Instead, we are stuck with a moron and pathological liar like Dubya, who seems hell-bent on starting WWIII, with his Zionist/Neocon backers paving the way. Psychopaths... all of them.

In order to familiarize the reader with these series of essays, I will be presenting the first few paragraphs or so of each chapter, with a link to it's proper source.

Enjoy!

Relic

#1 John F. Kennedy and The Debris of History

Over the past few days I've been thinking a lot about John Kennedy and what our world might have been like if he had lived. These thoughts didn't just come out of the blue, they are the result of the fact that I have just finished reading one of the saddest books ever written: Farewell America by the pseudonymous author, James Hepburn.

Farewell America is pretty well accepted to have been authored by the French equivalent of our CIA, and based on hard intelligence gathered from French, Russian, and even American sources. It was originally published in French in 1968, but it was unavailable in the United States for many years. With the coming of the worldwide web, it became available and I truly wish that every American citizen would read it.

With remarkable skill and insight, the book outlines the overall situation in America at the time, and describes the players and most probable conspirators involved in the horrific and brutal public execution of probably the best president America ever had. There are many reasons to think that George H.W. Bush was involved in the plot, and today, having placed his idiot son on the throne, the world is as far away from that world we could be living in had Kennedy lived, that it is like we all died back then, and now we have awakened in Hell. [...]

#2 The Gladiator: John Fitzgerald Kennedy

In my previous post, I included a chapter from Farewell America which gave a broad overview of the "American Psyche." It is crucial to understand the forces at play here in order to understand why John Kennedy was murdered, and why, when he died, the death knell of the American Republic - as well as its people - began sounding.
As I have written before, most Americans are woefully ignorant of their true history, and by design. [...]

#3 The Bushes and The Lost King

The assassination of John F. Kennedy is a lot like the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Since that terrible day, almost 43 years ago, there have been over 2,000 books written about the JFK assassination. There have also been numerous television programs and several movies. There is endless theorizing and speculation as to why John F. Kennedy was executed by what amounts to a firing squad, in broad daylight, in the middle of Dallas Texas, on a sunny day in November. Additionally, there have been a lot of myths created and propagated seemingly to muddy the waters. The only thing that most of the proponents of various theories can agree on is that the FBI and the CIA did little to help the Warren Commission solve the crime. Well, that also sounds a lot like the official 9/11 Report. Both events were dealt with in the same way, by a "select group of bureaucrats with an agenda of lies".

Just as with the events on 9/11, there is the "official story"; in the case of Kennedy, it was the "lone gunman"; in the case of 9/11, it was 19 improbable terrorists directed by a cave-dwelling mastermind. In fact, Osama bin Laden and Lee Harvey Oswald have a lot in common: both worked for the CIA. [...]

Is the Bush family implicated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy? [...]

#4 Sim City and John F. Kennedy

When I re-read the words of John F. Kennedy, when I consider the legislation he sought to enact, when I consider the sheer depth and humanity of him, and compare him with what is lurking and lurching in the White House today, I am literally overwhelmed. How far down into the Slough of Despond we have been sucked since that November day 43 years ago. [...]

#5 John F. Kennedy and All Those "isms"

Today, I want to come back to my JFK project. Twelve days from now is the 43rd anniversary of the assassination - a virtual coup d'etat effected by Corporate America and its various connections. As I mentioned when I began this little series in commemoration of John F. Kennedy, a close and careful study of American history reveals that the American system was set up to promote the rule of the rich. It was Calvinism with a kick, and that kick was that it appealed to deviant persons without conscience for whom it seems the Capitalistic system was invented. [...]

#6 John F. Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, Organized Crime and the Global Village

Did you know that if we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:

60 Asians

14 Africans

12 Europeans

8 Latin Americans

5 North Americans AND Canadians

Of all of the above, 82 would be non-white and only 18 would be "white".

67 would be non-Christian and only 33 would be Christian.

5 would control 32% of the entire world’s wealth, and all of them would be US citizens

80 would live in substandard housing

24 would not have any electricity (And of the 76% that do have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.)

67 would be unable to read

1 (only one) would have a college education.

50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation

33 would be without access to a safe water supply

7 people would have access to the Internet

If there is a meal in your refrigerator, if you are dressed and have got shoes, if you have a bed and a roof above your head, you are better off, than 75% of people in this world.

If you have a bank account, money in your purse and there is some trifle in your coin box, you belong to 8% of well-provided people in this world.

If you are able to go to church, mosque or synagogue without fear of harassment, arrest, torture or death, you are better off than 3 billion persons in this world.

I guess you notice that Americans are in the minority population wise and yet they control the majority of the world's wealth. What do you think will happen if that majority of people ever really gets it in their head that America is an intolerable bully and must no longer be tolerated? Sure, America could bomb the hell out of the planet and reduce our lives to a Stone Age existence, but then that would be rather like cutting off our noses to spite our faces, now wouldn't it?

Today I want to look at some of the words and acts of John F. Kennedy in the last year - and days - leading up to his death, extracted from Farewell America. These words and deeds give us a deep insight as to how he wished to deal with America's place in the global village; that he saw the danger and sought to avert just what is happening today: the entire world is turning against America. As you read his words, and contemplate his acts, consider them in the light of what we have experienced in America since his death. We know where the assassins have led us: a world of terror and heartbreak, of endless war and privation for multiplied millions of human beings; where would we be today if they had not succeeded? [...]

#7 John F. Kennedy and the Psychopathology of Politics

Today I want to continue with the subject of John Kennedy; there's only one week left before the anniversary of his death, so I'm going to have to really put the pedal to the metal to get to the end of the subject on time. As it happens, now that the subject weighs so heavily on my mind, I find that there are things that constantly remind me of what America lost, the terrible state of the world today as a consequence of that loss, and the ultimate reasons behind it all. [...]

#8 John F. Kennedy and the Pigs of War (JFK and the Bay of Pigs)

On November 18th, 1963, 43 years ago today, John F. Kennedy predicted that the month of April, 1964, would bring "the longest and strongest peacetime economic expansion in our Nation's entire history." And he added: "The steady conquest of the surely yielding enemies of misery and hopelessness, hunger, and injustice is the central task for the Americas in our time . . . 'Nothing is true except a man or men adhere to it -- to live for it, to spend themselves on it, to die for it . . . '"

Time was slipping through his hands . . . he had four days to live. [...]

#9 John F. Kennedy and the Titans

On November 19, 1963, 43 years ago today, at a ceremony in the White House Flower Garden, John F. Kennedy welcomed officers of state education associations of the National Education Association. he remarked: "I realize once again in a very personal way what a tremendous flood of children are coming into our schools..."

He was always concerned about children, his own as well as the children of all Americans and the world. [...]

#10 John F. Kennedy, Oil, and the War on Terror

On November 20th, 1963, between 11:30 - 11:40 a.m., President John F. Kennedy met with Lena Horne, Carol Lawrence, DNC chairman John M. Bailey, and others.

Later that day, he issued a statement on the Extraordinary Administrative Radio Conference to Allocate Frequency Bands for Space Radio Communication Purposes, held in Geneva, Switzerland from October 7 to November 8, 1963. He invited other nations to participate in setting up a global communication satellite system. He spoke of "a peace system worldwide in scope."

Following that, John Kennedy sent to the Congress the 17th annual report on U.S. participation in the United Nations, and then he signed into law bill (HR2073) to allow the conveyance of submerged and tidal lands to Guam, the Virgin Islands, and American Samoa if they are needed for economic development or other compelling reason. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Archives

At the end of the day, he had less than two days left...

Seismic Proof 9/11 Was An Inside Job

2006-11-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

Sunday, November 12th, 2006
Craig T. Furlong & Gordon Ross

There is an appointed time for everything
And there is a time for every event under heaven
Ecclesiastes 3:1

SUMMARY
On September 11, 2001, the seismic stations grouped around New York City recorded seismic events from the WTC site, two of which occurred immediately prior to the aircraft impacts upon the Twin Towers. Because these seismic events preceded the collisions, it is clear they were not associated with the impacts and must therefore be associated with some other occurrence. None of the authorities charged with the responsibility for the investigation of the events of 9/11 have proposed a source for these seismic events, nor have they given a valid reason for the difference in times between the seismic events and the aircraft impacts. Only by consideration of the evidence of basement explosions before the aircraft impacts, as experienced by William Rodriquez and 36 others, can an explanation be found for the fact that the seismic stations recorded seismic events originating from the WTC sites prior to the aircraft impacts. It seems unlikely that Middle Eastern terrorists could have overcome the WTC security and managed this kind of high-level, technological coordination. Do the facts presented here, simple and few, raise the possibility of inside involvement in 9/11/01, both before and after the attack? [...]

Post-Election Reality Check

2006-11-08T08:53:00.000-07:00

By Laura Knight-Jadczyk
08/11/2006

So you think "the system worked", democracy has won out, and that yesterday's election is the first step to straightening out the mess Bush and the Neocons have made on the planet?

Think again. It's not that "the system" didn't work; it worked very well, but you have again been duped.

Nothing has changed. In fact, many of you have been put back to sleep by the staged Democratic victory which was set up just for that purpose; to make you think you still live in a democracy. The fact is, the Zionist halter is as firmly strapped on the head of American State policy as it ever was, and the American voter needs to realize that it is immaterial which party prevails at elections.

We read in one news item today:

Democrats Win House, On Brink of Senate Power

Democrats rolled up gains of about 30 seats in the House in Tuesday's elections, riding to a huge victory on a wave of public discontent with the Iraq war, corruption and Republican President George W. Bush's leadership.

Yeah, the public has been VERY discontented and the wave of resistance growing, what with all the activity on the internet working to expose Bush and the Zio-cons for the criminals they are. I'm sure that this was part of the reason to carry on this election farce.

Democratic control of the House will make outspoken liberal Rep. Nancy Pelosi the first female speaker and could slam the brakes on much of Bush's agenda and increase pressure for a change of course in Iraq. ...

Just slamming on the brakes? How about let's put things into reverse and go back a bit? I don't think that is what Pelosi has in mind, though.

"Tonight is a great victory for the American people," Pelosi told a Democratic rally on Capitol Hill. "Today the American people voted for change, and they voted for Democrats to take our country in a new direction." ...

Did they REALLY? Or is this just another manipulation? Is it a distraction to make the people think that changes really are on the way, when, in fact, it will be business as usual?

Early exit polls showed voters disapproved of the war in Iraq by a large margin, but voters said corruption and ethics were more important to their vote, CNN said.

Democrats hammered Republicans for spawning a "culture of corruption" in Washington, with four Republican House members resigning this year under an ethics cloud.

The party was hit by allegations about influence peddling, links to convicted lobbyists and a Capitol Hill sex scandal involving Republican Rep. Mark Foley's lewd messages to teenage male congressional assistants.

Hmmm... Pelosi is focusing on Iraq and not on the corruption issues. I think I remember some recent polls that suggested over half the people in the U.S. would support impeachment of Bush and even criminal charges. That's what people are really upset about, but is Pelosi on top of that issue? Or is she just handing the people a consolation prize?

Here's another from the Chicago Tribune:

American people sent 'unmistakable message'

After six years of near-total Republican domination, voters repudiated President Bush, the Iraq war and the GOP-led Congress on Tuesday, handing control of the House of Representatives to Democrats, placing Republican hold of the Senate in doubt and upending the balance of power in Washington.

The election, which centered on war, scandal and an array of anxieties about illegal immigration, high gasoline prices and embryonic stem cell research, abruptly ended 12 years of Republican rule in the House, casting out incumbents in every region of the country. ...

Notice how the corruption issues mentioned in the article above as being the chief concern of the people in the exit polls are mentioned only briefly here - scandal - while the focus gets put on the war, (which is certainly an outgrowth of corruption in the Bush Administration), immigration, high prices, and - geeze, how did that get in there - "stem cell research"?? Did they miss the exit polls that said: "voters disapproved of the war in Iraq by a large margin, but voters said corruption and ethics were more important to their vote."

You know: corruption, lies about WMDs, corruption of the Media, criminal behavior that needs to be investigated and prosecuted criminally?! It's sounding more like a set-up all the time: "hey, we'll let you Dems take the elections so it gets the heat off of us from the people who are ranting that we are fascists, meanwhile, you just make sure that nobody gets called on the carpet and/or raked over the coals! We don't want any REAL truth and justice and the American Way in Washington, ya know!"

Tuesday's election results mean Bush enters his final two years in office without a Republican Congress willingly moving his agenda forward and refraining from asking hard questions about U.S. conduct of the war in Iraq. Instead, Democrats will confront him with an agenda of their own and a newfound power to issue subpoenas and launch investigations.

Hmmm... but will they investigate what really matters? That's the 64,000 $$ question.

"The American people have sent a resounding and unmistakable message of change and new direction for America," said an exhausted Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who recruited and funded many of the challengers who won Tuesday. ...

Did they? Or is it all a farce to let off some steam, and take the heat off the criminals?

Democrats have vowed to raise the minimum wage, allow Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, make college tuition tax deductible and implement all of the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission to secure the nation's borders and ports. They have also promised to expand federally funded embryonic stem cell research, which Bush gave his first, and only, veto to this year.

But wait a minnit! What about the exit polls that said: "voters disapproved of the war in Iraq by a large margin, but voters said corruption and ethics were more important to their vote."?? Sure, raising the minimum wage is a good idea, helping medicare and students out is all fine and good, but what about investigating the lies that led us into the Iraq War? What about investigating the complete lie of 9/11? What's this about "securing the nation's borders and ports"? That sounds like they are just going to continue the Bush Zio-con agenda while handing out candy to the crowd. And again, "stem-cell research"??!! Don't get me wrong, I'm all for stem-cell research if it is conducted ethically. I'm also pro-choice. But how did this become a "talking point" when what is really upsetting Americans is corruption and lack of ethics in government? We need some investigations - independent ones at that - and some arrests and prosecutions! We want Bush and the Zio-cons BEHIND BARS or in front of a firing squad! Geeze, Pelosi, they've murdered over 600,000 innocent people! Don't you get it?

On Iraq, Democrats have said they would begin a phased redeployment of U.S. forces and require Iraqis to take responsibility for their country. They have also promised to double the size of Special Forces in order to track down and destroy terrorist networks such as Al Qaeda. ...

In other words, they are just going to pursue the Bush-Zio-con agenda with different justifications. Nothing about bringing the criminals to trial, getting out of Iraq today, this minute or telling the truth to the American people that there never WAS a "terrorist threat" other than the ones created by the CIA and MOSSAD. And now that we've mentioned it, that's another thing that needs to be investigated, independently!!!

That unhappiness extended to conservatives who watched with dismay as Republicans shifted from the party of limited government, less spending and strong ethics to one of massive spending, more government and scandal.

And now it looks like the Dems are doing a similar metamorphosis ...

Voters across the political spectrum were also distressed as bribery and lobbying scandals tainted a host of Republicans, forcing House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to resign and sending Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California to prison. Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) pleaded guilty to accepting illegal gifts from lobbyists, resigned his seat and is headed to prison next year.

"They went from being the party of conviction to the party of convictions," said Matt Bennett, a strategist for Third Way, a Democratic think tank. ...

And that's the main issue, if Pelosi and gang will just take notice. And the corruption goes all the way to the top.

On top of all that, sexually explicit electronic messages to congressional pages forced Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) to leave office and allowed a Democrat to win his seat. The ensuing scandal over who knew what when threatened to cause the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, New York Rep. Tom Reynolds, to lose his own previously secure Republican seat. Even so, Reynolds managed to win re-election.

Now, isn't that odd? We already know that the main thing that Americans are upset about it corruption, and here is a guy, at the center of a major scandal, who somehow managed to get re-elected?! Something isn't right with this picture. How much you want to bet that the guy running against him couldn't be bought, and the only Dems that did win in this whole election farce were the ones that could be relied upon to be "guided" by those special interests that are driving America to destruction?

Meanwhile, Rep. Don Sherwood (R-Pa.) lost his bid for re-election after acknowledging a long-running affair with a younger woman who alleged that Sherwood had assaulted her. He later reached an out-of-court settlement with the woman. And in New York, Rep. John Sweeney lost to Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand after it became public that police responded to a domestic violence call involving Sweeney and his wife last year. ...

I guess that Sherwood was expendable. Odd that he would lose for basically a "normal" scandal - at least it was adults involved - while Tom Reynolds, involved in the Foley pedophilia scandal kept his seat. Is it just me, or is anybody else seeing something wrong with this picture?

The country's sour mood and its unhappiness with the Bush administration were apparent in the final days and weeks of the campaign. As House and Senate races went down to the wire, many Republicans chose to distance themselves from the president. And the president was unwelcome in many states where Republicans were struggling to hold onto power.

And you can bet it was all planned that way. Now, let's look at Pelosi:

Pelosi set to become first woman to lead House

Under U.S. law, the speaker is second in the line of succession to the presidency, behind only the vice president.

That means that the controllers must be very sure of Pelosi. I would say that this almost guarantees that she is dirty.

Pelosi has said she will not try to end U.S. funding of the Iraq war but will pressure Bush to shift course, begin a phased redeployment of U.S. troops and require Iraqis to take greater responsibility for their own nation.

Oh, geeze, Nancy! How assertive of you! That would have probably happened anyway because even the Repubs admit it's a quagmire. You are doing anything special!

Pelosi has rejected calls to attempt to impeach Bush and drive him from office. But she has said Democrats would hold congressional oversight hearings, which could include such matters as whether he manipulated the facts to build early support for the Iraq war.

Wow! That says it all! Pelosi rejects calls to impeach Bush... but, just to make sure people think she is being straight-up, they'll investigate the "manipulation of facts." Can we say LYING, Pelosi? Can we say putting American lives in danger? Can we say TREASON?

Now, let's think about this for a minute: All the revelations mentioned above - the "culture of corruption" - came to us via the Media. We all know that the media is responsible for promoting the lies that Bush and the Neocons peddled about 9/11 and bin Laden and Saddam that got us into the war. We all know that the media colluded to protect the standing of G.W. Bush, a rapist, drunk driver, cocaine user, and deserter from the National Guard. Now, do you really think that the media (and its controllers) suddenly woke up and decided to become overseers of the Neocon ethics, to expose the corruption in the Bush Administration that has existed for all of the past six years?

Of course not.

Now, think back to the previous presidential election when it is a certainty, based on exit polls and the general feeling in the U.S., that G.W. Bush did not win that election - heck, he didn't win the first election - it was a fraudulent election, plain and simple. Take this to the next step: do you really think that if two elections could be stolen, that a third one could not? That the entire election of yesterday could not have gone to the Republicans IF that had been wanted by those who control the money, the media, and the voting machines?

But they knew that Americans were getting just a bit too hostile, that the climate in America was volatile, and another obviously "stolen" election could have been the spark to set off a powder keg. Not that they don't, ultimately, WANT to create a revolution in the U.S.; they just want it on their terms, and when they are certain that they can make it go the way they want it to go.

Besides, the crucial legislation that was needed to get and keep all the Democrats in line has already been passed.

Remember how many democrats voted to confirm Samuel Alito? What about Atty. General Gonzalez? How about the Patriot Act? The Torture Act? Remember how McCain showed his yellow spine?

So, do not, for an instant, let it escape your mind that the very media organs that ought to support accountability have been totally co-opted for a very long time.
Israel - by way of Jews loyal to the Zionist agenda - controls the media.

They control other things as well.

Consider who controls the telephone system in the U.S.... Israel. In short, long before 911, they had the ways and means to blackmail anyone in this country, INCLUDING CONGRESS.

Then consider what Paul Craig Roberts wrote about Bush's illegal spying...

Bush's acts of illegal domestic spying are gratuitous because there are no valid reasons for Bush to illegally spy. The Foreign Intelligence Services Act gives Bush all the power he needs to spy on terrorist suspects. All the administration is required to do is to apply to a secret FISA court for warrants. The Act permits the administration to spy first and then apply for a warrant, should time be of the essence. The problem is that Bush has totally ignored the law and the court.

Why would President Bush ignore the law and the FISA court? It is certainly not because the court in its three decades of existence was uncooperative. According to attorney Martin Garbus (New York Observer, 12-28-05), the secret court has issued more warrants than all federal district judges combined, only once denying a warrant.

Why, then, has the administration created another scandal for itself on top of the WMD, torture, hurricane, and illegal detention scandals?

There are two possible reasons.

One reason is that the Bush administration is being used to concentrate power in the executive. The old conservative movement, which honors the separation of powers, has been swept away. Its place has been taken by a neoconservative movement that worships executive power.

The other reason is that the Bush administration could not go to the FISA secret court for warrants because it was not spying for legitimate reasons and, therefore, had to keep the court in the dark about its activities.

What might these illegitimate reasons be? Could it be that the Bush administration used the spy apparatus of the US government in order to influence the outcome of the presidential election?

Could we attribute the feebleness of the Democrats as an opposition party to information obtained through illegal spying that would subject them to blackmail?

When Roberts suggests "What might these illegitimate reasons be? Could it be that the Bush administration used the spy apparatus of the US government in order to influence the outcome of the presidential election? "

... he doesn't really go the full distance. What if the illegal spying is to gain complete control of government and judiciary? Everybody has dirty laundry, and if you have that information, you can control about anything. The only people you can't control are those who are "clean" and we can guess from the way things are going in the U.S. and UK, just about everybody is "dirty."

Americans turned out in record numbers to vote in the last presidential election. They NEVER do that unless they are unhappy with the status quo. The exit polls and evidence of vote tampering suggests strongly that Bush did not win the election... (which is not to say that Kerry was any better choice!)

So, not only do they have control of congress and the judiciary so that they can control legislation, they also control the votes... As Stalin said, it's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes. And with control of congress and the judiciary AND the support of the Israeli owned media, there is NO possibility of them being made accountable for ANY of their crimes.

The whole election was played out as a farce to reassure the American people that they still lived in a democracy and to quell the growing revolutionary agitation.

So, considering the cards that the Israelis are holding in terms of illegal spying, I think we need to be realistic and understand that this election is not going to change anything substantive. They made a big show of the Democratic Sweep of the House, and on and on. But with the controls this cabal has already, there is ZERO possibility of fundamental change in course.

That's the problem we are facing and 911 is the single best leverage we have to DO something about it IF it is utilized efficiently. People need to continue to demand accountability for 9/11 - a full and independent investigation that includes reviewers and overseers selected at random from a pool of qualified, INTERNATIONAL, experts. The real criminals need to be found and prosecuted.

Anything else is just farce, business as usual.

This excellent analysis of post-election lies and hysteria can also be found at Signs of the Times

Canadians believe Bush is a threat to peace

2006-11-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

Poll:
Many fear U.S. will launch strikes on Iran, N. Korea
Bin Laden still perceived as greatest danger

Nov. 3, 2006. 01:00 AM
TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON—Canadians believe the world has become a more dangerous place since George W. Bush was elected U.S. president and a majority believe he will launch military strikes in Iran or North Korea before his term ends in 2008, according to a new Toronto Star poll.

Canadians also consider Bush more dangerous to world peace than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

The EKOS poll was done in Canada for the Star and Montreal's La Presse ahead of Tuesday's U.S. mid-term elections, expected to be decided on the issue of the Iraq war. The same questions were posed to respondents by pollsters in Britain, Israel and Mexico.

Canadians — like Americans — have soured on the U.S. invasion of Iraq with 73 per cent now telling EKOS that Washington had no justification for it. When the same question was asked of Canadians in April 2003, right after the Bush invasion, EKOS found 53 per cent thought it unjustified.

Also like Americans, Canadians are split on whether the U.S. should stay and finish the job or come home as soon as possible.

Canadians told EKOS they believed Osama bin Laden posed the greatest danger to the world, followed by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, then Bush, Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah.

Mexicans ranked Bush the second-most dangerous of the five, behind Al Qaeda's bin Laden.

Views in Israel were radically different, where only 9 per cent ranked Bush a "great danger," compared to 34 per cent of Canadians, 41 per cent of Britons and 58 per cent of Mexicans.

Israelis ranked Ahmadinejad — who has vowed to wipe the country off the map — the most dangerous, slightly ahead of bin Laden.

In addition, 57 per cent of Canadians said they believed the U.S. would intervene militarily in North Korea or Iran in the next two years over objections to their nuclear programs.

The polls were conducted in late October and involved 1,000 people in each country. The results are considered accurate within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Analysts here say anti-Americanism has become more intense under Bush than any other U.S. president before him.

"The feeling goes well beyond just policy choices," says Charles Pena of the Independent Institute. "There is the perception the Bush administration went into Iraq unilaterally and has made other choices unilaterally. There is a belief we ran roughshod over allies and that their opinions didn't matter and we wouldn't listen anyway."

Charles Kupchan of the non-partisan Council on Foreign Relations says there is a sense in the world that "America has gone off the reservation ... it is no longer a team player.

"It's a reaction to an Iraq war which seems to get worse by the day and is a festering wound. It will damage the U.S. image to 2008 and beyond because this eight-year period under Bush is something that will take years to overcome."

The Canadian view is not that different from that held by Americans. A New York Times/CBS News poll published yesterday indicated 26 per cent of Americans believe Bush had a clear plan to deal with the situation in Iraq and only 8 per cent said they believed he should continue on his present course in the war. Bush had the approval of 34 per cent of those polled.

The Pew Research Center in the U.S. regularly tracks America's global image and it, too, has found the image being tarnished with each passing year of the Bush administration.

Pew found the only time anti-Americanism had shown signs of abating was 2005 because of positive feelings generated by U.S. aid for tsunami victims in Indonesia and elsewhere. But a year later, America's image also had declined significantly in India (from 71 per cent to 56 per cent with a favourable opinion) and Indonesia (from 38 per cent to 30 per cent), Pew reported.

First-Grader Suspended Over Plastic Squirt Gun

2006-09-20T09:44:00.000-06:00

School District Says Policy Prohibits Exceptions

POSTED: 6:26 am EDT September 20, 2006

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A Missouri mother is angry that her first-grader was suspended from school over a plastic toy gun.

"I asked her, 'You're going to suspend my son for 10 days for this? He cannot harm a soul with this,'" said Danielle Womack, whose son, Tawann Caskey, was suspended from Milton Moore Elementary School in Kansas City.

Tawann was suspended over a 2-inch plastic squirt gun.

"She told me it's a weapon, a little girl saw it and reported to a teacher that he had a weapon," Womack said.

According to Kansas City, Mo., School District policy, the squirt gun is a simulated weapon and a class IV, which is the most serious school offense. Principals claim to have no discretion in cases like Tawaan's. It is an automatic 10-day suspension.

"We ask our principals for safety of students and staff, and we do follow the code of conduct and do not give exceptions to Class IV offenses. We take it very seriously," the school district's Phyllis Budesheim said.

The incident will stay on Tawann's permanent school record. But Womack said her son does not understand why he's not in school.

"I think this could have been resolved in a different way. It's wrong to bring it school, but come on, he's 6 years old. This would not hurt a soul," Womack said.

The school district said it is all policy -- one that the school told students and parents about at the start of the year.

"We regret that this happened. My feeling is that by not giving any exceptions, this young man will not bring a toy gun to school again," Budesheim said.

The school district said that the incident should be a reminder to parents to check their children's backpacks before they go to school.

Mystery package grounds flight

2006-09-20T09:09:00.000-06:00

Mystery package grounds flight
Passengers held 12 hours in lock-up
Parcel contained tools, no bomb
Sep. 20, 2006. 06:09 AM
JIM WILKES
STAFF REPORTER

A planeload of Air India passengers spent nearly 12 hours in an airport security lock-up yesterday after the discovery of a suspicious package wrapped in black tape forced their overseas flight to return to Toronto.

Passengers said they were given little information about why Flight 188 — bound for Birmingham, England and Amritsar, India on Monday night — was turned around near Montreal when the package was found on the floor of a washroom.

Eleven crew members and 149 passengers were evacuated from the Boeing 777 jet when it reached Pearson International Airport at about 11:25 p.m. A Peel police robot detonated the package early yesterday but found nothing suspicious or threatening inside, only small tools that police said were "uniquely packaged." [...]

Israel Admits No Hizb'allah Rockets Fired From Qana

2006-08-02T21:15:00.000-06:00

Haaretz
02/08/2006

The deaths of dozens of civilians in an Israel Air Force attack on the southern Lebanese village of Qana marked a significant diplomatic turning point against Israel, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Tuesday.

The foreign minister said that following the events in Qana, Israel's scope for political maneuvering had been reduced, as was the amount of European support Israel is receiving for its operation in Lebanese soil.

Livni said this change was exemplified in the "problematic" Russian and French stance towards Israel.

She said that despite the pictures of civilian casualties coming from Qana of it was important not to stray from implementing UN decision 1559.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel on Tuesday urged Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to establish a state commission of inquiry into the killings at Qana.

As the Israel Air Force continues to investigate the air strike, questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident.

It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.

The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.

Spot The Difference - IDF Rocket, Hizb'allah Rocket

2006-08-02T21:13:00.000-06:00

(follow link to see picture)

Rumourmill News
02/08/2006

In the eyes of the Israeli and American media these images appear to be identical. But looks can be deceiving sometimes.

There are actually some differences between the images.

Can you spot them all?

Teacher's 9/11 views irk lawmakers

2006-08-02T10:14:00.000-06:00

ED: More and more people are becoming aware that the 9/11 attacks were planned, orchestrated and executed by elements within the American and Israeli governments. Will enough people learn this truth before the entire Middle East is engaged in an all out war, with the planned and deliberate extermination of all Semetic peoples? Time will tell...

Legislators want U. of Wisconsin to fire instructor of class on Islam

By Jodi S. Cohen
Tribune higher education reporter
Published August 2, 2006

MADISON, Wis. -- University of Wisconsin lecturer Kevin Barrett knows a little about life outside the mainstream--indeed, he once penned a travel guide under the pseudonym Dr. Weirde.

But he never expected to find himself carrying the banner for one of the most controversial theories of our times, a hypothesis that more than a few critics think goes beyond strange.

Barrett believes the U.S. government orchestrated the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, to create support for a larger military budget and a long-term Middle East war. He believes the World Trade Center buildings fell after a controlled demolition and doubts that the hijacker believed to have flown the plane into the Pentagon had the skills to do it. He thinks Osama bin Laden is probably dead. [...]

Slaughter taking place while Canada does nothing

2006-07-30T10:22:00.000-06:00

Toronto Star
Jul. 30, 2006. 01:00 AM
LINDA MCQUAIG

For the Israeli air force, carrying out bombing raids over Lebanon is about as challenging as shooting fish in a barrel.

Hezbollah has no air force or air defences. So the Israeli air force — one of the best in the world — has been able to drop a constant barrage of bombs for the past two weeks on Lebanon, where civilians are essentially defenceless.

More than 600 Lebanese have been killed, according to the Lebanese Health Minister — more than 10 times the Israeli death toll.

By now, the Israeli civilian population has been largely evacuated from northern Israel, where Hezbollah rockets can strike, to the safe central and southern parts of the country. For millions in Lebanon, including an estimated 25,000 Canadians still there, no such safe haven exists.

So the refusal of the U.S. — and its attendants Britain and Canada — to call for a ceasefire amounts to an endorsement of a slaughter of completely unprotected people.

Essentially, the U.S. is saying: Let the killing continue, so that Israel can have a free hand in its mop-up operation against Hezbollah.

We're told that Israel doesn't target civilians, but that it sometimes has no choice but to kill them because Hezbollah fighters "hide behind them."

This is absurd. Let's say a gunman is trying to kill someone who runs into a crowded shopping centre. The gunman can't justify killing innocent shoppers on the grounds that he really only wanted to kill the guy he was chasing, but the guy hid behind shoppers.

Israel apparently considers some Lebanese civilians to be legitimate targets, since they sympathize with Hezbollah.

Last week, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon said that civilians have had plenty of time to leave the villages of southern Lebanon, and that Israel should now flatten these villages. "All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah," Ramon said.

In fact, the situation in southern Lebanon is so dangerous that it is almost impossible for civilians — including Canadians trapped there — to get out. A number of civilians attempting to flee, as well as ambulance workers and UN peacekeepers, have been killed and wounded by Israeli bombs.

Ultimately, this crisis will only be solved through negotiations for a comprehensive peace settlement that goes far beyond simply the release of the three captured Israeli soldiers (and thousands of Palestinian prisoners.)

Meanwhile, let's not forget the 1982 massacres, in which the Israeli army allowed vengeful Lebanese Christian militiamen to enter the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, where the militiamen slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian refugees. An Israeli inquiry, headed by a former Supreme Court judge, concluded that then Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon bore "personal responsibility" for the massacre.

Once again, a slaughter is taking place in Lebanon, only this time those allowing the slaughter to take place are running the governments of the United States, Britain — and Canada.

Linda McQuaig is a Toronto-based author and commentator

The History Of War Is The History Of Lies

2006-07-25T10:13:00.000-06:00

Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
24/07/2006

The public record is replete with 'historical' accounts of the cause and effect of the many wars enjoyed by the sprawling masses of humanity. A little known fact however is that, from the point of view of accuracy, the public record stinks.

Spinning the truth about the reasons for war has always been easy. With the major media magnets donating large sums to political parties, and war reports pre-approved by military press liaison officers, military, government and media quickly take on the appearance of one big, happy family.

In the case of the current Israeli invasion of Lebanon therefore, you will (or should) be somewhat less than surprised to learn that all is not as it seems.

To begin our impromptu lesson in reality, a few brainteasers:

What event precipitated the current Israeli invasion of Lebanon? Was it the 'unprovoked' attack by Hamas on the Israeli post when Corporal Shalit was captured? Or was it the 'unprovoked' attack by Hizb'allah when they captured two Israeli soldiers two weeks later?

According to most mainstream papers and American and Israeli government officials, the Hamas attack on June 25th that led to Shalit's capture was an unprovoked act of aggression. What they fail to mention however, is that the day before the Hamas attack, on June 24th, Israeli troops entered Gaza and abducted two Palestinian civilians, a doctor and his brother. The Israeli army asserted that the men were members of Hamas, a claim which Hamas refuted. Yet even if the men were Hamas members, while Israel had been happily pounding the Gaza strip and its civilians with up to 1,000 missiles per week, the seven month-old Hamas government had been holding to a 16 month unilateral ceasefire with Israel. The only reason for Israel to abduct the two men therefore would seem to be for its value as an act of provocation, and the capture of Shalit the following day cannot be claimed as an "unprovoked attack" but retaliation to Israeli aggression. Of course, this is assuming that Israel did not also have a hand in the retaliation. The Israeli daily Haartez published a report which suggested that Israel knew several months in advance that the tunnel attack was planned. Which this leads us to conclude that the Israeli government may have allowed the attack in which Shalit was captured to happen, or facilitated it, for a very specific reason, which in turn means that Israel is to one extent of another fighting the "war on terror" on both sides. So what's new?

Also according to the oh-so reliable mainstream press, on July 12th, Hizb'allah captured two Israeli soldiers "in a cross border raid", which Israel called an "act of war" and which provided plausible justification for the current massive Israeli bombardment of Lebanon and its civilians. However, according to several non-Western or foreign language news agencies, it was Israeli soldiers who had invaded Lebanese territory, leading to the capture of two of their number by Hizb'allah, an expected conclusion to a foolish foray into enemy territory and definitely not an "act of war". Indeed, in this light, it is Israel that is guilty of provoking Hizb'allah.

The Indian Daily tells us:

The Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement announced on Wednesday that its guerrillas have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. "Implementing our promise to free Arab prisoners in Israeli jails, our strugglers have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon," a statement by Hezbollah said. "The two soldiers have already been moved to a safe place," it added. The Lebanese police said that the two soldiers were captured as they "infiltrated" into the town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the Lebanese border. [New Kerala 12/07/06]

According to the Bahrain News Agency:

The Lebanese Hezbollah movement announced Wednesday the arrest of two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. Lebanese police said that the two soldiers were arrested as they entered the town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the Lebanese border. Israeli aircraft were active in the air over southern Lebanon, police said, with jets bombing roads leading to the market town of Nabatiyeh, 60 kilometers south of Beirut. [Bahrain News Agency 7/12/06]

The strange thing is, almost all English language Western news reports proclaimed loud and clear that Hizb'allah had invaded Israel! How can this be?

Try this:

Israeli Censor Wielding Great Power

Thursday July 20, 2006
Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM (AP) - Here's some news you may never hear about Israel's war against Hezbollah: a missile falls into the sea, a strategic military installation is hit, a Cabinet minister plans to visit the front lines.

All these topics are subject to review by Israel's chief military censor, who has - in her own words - "extraordinary power." She can silence a broadcaster, block information and put journalists in jail.

"I can, for example, publish an order that no material can be published. I can close a newspaper or shut down a station. I can do almost anything," Col. Sima Vaknin said Wednesday. [...]

Now think about this for a moment. Say Israel had drawn up plans for a military invasion/attack on its Arab neighbors for some time, but was in need of some kind of justification, some rationale that could be presented to the world public. How easy would it be to stage the capture of an Israeli soldier in Gaza and two in Lebanon? Soldiers are not privy to intelligence information, unless their superiors supply it to them, and they are entirely dependent on their military commanders to not place them in danger. But in war, or war planning, all is fair, as they say.

But what evidence is there to suggest that Israel had been planning to provoke a wider Middle East war for some time?

Not much, just that provided by the Israeli military itself:

Israel set war plan more than a year ago posted

07/22/2006
SF Chronicle

Israel's military response by air, land and sea to what it considered a provocation last week by Hezbollah militants is unfolding according to a plan finalized more than a year ago.

In the years since Israel ended its military occupation of southern Lebanon, it watched warily as Hezbollah built up its military presence in the region. When Hezbollah militants kidnapped two Israeli soldiers last week, the Israeli military was ready to react almost instantly.

"By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board." said Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University

More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified.

Notice the newsroom spin that the plan was drawn up because Hizb'allah was "building its military presence in Southern Lebanon." If Hizb'allah has any military prowess they certainly have a strange way of flaunting it. Since the beginning of the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, Hizb'allah has fired hundreds of their "deadly" weapons at Haifa (the only Israeli town within reach), resulting in the death of 15 Israeli civilians, 2 of them Israeli Arabs. About 95% of Hizb'allah's rudimentary 'Katyusha' rockets miss their targets or fail to explode, or both, in very much the same way as Hamas' and Islamic Jihad's 'Qassam' rockets fired from Gaza, which have killed 5 Israelis in one town in 5 years. A real 'threat' to the state of Israel indeed.
Remember last year, when the Israeli Mossad murdered Rafik Hariri? Hariri had been Lebanese Prime Minister from 1992 until 1998 and again from 2000 until 2004 when he resigned. By all accounts, he was slated to return to the postion again at the next elections. Apart from being a billionaire, Hariri had a lot of friends in high places. He was as happy enjoying a beer with French President Chirac in down-town Beirut as he was strolling the halls of Boston University's School of Management which bears his name.

Hariri was one of the few "men of peace" left in the Middle East. In his two terms as Lebanese PM since 1992, he had brought Lebanon out of the carnage wrought by 15 years of civil war and set it well on the way to reclaiming its status as the "Paris of the Middle East." Hariri willingly expended his personal fortune on Lebanon's recovery pouring millions into the reconstruction of Beirut. Viewed as a leading Arab-world reformer, he was also credited with restoring Lebanon's reputation abroad as a liberal, open Middle Eastern country. He paid for the 1989 Christian-Muslim peace conference in Taif, Saudi Arabia, which laid the foundation for the ceasefire that came a year later. During his tenure as Prime Minister, Harari also made it his goal to ensure that the religious divisions (Christian and Islamic) were kept out of politics.

Since 1976 and until last summer, 14,000 Syrian troops were stationed in Lebanon. The troops had initially arrived in 1976 at the request of the Lebanese government in order to protect the Lebanese population from Israeli attacks. When Mossad murdered Hariri, not only did they remove the most powerful man in Lebanese politics, but they also, by way of a whitewashed investigation, pinned the blame for his murder on Syria and successfully forced the removal of the Syrian military presence in Lebanon, the final obstacle to dissuading Israel from re-invading Lebanon. At the time, I wrote:

While Hariri might have been quietly pressuring Syria for the ultimate removal of it's troops, he was also well aware of the reason for those troops - to dissuade Israel from staging another invasion of Lebanese territory. Having manipulated Lebanese and world opinion into believing that Syria killed Hariri and with the withdrawal of Syrian troops already under way, Lebanon and its people will once more be exposed to the predations of the butcher Sharon.

The name has changed, but the goal of the current Israeli Prime Minister remains the same. All of it, it seems, has been set up very nicely indeed.

Of course, Israel would not be in a position to dominate any conflict with its Arab neighbors if it were not for the generous support of American taxpayers. We are yet again unsurprised to learn therefore that while Israel was busy planning the current attack on Lebanon and its justification, the Bush administration was right there beside them:

Secret 2001 Pentagon Plan to Attack Lebanon

Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general who is one of 10 candidates for the Democratic nomination for president, has written a new book that is just arriving on bookstore shelves. Called Winning Modern Wars, it’s mostly about the Iraq war and terrorism—and it is laced with powerful new information that he held back from the public when he was a CNN military commentator during the Bush administration’s preparations for the war.

For example, he says he learned from military sources at the Pentagon in November 2001, just two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, that serious planning for the war on Iraq had already begun and that, in addition to Iraq, the administration had drawn up a list of six other nations to be targeted over a period of five years.

Here’s what he writes on page 130:

"As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan." Clark adds, "I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned."

So there you have it, and you thought it was all about Osama bin Laden attacking the US on September 11th. How could you have been so wrong?!

Certain "Middle Eastern analysts" (who couldn't analyse their way out of a chair) have stated that Hizb'allah provoked the current conflict with Israel in order to "reduce the pressure on Palestinians and force Israel to fight on two fronts", but such 'analysis' either completely misses (or conveniently ignores) the above facts - that Israel has long sought an opening to 'deal with' its Arab problem. Further inane 'analysis' is provided by Noam Chomsky, an alleged expert on the Middle East, where he criticises Hizb'allah for the "irresponsible" act of capturing the two Israeli soldiers, which, he claims, has exposed the Lebanese people to the dire threat from Israeli bombs and guns. Chomsky seems to forget that Israel needed no encouragement to butcher 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians in their last full-scale invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Chomsky, for all his credentials, seems oblivious to the long-standing violent intentions of successive Israeli governments towards almost all of its Arab neighbors, neighbors who have the audacity to attempt to remind Israel and the world that Israel is occupying stolen Arab land!

Not only have the Lebanese people witnessed Israel's malevolent intentions first hand many times in the past, but Hizb'allah has surely been watching carefully over the past few years as Israel set the scene for yet another Lebanese bloodbath. Yet when Hizb'allah captures two Israeli soldiers that invaded their territory 2 weeks ago, Chomsky blames Hizb'allah for putting the Lebanese people in danger! Talk about having your head in the sand!

Thankfully, there are those of us who have long-since dispensed with any semblance of wishful thinking about the intentions of the state of Israel and the psychopaths that run the Zionist show, and as such, are in a position to definitively answer the following questions:

Is Israel lying about the source of the present conflict? Undoubtedly.

Are Israeli lies being promoted by American media outlets?
No question.

Has Israel manipulated the current crisis and wantonly murdered 350 Lebanese civilians? The answer is clear.

Does the Bush government wholeheartedly endorse and support Israeli manipulations? It's a 'no-brainer'

But what of the bigger question? What of the "why" of the actions of these few wild-eyed nut-jobs-in-suits in power? Why is Israel doing this? Why is the American government supporting them? What of the future? Where is all of it leading?

Well, according to Condi Rice it is nothing less than the "birth of a new Middle East", which of course sounds like a wonderfully noble ideal.

And therein lies the hook.

Every war ever waged by a major state player (which is pretty much all of them), has been presented to the public in terms of an ideal, like 'freedom' for example, when in reality, the main motivating factor boils down to personal profit or gain. That psychopathic warmongers would engage in such mass manipulation is elementary - they know that ordinary, decent people would never knowingly support a war in which they, their children, or other innocent human beings are certain to die, purely to serve the personal ambitions of an elite few. Ordinary, decent people will, however, always rally to the cause of 'freedom' and allow that ideal to steel them against the massive suffering and death that war entails as they make the 'ultimate sacrifice' 'for freedom's sake'.

I trust you can see just how intrinsically evil such a manipulation is. But more important than seeing the manipulation, is recognizing its authors, and realizing that their cold-blooded, calculated manipulations, leading to the deaths of millions of innocent people - people like you and I, our sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers - is something you and I could never do.

Yet they can - and do, over and over and over again.

Not only can they do it, but they are aware enough to know that they must ensure, at all costs, that you and I never understand why they do it or how they can do it. We must never fathom the mechanism that allows them to commit acts of extreme barbarity while simultaneously presenting themselves to the world as the progenitors of honorable human values. We must never be allowed to know their true nature or the sick game they play. For the day that you and I possess such knowledge and realize who the real enemy is, is the day that we no longer serve the interests of the pathocracy - the psychopaths in power - through our naivety and gullibility. On that day, their spell will be broken. No longer will thousands march to war under their banner of fake "freedom", no longer will millions shrink in fear of illusory "terrorism" and permit atrocities to be committed in their name. On that day, our planet shall be retaken for the sane, rational and decent human beings, and the fifth column that has dwelt for so long in our midst shall be confined to the asylum where they belong.

Let's make it happen. Wake Up, and spread the word. These people are not like you and I. They have no conscience, they have no ability to feel empathy for the suffering of another. They are psychopaths, and they are our leaders.

American thespian Fritz Williams wrote:

"Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy, which transports us into the soul and heart of another person. In those transparent moments we know other people's joys and sorrows, and we care about their concerns as if they were our own."

In recent weeks, as we pondered the pictures showing the horror wrought by Israel in Lebanon, all decent human beings instinctively made the leap of empathy spoken of by Williams. Some, however, did not. They could not. And it just so happens that they are same people responsible for bringing the horror of mass murder into our lives.

My Favourite Bushisms

2006-07-24T10:31:00.000-06:00

Thanks to the folks at the "Beep! Beep! It's Me" blog for this wonderful compilation

My Favourite Bushisms

I have provided a title so Bush Believers will also be able to understand what the rest of us are laughing about.

George Is A Mom?
"So thank you for reminding me about the importance of being a good mom and a great volunteer as well."—St. Louis, Jan. 5, 2004

What about the WMD the US Has, George?
"See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction."—Milwaukee, Wis., Oct. 3, 2003

Maybe He Meant "Explore"?
"We've got hundreds of sites to exploit, looking for the chemical and biological weapons that we know Saddam Hussein had prior to our entrance into Iraq."—Santa Clara, Calif., May 2, 2003

George Wants To Restore Chaos. Mission Completed
"You're free. And freedom is beautiful. And, you know, it'll take time to restore chaos and order—order out of chaos. But we will."—Washington, D.C., April 13, 2003

We Must Invade Iraq To Stop Saddam Terrorising Himself.
"The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself."—Grand Rapids, Mich., Jan. 29, 2003

This Is Just Wrong On So Many Levels. How About Presumption Of Innocence And "Prosecute" Not "Persecute"
"When Iraq is liberated, you will be treated, tried, and persecuted as a war criminal."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 22, 2003

The US Is Going To Disarm If Saddam Doesn't
"I was proud the other day when both Republicans and Democrats stood with me in the Rose Garden to announce their support for a clear statement of purpose: you disarm, or we will."—Speaking about Saddam Hussein, Manchester, N.H., Oct. 5, 2002

Why George? Thinking About Pulling Out The Klan Outfit?
"Do you have blacks, too?"—To Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso, Washington, D.C., Nov. 8, 2001

George Wanted Arafat To Rule The World
"After all, a week ago, there were—Yasser Arafat was boarded up in his building in Ramallah, a building full of, evidently, German peace protestors and all kinds of people. They're now out. He's now free to show leadership, to lead the world."—Washington, D.C., May 2, 2002

George Gives Us A Hint Why His Businesses Have Gone Bankrupt
"We've tripled the amount of money—I believe it's from $50 million up to $195 million available."—Lima, Peru, March 23, 2002

George Doesn't Want Peace To Happen
"My administration has been calling upon all the leaders in the—in the Middle East to do everything they can to stop the violence, to tell the different parties involved that peace will never happen."—Crawford, Texas, Aug, 13, 2001

WTF?
"Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods."—Austin, Texas, Dec. 20, 2000

Ummm It Is A Federal Program?
"They want the federal government controlling Social Security like it's some kind of federal program."—St. Charles, Mo., Nov. 2, 2000

Fish Are Violent Apparently
"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."—Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000

Most Imports DO Come From Overseas
"It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas."—Beaverton, Ore., Sep. 25, 2000

George Loves His Wife Like He Loves His Brother
"She is a fabulous First Lady. I was a lucky man when she said, yes, I agree to marry you. I love her dearly, and I'm proud of the job she's doing on behalf of all Americans. Just like I love my brother." - George W. Bush, Jacksonville, Florida, Sep. 9, 2003

The Nazis Agree With You About Propaganda
"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." --President Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

Please Shut Up Now
"Who could have possibly envisioned an erection — an election in Iraq at this point in history?" —George W. Bush, at the white House, Washington, D.C., Jan. 10, 2005

I Am Begging You. Shut Up
"I think — tide turning — see, as I remember — I was raised in the desert, but tides kind of — it's easy to see a tide turn — did I say those words?" —George W. Bush, asked if the tide was turning in Iraq, Washington, D.C., June 14, 2006

Germany?
"The point now is how do we work together to achieve important goals. And one such goal is a democracy in Germany." —George W. Bush, D.C., May 5, 2006

George Wants To Control Us Not Defend Freedom
"Let me put it to you bluntly. In a changing world, we want more people to have control over your own life." —George W. Bush, Annandale, Va, Aug. 9, 2004

And My All Time Favourite
"Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." — George W. Bush, Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004

Collective Punishment Isn't Self-Defense

2006-07-23T15:25:00.000-06:00

Posted: 2006/07/22
From: Mathaba

By Ted Rall

Neither the United States nor Israel is equivalent to Nazi Germany, yet both countries have adopted a Nazi-like obsession with collective punishment

SAN DIEGO - As commander of a Nazi einsatzgruppen death squad in occupied Poland, Dr. Werner Best came to believe that the most effective response to terrorism was collective punishment. After the fall of France he went on to draft the Third Reich's counterterrorism policy for countries occupied by Germany. Towns where acts of "passive" resistance such as the cutting of telegraph cables had taken place were placed under curfews, fined and slapped with travel restrictions. "Active" resistance--the killing of a German soldier--would be met by reprisal killings of local civilians.

Dr. Best was trying to protect German troops. Rather than be cowed, however, leaders of European resistance groups saw Best's ruthless policy as their chance to radicalize moderates who were still on the fence about their German occupatiers. The insurgents stepped up assassinations of German troops. The killings prompted the Germans to shoot more local businessmen and political leaders. The cycle of violence was spiraling out of control.

Eventually Hitler himself got into the act. Convinced that collective punishment was failing because it wasn't severe enough, the führer issued a September 1941 order to use "the harshest measures" against civilians in areas where the Resistance was active. Arguing that "only the [collective] death penalty can be a real means of deterrence," Hitler ordered that 50 civilians be executed for each German soldier killed.

Some in the German high command argued that punishing innocent civilians in large numbers would alienate the local population and lose the battle for hearts and minds. Although they were eventually proven correct, they were overruled. New reprisals, each worse than the last, strengthened the resolve of the resistance and gained them new recruits. By the end of the war, reprisals had assumed grotesquely lopsided ratios of murdered locals to dead Germans. Entire villages--Lidice in the Czech Republic (340 killed), Oradour-sur-Glane in France (642), Kortelisy in Ukraine (2,892)--were wiped out.

Even right-wingers who'd supported the Nazis were appalled. Support for the Germans and their puppet regimes declined with each new campaign of "counterterrorism." Public opinion wasn't decisive; no nation occupied by the Nazis during World War II could solely credit its resistance for its liberation. Still, collective punishment was an unequivocal tactical failure. Resistance groups and their sympathizers hastened the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Neither the United States nor Israel is equivalent to Nazi Germany, yet both countries have adopted a Nazi-like obsession with collective punishment. Israeli Defense Forces, which subject centers of Palestinian resistance in the occupied West Bank to curfews and encirclement by barbed-wire fences, taught their techniques to U.S. occupation troops in Iraq. After Islamist suicide pilots killed 3,000 Americans in the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government justified the killing of 200,000 Afghans and Iraqis as an act of "self-defense."

George W. Bush exceeded Hitler's 50-to-1 ratio.

Now Israel is "reacting" to the capture of two of its soldiers by the Palestinian resistance organization Hezbollah by invading and bombing Lebanon. Death tolls that fall disproportionately heavily upon Palestinians have long been a hallmark of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During the 2000-03 intifada, for example, at least seven Palestinians were killed by Israelis for every Israeli killed by a Palestinian. Now, as of this writing, more than 500 Lebanese civilians have been killed by Israeli bombs. On the Israeli side, 15 civilians have died in Hezbollah rocket attacks and 14 soldiers have been killed in combat.

Current ratio: 30-to-1.

"Israel has a right to defend itself," Bush said at the start of the current Middle East crisis. No doubt. But the Israelis aren't defending themselves any more than the Bush Administrative is defending us. Each is using a crime--the kidnapping of two soldiers, the 9/11 terrorist attacks--as an excuse to wage war against innocent people who had nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, the criminals--the kidnappers and those behind 9/11--are allowed to get away scot-free.

In response to criticism that Israel was using "disproportionate" force against Lebanon, its ambassador to the United Nations told a cheering mob in New York: "You're damned right we are!" Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) chimed in: "Since when should a response to aggression and murder be proportionate?"

Congressman Nadhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifler ought to catch up on his reading. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which has been signed and ratified by both Israel and the United States and was drafted in response to the kinds of Nazi atrocities described at the beginning of this column, specifically prohibits collective punishment. As a treaty obligation, it is U.S. law. It is Israeli law.

Nothing prevents a nation from defending itself or going after those who commit heinous crimes--which include kidnapping--against its citizens. Understanding the difference between self-defense and collective punishment is what separates Israel and the U.S.--on paper, anyway--from the Nazis.

Ted Rall is the editor of "Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists," a new anthology of webcartoons. Visit his website at:

http://www.tedrall.com

Israel run by Psychopaths - Podcast

2006-07-23T12:48:00.000-06:00

What does it take to be able to kill a child, or a hundred children? Or to burn them alive and tear their bodies to shreds. Day in and day out. Could you do it? Some people don't give it a thought for they are without conscience. Meet the psychopath. He probably runs your country, may run the company you work for or be your direct boss. He is definitely in charge in Israel. He is the invisible enemy of humanity, invisible because he comes in all colours, shapes, and religions. He is aware of his difference from the rest of us, and is working to eliminate as many of us as he can in order to preserve his power. The real New World Order is the Pathocracy. It is already here. This week we look at war crimes in Palestine and Lebanon and the people who order them.

Signs Podcast

OPINION: A Bush-league response?

2006-06-11T10:33:00.000-06:00

Jun. 11, 2006. 01:57 AM

PETER SCOWEN

"Their alleged target was Canada, Canadian institutions, the Canadian economy, the Canadian people. We are a target because of who we are and how we live, our society, our diversity and our values — values such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law."

— Stephen Harper, June 3

Our prime minister, Stephen Harper, has been accused more than once of deliberately adopting the style and tone of President George W. Bush.

Critics cite Harper's emphasis on his faith, his disdain for the press, his support of the military, and his socially conservative values as the main evidence for this.

It is a partisan critique, and not an especially effective one. Even if it is true that Harper assembled himself out of spare Bush parts, so? Stealing useful ideas from a fellow conservative leader who has been elected twice is good politics.

But now Harper, responding to the arrests of 17 terror suspects — whom we have since learned were planning to attack Parliament Hill and, prosecutors allege, to behead the prime minister if he didn't agree to pull our troops out of Afghanistan — has aped Bush in a way that is deliberately divisive and dangerous.

The quote by Harper at the top of this piece is what I'm talking about. His claim — made at a military swearing-in ceremony in Ottawa — that the terror suspects targeted Canada "because of who we are and how we live" is a rip-off of the official Bush White House response to 9/11.

After the attacks, Bush and his team began to push the message that America was an innocent victim attacked by fanatics who despised it for the freedoms and comforts it provides; the country was targeted, Bush said on Sept. 12, 2001, because it was "the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world."

Rudolph Giuliani, the heroic mayor of New York, made the same point in a speech on Oct. 1, 2001 — and added a warning to anyone who didn't agree:

"The era of moral relativism between those who practise or condone terrorism, and those who stand up against it, must end. Moral relativism does not have a place in this discussion and this debate."

The message was hard to miss: The attacks were not to be construed as a response to U.S. foreign policy. "Moral relativism" was the sin committed by anyone who disobeyed this edict.

A good synonym for "moral relativism" would have been "independent thinking," but that only became apparent after the world discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks.

People who recall the period immediately after 9/11 will remember that the mantra of anti-moral relativism served the Bush administration well. The media raised no serious objection to the invasion of Iraq. (In May 2004, The New York Times published a gigantic apology to readers for not questioning the White House's war plans with the proper skepticism.)

So why has Harper plagiarized Bush in his statement about the arrests of 17 made-in-Canada terror suspects?

The obvious answer is that he doesn't want the arrests to affect our military's presence in Afghanistan, even if it is clear from the charges laid last week that the alleged recruiters used the war in Afghanistan, and Canada's part in it, to motivate some of the younger suspects.

Is Harper saying Canadians cannot sympathize with the accused men's demand that our troops withdraw from Iraq, even if those same Canadians would never support terror as a tactic, because to do so would be a failure to defend "who we are and how we live"?

The American who was most courageous in her post-9/11 writings was the late critic Susan Sontag. She was repelled by her government's reaction to the attacks and said so in a piece in The New Yorker.

This is the guts of what Sontag wrote in the magazine's issue of Sept. 25, 2001:
"A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counterintelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defence. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy."

Harper, like Bush and Giuliani were, is wrong when he says we are a terror target because of "how we live." Canada is and will be a target because of, as Sontag also wrote, our "specific alliances and actions."

We cannot, as a mature democracy, allow terrorism or its threat to dictate government policy — no one is saying that.

But we also cannot allow the threat of terror to shut down our ability to think.

And what we really don't need is a prime minister using a discredited U.S. political strategy to scare off serious, mature debate about Canada's military presence in Afghanistan and its alliances with the United States.

— Peter Scowen

Who is JJ Hurtak?

2006-04-12T09:16:00.000-06:00

To kick off this ambitious project, let us have a look at Don JJ Hurtak, the guy who started the whole “Keys of Enoch” deal and garnered such followers as the young Don Bernard “Drunvalo” Perona. Now a fully fledged psychic mafia Don in his own right.

Don James J "J.J." Hurtak's published bio says:

"J.J. Hurtak, Ph.D., Ph.D., M.Th. is a social scientist and futurist who studied at the University of California and the University of Minnesota."

Now, certainly he does not say that his degrees came from the University of California and the University of Minnesota... he only says he has degrees, followed by the names of two universities where he "studied." However, certainly, a reader would assume from this juxtaposition that his degrees came from those universities.

The fact is that his PhD is in social science and his other PhD in History and Oriental Studies, were obtained from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico.

Regarding Hurtak's claims to have been at the Uni of California in 1973, we find the following.

The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch® (1973, 1975, 1977) makes the correlation that this Divine Name was the key behind the transcription code of chemical letters which develops the human body. In 1973 while at the University of California, Hurtak came to understand that there was a connection between the series of linguistic and genetic associations in the spelling of God’s name in the biblical Hebrew (YHVH).

http://www.keysofenoch.org/html/academy_learning_session__dna.html

Hurtak’s bio claims:

"He worked with Dr. Thich Tien-An, Vietnamese Buddhist scholar in establishing the curriculum of studies at the Graduate School of Buddhism, Los Angeles, as well as working with the microfilming of the Tibetan canon in Nepal and India."

Apparently Dr. Thich Thien-An died in 1980. Here is a link with a brief overview of his life in which you will find no reference to Hurtak.

http://www.urbandharma.org/ibmc/ibmc2/suto.html

Ven. Dr. Thich Thien-An came to Southern California in the summer of 1966 as an exchange professor at UCLA. Soon his students discovered he was not only a renowned scholar, but a Zen Buddhist monk as well. His students convinced Dr. Thien-An toteach the practice of meditation and start a study group about the other steps on the Buddhist path, in addition to the academic viewpoint….

…Dr. Thien-An died at the age of 54 of cancer which had spread rapidly throughout his body, from his liver to his brain. In his last months, one could often find him sitting peacefully on the steps of the bell tower. It was a gift to be able to sit quietly next to him and feel the energy of his understanding. He had many plans but saw the reality of what was happening. He smiled, as he smiled often, a smile of great compassion and loving-kindness for all the world.

From http://jbe.gold.ac.uk/6/metcalf991.html , a review of a book

"The faces of buddhism in America":

Cuong Nguyen and A. W. Barber, on the other hand, peremptorily dismiss the careers of Thich Nhat Hanh and Thich Tien An (p. 131) and spend their chapter discussing Vietnamese Buddhism in the Vietnamese American community only. [...] And wherever Thich Tien An got his training, his memory has certainly not faded away in Los Angeles, where he is remembered at his flourishing Dharma center, rightly or wrongly, as the first patriarch of American Vietnamese Buddhism.

Again, nowhere is there a mention of J.J. Hurtak.

Hurtak’s bio claims: He is President of the International Academy for Future Science.

What is the Academy for Future Science?

Website: http://www.affs.org/index.html

ACADEMY FOR FUTURE SCIENCE

The Academy for Future Science is an international non-profit organisation operating in more than 12 countries since its inception in 1973. Its charter covers the areas of archaeology, anthropology, environment and remote sensing, computers and physics, as well as studies in consciousness and comparative religion. Its work has been represented at the Parliament of the World's Religions (1999),The Millennium Peace Summit ofWorld Religious Leaders (2000), and at many university conferences on the dialogue of science and religion. Its members have been responsible for the updating of the medical curriculum at universities in South Africa and the monitoring of critical environmental areas in Brazil.

Dr. James J. Hurtak, PhD, PhD is President of the Academy for Future Science. He is a social scientist and futurist with two doctorates who studied at the Universities of California and Minnesota. His main concern is the interface between science, religion and the environment. He was a presenter at the recent Parliament of World Religions (1999) in Cape Town.

The Academy For Future Science http://www.affs.org/

P.O. Box FE, Los Gatos CA 95031, USA P.O. Box 35340, Menlo Park, 0102, Pretoria, South Africa

Desiree Hurtak is listed as the admin contact (WhoIs records) for the futurescience.org domain. Turns out she's James (Jim) J. Hurtak's wife. Bio here:

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/guests/767.html

The wife of J.J. Hurtak, Desiree Hurtak is an international relations expert and author. Her recent work involves environmental studies and the film documentation of indigenous cultures to preserve their cultural heritage. To this end, she has also studied and written on the philosophies and literature of various ancient cultures including Egypt and Mesoamerica to understand their importance in our evolving society.

They've both been on the show twice in the past 10 months.

Photos of both are here, from the UN Summit on Sustainable Development:

http://www.un.org/events/wssd/photos/020831pressphotos.htm

At another of their websites: http://www.pistissophia.org/

We find:

The Pistis Sophia is a translation and commentary of a special collection of 2,000 year old Gnostic Coptic manuscripts, derived from ancient Egyptian-Coptic Christian Codexes. In the historic period after the early Church became established as the "official religion" of the Roman Empire (325 C.E.), the Pistis Sophia literature was withdrawn. It remains an inner teaching of the Coptic and African communities.

The words Pistis Sophia are Greek for "Faith Wisdom" and represent a teaching given to the disciples of Christ Jesus AFTER his resurrection. Significant for modern times, these are teachings revealed not only to Jesus' male disciples, but also to his female disciples including Mary Magdalene, Martha, and Salome! […]

At the same time, the Pistis Sophia texts work richly and expoundingly in concert with the Gospel Teachings of Jesus Christ, the work of the Prophets and the Saints, both the Old and the New Testaments as well as many Intertestamental works and The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch® .

At the bottom of this page, we see an address (2003) for the Academy of Future Science: PO Box 395, Ava, Mo 65608

Articles from the AFFS,

The Quest to Terraform Mars by D. M. Hurtak, M.S.Sc.
http://www.affs.org/html/the_quest_to_terraform_mars.html

Crisis of the Amazon by J.J. Hurtak, Ph.D., Ph.D.
http://www.affs.org/assets/images/autogen/Crisis_of_the_Amazon_Ns1.gif

An article on Biogmagnetism by H. Coetzee, Ph.D. [Originally published in Future History, Volume 8]
http://www.affs.org/html/biomagnetism.html

We search for info on H. Coetzee, and find a mish mash of various other people with the name, either in Washington state, or in South Africa.

When we check on the referenced journal, Future History, we find it here: http://www.keysofenoch.org/html/journal.html

The Academy for Future Science, i.e. Hurtak, publishes this journal!

Then, there is this.

Laser Remote Sensing by Dr. Edgardo Gerck
Lasertech S.A.
Campinas, SP, Brasil Dr. James J. Hurtak
Lasertech-USA
Los Gatos, California USA

Originally published in International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Vol. XXIX, 1992, ISPRS, Washington, D.C.

Which leads us to: http://www.isprs.org/isprs.html.......You can see the “officials” of this organization here

Where you also discover: “The headquarter of the Society for the period 2004-2008 is the office of the Secretary General.

“ Said “Secretary General is:
ORHAN ALTAN
Istanbul Technical University
Faculty of Civil Engineering
Department of Geodesy and Photogrammetry
34469 Ayazaga-Istanbul
TURKEY

Here you can find out about their members

For example, the entry for the United States is:
United States American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
5410 Grosvenor Lane, Suite 210
Bethesda, Maryland 20814-2160, USA
Tel: +1-301-493 0290
Fax: +1-301-493 0208
E-mail: asprs@asprs.org

Number of Individual Members: 6,000

If you have a look at their website, you will read this:

What is ASPRS? Founded in 1934, the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) is a scientific association serving over 7,000 professional members around the world. Our mission is to advance knowledge and improve understanding of mapping sciences to promote the responsible applications of photogrammetry, remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), and supporting technologies. […]

"We are extremely proud of our historical roots in imaging science and technology in the form of photogrammetry and remote sensing, and we intend to maintain and build upon our emphasis in this area. However, our membership is focused on imaging not only in the sense of primary data acquisition, but also with respect to the extraction of information from image data in a decision support context," said Lillesand.

"We want to make clear that ASPRS represents a scientific and professional home for a broad array of individuals whose interests span the entire spectrum of geospatial information sciences, technologies, and applications."

In short, it is more or less a spying organization that is also a “vacuum cleaner” operation. Shades of the CIA!

Here you will find some of the “sustaining members” of ISPRS:
http://www.isprs.org/members/sustaining.html

Again, as you scan the names of the corporations, you realize that this is nothing more than an organization of “psychic spies.”

Back to Hurtak: Supposely he was the second in command in the Council of Nine...
See: www.tribwatch.com/aquarian.htm

A Fortean Times article reveals that Hurtak was second in command in the Council of Nine. Note how the mind-control projects of this Council mirror those of Tavistock-Stanford:

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the history of The Nine is its relationship to the career of Andrija Puharich. Recent research has revealed Puharich to have a distinctly sinister side. As an Army doctor in the 1950s, he was deeply involved with the CIA’s notorious MKULTRA mind control project.

He - together with the infamous Dr Sidney Gottlieb - experimented with a variety of techniques to change or induce actual thought processes...even to creating the impression of voices in the head. These techniques included the use of drugs, hypnosis and beaming radio signals directly into the subject’s brain. And, significantly, he was engaged in this work at exactly the same time that The Nine made their first appearance at the Round Table Foundation. The Foundation itself is now known to have been largely funded by the Pentagon as a front for its medical and parapsychological research. Puharich was still working for the CIA in the early 1970s, when he brought Uri Geller out of Israel."

Hurtak’s bio claims: He has been Director of LASERTECH in Brazil, which developed lasers for industrial and environmental studies in the Amazon.

Here is lasertech’s website: http://www.lasertech.com/s_amer.html

No mention of Hurtak there anywhere. But, we have a researcher in Brazil checking on this and may have more details later.

From Hurtak’s bio:

"With broad scientific interests in ecology, remote sensing, technology, and alternative energy, as well as belief systems of indigenous cultures, Dr. Hurtak has published eight books and more than 100 articles in eight languages."

It’s rather difficult to find these articles: A list of published issues of antigravity news, but the links of Hurtak's publications doesn't work:
http://www.padrak.com/agn/AGPAPER99.html

Bailey, P., Grotz, T., and Hurtak, J., "Survey And Critical Review Of Recent Innovative Energy Conversion Technologies," October 1997. [http://www.padrak.com/ine/BGH97_1.html]

Bailey, P., Grotz, T., and Hurtak, J., "Review And Status of Reported Innovative Energy Conversion Technologies, Contrasted Using A Consistent R&D Ranking Scale," October 1997. [http://www.padrak.com/ine/BGH97_2.html]

A search on the electronic uni library system returns a series of FIVE publications on various journals, examples:

Authors Hurtak JJ.

Institution Academy for Future Science, Los Gatos, CA 95031, USA. jjh@affs.or

G Hurtak JJ. Acupuncture and the cycle of birth as viewed in an historic Japanese medical text. [Historical Article. Journal Article] Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine. 10(2):231-3, 2004 Apr. UI: 15165402

Curtis BD. Hurtak JJ. Consciousness and quantum information processing: uncovering the foundation for a medicine of light. [Review] [77 refs] [Journal Article. Review. Review, Tutorial] Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine. 10(1):27-39, 2004 Feb. UI: 15025876

Hurtak JJ. An overview of acupuncture medicine.[see comment][erratum appears in J Altern Complement Med. 2003 Feb;9(1):179]. [Historical Article. Journal Article] Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine. 8(5):535-8, 2002 Oct. UI: 12470432

Energy technologies for the 21st century: Substitutes for fossil fuel Fuel and Energy Abstracts Volume: 37, Issue: 3, May, 1996, pp. 202 Hurtak, J. J.

One suspects that the “hundreds of articles”(?) must be in his own publications. Also note that the publications listed above are considered “fringe”.

From Hurtak’s bio: He produced The Voice of Africa, a Study on African Shamanism (1987) and Merkabah: Voyage of a Star Seed (1998), a winner of four international awards with its computer-animated symbols of spiritual unity.

From http://www.souloflife.com/musvideo.html :

JJ Hurtak - MERKABAH - Voyage of a Star Seed - Prepare yourself for the Merkabah journey that carries you into the higher worlds. Amid sacred sounds and colors you experience its transport powers as a super-luminal light, traveling beyond the limitations of physical form. Become a time and space traveler as you experience the many heavens! Encountering angelic beings and whole Light forms of ultraterrestrial Light from higher dimensional realms the dimensional gateways will open to you. In this masterpiece of video animation the Merkabah transports you from our immediate planetary system into other realms of awareness, connecting past, present, and future worlds of balance and beauty.

At OneLoveOneSpirit.com: We find the following statement:

"VIDEO MERKABAH: Voyage Of A Star Seed We regret to say that we are no longer allowed to retail this video. OneLoveOneSpirit.com apologizes for any inconvenience this may have caused you ."

We were unable to find any “international awards” for this video as claimed.

We were unable to find any verification for “The Voice of Africa” in any context.

From Hurtak’s bio:

"Over the past 20 years, he has been involved with the dialog on issues concerning the environment, religion, and science. He was a presenter at the Parliament of the World’s Religions (1999) in Cape Town".

From: http://www.cpwr.org/

"The mission of the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions is to cultivate harmony between the world's religious and spiritual communities and foster their engagement with the world and its other guiding institutions in order to achieve a peaceful, just, and sustainable world. "

The "Council for a Parliament of the World'd Religions"'s site seems to be Cesnur-like: studying the world religion's scenario and defend the principle of religious liberty.

http://www.cesnur.org/about.htm (scroll down for the english version)

Parliament's who's who:

http://www.cpwr.org/who/who.htm

Mission: The mission of the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions is to cultivate harmony among the world's religious and spiritual communities and foster their engagement with the world and its other guiding institutions in order to achieve a peaceful, just, and sustainable world.

http://www.cpwr.org/who/staff.htm

1999 Cape Town's meeting attendees

http://www.cpwr.net/120499.htm

This looks like a benevolent and legitimate organization that Hurtak has managed to “gate crash” with no real credentials.

It’s sister organization, CESNUR, has an article on Hurtak here: http://www.cesnur.org/2004/waco_matthews.htm

Entitled: "The Master Race and the Family of Light: Conflict, Spiritual Purification and Bio-Political Agendas in JJ Hurtak's "Book of Knowledge"

Which says, in part:

Earlier in 1973, maverick linguist, alleged CIA consultant, occultist and nouveau Egyptologist, J.J. Hurtak, according to his account, had been “lifted up” in a body of light into a region of stars called Merak and Muscida by the Master Ophanim Enoch. Enoch, answering a prayerful plea from Hurtak, had come to deliver a revelatory message outlining the purpose of life on the Earth plane, and to reveal the contours of a coming confrontation between the Children of Light and the Fallen Masters of Darkness.2 Over a period of two days (Jan 2-3) Enoch “downloaded” into Hurtak a total of 64 keys or revelations and these became The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch. The Book of Knowledge details a premillennial, post-Christian account that calls on the Children of Light to be genetically recoded for the energy transformations to come that they may be the vanguard of an ascended “Christ Race,” which will complete the evolution of the original Pre-Adamic races. Key 109, a central revelation in this regard, reads as follows: The Anti-Universe is composed of Star Field Energies revealed on the Black Cube of Mecca which shows the function and destruction of three dimensional universes. 3

Hurtak’s commentary on this Key reveals that the events of October 1973 galvanized him. Hurtak saw the October war as evidence that most Muslims, particularly those in power, are in league with, or in thrall to, dark extraterrestrial forces that originate in the constellations of Ursa Minor and Draco (with the principle star alpha Draconis as a focus).

Hurtak constructs an elaborate narrative linking ancient astronomy and geometry, genetic/molecular and computer theory with geo-political events, and in revisiting the old competitions between Muslim, Christian and Jew, recasts the historic dimensions of this occasional conflict in extraterrestrial, genetic terms.

In elaborating on Hurtak’s prophetic project I will first briefly describe Hurtak’s process of “prophetic regenesis,” in which revelation and prophetic commentary are said to “reveal” the contours of a cosmic conflict between two ancient extraterrestrial genetic bloodlines that is said to manifest itself in geo-political events on earth. Then, I will discuss how Hurtak’s process of revelation subsumes and elides the actual sequence of events as recorded by news agencies. Lastly, I will briefly describe how this narrative of Muslim/Christian conflict, recast in extraterrestrial and genetic terms, has impacted the writings and ideations of New Age and Ascensionist thinkers and practitioners. […]

For example, an examination of the commentary explicating Key 109 demonstrates how, according the Hurtak, the Kaaba at Mecca acts as a concentration of anti-Universe, anti-Christ energy, a kind of spiritual black hole as it were. […]

For Hurtak, this “clinging to the cube” that the Kaaba represents is, in fact, evidence of a dangerous tendency toward retrogression, rigidity, entropy and a need to tyrannically control. As Muslims circumambulate around their most sacred shrine in Mecca, they are exhibiting the “black hole function” of refusing to evolve up to the next level of organic organization. […]

The implication is that Muslims do not “allow” the light of program of God to penetrate them, therefore, they re-enact and reinscribe, in their revering of the cube at Mecca, a focus on physical destruction of the 3-D world, in the way that the black hole is postulated to trap light itself.7 […]

The Book of Knowledge constitutes Hurtak’s attempt to construct what occultist Rene Schwaller de Lubicz referred to as la Symbolique, a purported system of knowledge transmission de Lubicz considered to be primarily visual and pre-linguistic, and is secretly encoded in the shapes of various written languages, mystical buildings, such as the Great Pyramid and for Hurtak, in human DNA. […]

The Children of Darkness “cling to the cube” in Mecca in order to keep the Children of Light from discovering the symbolique of redemption hidden in the Kaaba. They are not entirely at fault, since they are operating at the behest of extraterrestrials from alpha Draconis/Ursa Minor. They can be saved by bringing them to the Torah Or (Light of the Torah)—which Hurtak prophetically retranslates as the Program of Israel with Gematria designation 8033-45. […]

Now lets look at the "Council for a Parliament of the World'd Religions" Mission again and see how it fits in with the above........... Mission: The mission of the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions is to cultivate harmony among the world's religious and spiritual communities and foster their engagement with the world and its other guiding institutions in order to achieve a peaceful, just, and sustainable world.

It appears that the CPWR hasn't done it's homework!

Continuing with the Censur article

There is no way to determine for sure whether Hurtak’s apparent conflation of events is purposeful, the result of a faulty news source, or a common American tendency to disregard the complexities of Middle Eastern politics. Whatever the case, Hurtak declares that Enoch transported him to the location of the Kaaba, in much the same way that Jabriel was said to have transported Muhammad to the Temple Mount during his Night Journey. From his exalted standpoint, Enoch revealed to Hurtak how the cubic structure of the Kaaba acts like a black hole, sucking in and trapping the Light of the Father and feeding the Children of Darkness. 13 The stone inside the Kaaba, it is said holds and traps the accumulated and unredeemed sins of humanity inside the cube as Muslims, guided by extraterrestrial forces from alpha Draconis, are vampirically infected by the resulting energies of degeneration, vengeance and anti-evolution. […]

So, how has this premillennial scenario played to Hurtak’s New Age and Ascensionist audience? […]

Perhaps one of the most interesting responses can be found in an early ascension channeling session conducted by trance channel Barbara Marciniak in 1990.

When asked specifically about Hurtak and The Book of Knowledge, Marciniak’s guides replied that, although in the past they may have spoken highly of the Book, they also had “always maintained that [we] do not agree with what is being said there.” While the book is said to “resonate with its own form of integrity,” it is also limited by Hurtak’s belief systems, and he will eventually be surprised when he finds out what and who the conflict really involves. Her guides go on to recommend The Gods of Eden by William Bramley as a more accurate account of humanity’s extraterrestrial background.16

Some ascensionists have reported to me that something about the book “creeps them out,” and still others were quite surprised when I pointed out passages in the text that seemed to vilify Muslims or contained a ‘master race’ narrative.

Most ascensionists seem not to be very interested in pursuing Hurtak’s premillennial charges of anti-Christ Muslim behavior, even while they generally accept his overall narrative regarding the existence of an extraterrestrial conspiracy on the Earth that is designed to keep humans from evolving and the importance of DNA as the locus of personal incarnation.

On the other hand, while perusing Internet archives of ascensionist/New Age chat rooms, I ran across several conversations, all post 9/11, in which Key 109 was brought up for discussion. In one instance, a respondent simply replied by posting a verse from Surah 9 of the Koran, which, when taken out of context, seems to provide justification for Muslims to kill their enemies at any opportunity. It was as if the respondent was saying: “Yes, see, look at their scriptures, they are just like that.” […]

Robert Fuller (no relation to Buckminster), in his book Naming the Anti-Christ: The History of an American Obsession, notes that a great deal of the apocalyptic imagery that is increasingly found in much New Age/Ascensionist literature derives from fundamentalist/right wing sources/pre-millennial, ranging from Hal Lindsey to Orson Scott Card.18 […]

For all of its sophisticated patter, and it’s potential as a vision that seeks to intimately link the twin infinities of the cosmos and the human soul through the mediating mechanism of DNA, Hurtak’s revelation seems to follow this trajectory with remarkable fidelity, only now the millennial conflict is cast in mathematical, extraterrestrial, genetic and even racial terms.

Later in The Book of Knowledge, Hurtak reveals that there are two other groups who operate with the Fallen Masters, obscuring the possibility of the Christ race evolving on Earth. These individuals are the orthodox ‘believers’ in the Jewish and Christian communities, and the secular scholars and intellectuals who annoyingly insist on the importance of history, context, analysis and fact-finding.

For Hurtak, such critical analysis is idolatry constituting the Abomination of Desolation as described in the Book of Daniel.

Well, I guess the shoe fits. A close look at the Book of Knowledge reveals what one might call the circular edge of closure, when right and left wing interests are joined in the fervor of premillennial promises of perfected genetic evolution, the end of history and the conquering of ones stated enemies. It’s the same story being told now in more dangerous times.

The Letter of the Law

2006-03-20T09:21:00.000-07:00

The White House says spying on terror suspects without court approval is ok. What about physical searches?

By Chitra Ragavan
3/27/06

[...]

"Black-bag jobs."

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse says the white paper cited the Gorelick testimony simply to bolster its legal defense of the NSA's electronic surveillance program. Roehrkasse points out that Justice Department lawyers have told Congress that the NSA program "described by the president does not involve physical searches." But John Martin, a former Justice Department attorney who prosecuted the two most important cases involving warrantless searches and surveillance, says the department is sending an unambiguous message to Congress. "They couldn't make it clearer," says Martin, "that they are also making the case for inherent presidential power to conduct warrantless physical searches." [...]

Hell of war still haunts Iraq vets

2006-03-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

Many struggle with mental health disorders, homelessness As fight drags on, questions being raised about true costMany struggle with mental health disorders, homelessness
As fight drags on, questions being raised about true cost

Mar. 20, 2006. 01:00 AM
TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON—Every day, Staff Sgt. Eugene Simpson is back in the pocket, looking for the open receiver downfield.

In his mind, he's there again, reliving his days as a high school football quarterback, a junior college cornerback and a point guard on the basketball team.

He can't suppress a grin, and that's the incongruous moment in his story, because this 29-year-old father of four with the upper body physique of the athlete he once was is sitting in his wheelchair in Washington's Veterans Administration hospital, paralyzed from the waist down, a graduate of the Iraq war, Class of 2004.

"I can't let this beat me," he says. "It's a competition, it's that competition left over from my days in sports."

Almost on the other side of the country, Sgt. Michael Sarro, Iraq war, Class of 2005, is lying in a hospital bed in Texas, his 10th or 11th time back there — he's lost count — talking about the nights, when darkness rolls in, and you're all alone, with nothing but time to think, about yourself, about what happened, about why it happened.

"Some of those things I've thought or felt, I'm not sure I want the guys I know to read about," he says. "You know, the military, it's really the biggest tough guy convention you'll find ... you have to keep that tough guy outlook."

No one could ever question the toughness of Simpson or Sarro, two of the more than 17,000 injured Iraq war veterans, many battling back from horrific injuries in this country as it marks the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

But as the fight drags on, there are questions about the cost of this war to a generation of young men and women.

There are even larger questions about the psychological cost to those who have returned and the tens of thousands who will someday return to try to reintegrate into everyday life here.

By some estimates, a U.S. Senate committee was recently told, one in three of the homeless in America are veterans, and more and more they are young veterans of Afghanistan or the two Iraq campaigns.

A study published in the Journal of American Medicine last month concluded about one-third of Iraq war veterans seek mental health help upon their return. The study of 222,620 veterans found the risk for serious mental problems was much higher in Iraq veterans than those returned from Afghanistan or other conflicts.

The study found 80 per cent of those who were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) reported witnessing persons being wounded or killed or being involved in combat in which they fired their weapons.

"For those who survive, they return home having seen hellish things," says Dave Uchic, a spokesperson for Paralyzed Veterans of America.

"They are serving in a constant state of stress. There is no front. It is urban warfare. What if Iraq tips to civil war? They could witness massacres or huge waves of suicide bombings.

"This is a terrible thing they have to deal with over there. But this could get much worse when more and more start coming home."

Canada now has about 2,200 troops stationed in Afghanistan and is starting to suffer casualties. The U.S. experience may serve as a precursor to the types of problems Canadian veterans could face when they return home.

Tom Cray of the U.S. National Coalition for Homeless Veterans told a congressional committee that there are 200,000 veterans living on American streets on any given night, but his network is seeing more and more veterans from this Iraq war, many of them suffering PTSD, on the streets. [...]

"Biggest" Air Attack in Iraq Turns Out to be Bush PR Stunt

2006-03-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

Why bother spending billions of dollars on big corporate mainstream media reporters when they could just as easily have the Pentagon supply the stories and footage directly?

They already do in most cases.

Take the breathlessly "covered" air attack in Iraq. "Largest Air Attack in Iraq War Launched Against Insurgents," read one big city headline we saw. And television was right there, providing lead stories on the massive "air attack."

Only, of course, it turned out to be a PR stunt to boost Bush's poll ratings at home and divert attention from the civil war in Iraq, as if the U.S. presence was accomplishing something.

It turned out that this air blitz was just a bunch of helicopters that flew up to a pretty sparsely populated area, where 40 poor shlubs that happened to be around were detained. There was no shooting, no injuries, no deaths. It was all just show time.

But did the mainstream media expose the stunt? Are you kidding? They just dutifully reported it as if it were some vital military strategic assault.

Soviet propaganda fulfilled the same function as "reporting" like this. The mainstream press has been lobotomized by a corporate culture that doesn't want to "upset" the administration by practicing actual journalism.

Most television news and print coverage fulfill the same role as public relations agencies for the administration, with some exceptions for whistleblowing stories that are shoved in the media's face.

But the "massive air attack" fell into the former category. The mainstream media might as well have had the Pentagon press office or Karl Rove's shop writing their material. Maybe they did.

Pay too much and you could raise the alarm

2006-03-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

By BOB KERR
The Providence Journal
28-FEB-06

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Walter Soehnge is a retired Texas schoolteacher who traveled north with his wife, Deana, saw summer change to fall in Rhode Island and decided this was a place to stay for a while.

So the Soehnges live in Scituate now and Walter sometimes has breakfast at the Gentleman Farmer in Scituate Village, where he has passed the test and become a regular despite an accent that is definitely not local.

And it was there, at his usual table last week, that he told me that he was "madder than a panther with kerosene on his tail."

He says things like that. Texas does leave its mark on a man.

What got him so upset might seem trivial to some people who have learned to accept small infringements on their freedom as just part of the way things are in this age of terror-fed paranoia. It's that "everything changed after 9/11" thing.

But not Walter.

"We're a product of the '60s," he said. "We believe government should be way away from us in that regard."

He was referring to the recent decision by him and his wife to be responsible, to do the kind of thing that just about anyone would say makes good, solid financial sense.

They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges' behavior was found questionable.

And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn't call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn't try to sneak a machine gun through customs.

They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.

After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn't changed.

So Deana Soehnge called the credit-card company. Then Walter called.

"When you mess with my money, I want to know why," he said.

They both learned the same astounding piece of information about the little things that can set the threat sensors to beeping and blinking.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.

Walter called television stations, the American Civil Liberties Union and me. And he went on the Internet to see what he could learn. He learned about changes in something called the Bank Privacy Act.

"The more I'm on, the scarier it gets," he said. "It's scary how easily someone in Homeland Security can get permission to spy."

Eventually, his and his wife's money was freed up. The Soehnges were apparently found not to be promoting global terrorism under the guise of paying a credit-card bill. They never did learn how a large credit card payment can pose a security threat.

But the experience has been a reminder that a small piece of privacy has been surrendered. Walter Soehnge, who says he holds solid, middle-of-the-road American beliefs, worries about rights being lost.

"If it can happen to me, it can happen to others," he said.

Harold Pinter: Theater's angry old man

2006-03-17T18:16:00.000-07:00

At the Prize of Europe, the playwright is all politics

By Porter Anderson
CNN
Friday, March 17, 2006 Posted: 1824 GMT (0224 HKT)

[...] Harold Pinter -- one of a handful of English-language writers whose work has powerfully affected two generations of European and North American theater -- was onstage Sunday in the ornate 300-year-old Teatro Carignano to receive the 10th Premio Europa per il Teatro, or Prize of Europe in Theater.

[...] But if anyone thought this London-born son of a dressmaker would rhapsodize on the career that began in 1948 with his arrival at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, they were surprised.

The task of Europe, he told the assembly, "is to resist the power of the United States" -- a political and cultural force so virulent, Pinter said, that it may "destroy" Europe. [...]

And in "Art, Truth & Politics," a lecture Pinter created for his receipt of the Nobel, the man's terms finally were clear and harrowing, both for the United States and for his own British government.

The United States, Pinter wrote in that lecture, is "brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless." It "no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favor. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain."

"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?" he asked in his text. "One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice." [...]

Despite such bleak visions, Pinter's determination embraces hope: "There does seem to me to be more public awareness now," he says, "... of what actions our societies and our countries actually take and have taken. And what it means. And what torture actually is."

And in the winter of his illustrious career, the playwright likes to talk of his characters having lives of their own. "They surprise me."

The role he has assigned to himself, the artist-adamant, may at times surprise him, too. But he wryly insists he's earned his stance as the angry old man of modern theater.

"I've written 29 damned plays," he cracks. "Isn't that enough?"

Afghan family disputes Canadian Forces' account of shooting death

2006-03-16T20:43:00.000-07:00

Last Updated Thu, 16 Mar 2006 18:46:45 EST
CBC News

Canadian troops in Afghanistan fired no warning shots and gave no medical attention to a man they shot and killed in a taxi this week, the man's family says. [...]

Iraqis say US raid on home killed 11 family members

2006-03-16T20:16:00.000-07:00

If there remains any doubt that the US military are nothing but a bunch of cold blooded murderers, let the following story put the matter to rest...

Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:40 PM GMT

By Amer Amery

TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Eleven members of an Iraqi family were killed in a U.S. raid on Wednesday, police and witnesses said. The U.S. military said two women and a child died during the bid to seize an al Qaeda militant from a house.

Television pictures showed 11 bodies in the Tikrit morgue -- five children, two men and four women. A freelance photographer later saw the bodies being buried in Ishaqi, the town 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad where the raid took place.

The U.S. military said in a statement its troops had attacked a house in Ishaqi early on Wednesday to capture a "foreign fighter facilitator for the al Qaeda in Iraq network".

"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," U.S. spokesman Major Tim Keefe said. "Coalition Forces returned fire utilising both air and ground assets.

"There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the firefight. The building ... (was) destroyed."

Keefe said the al Qaeda suspect had been captured and was being questioned.

RUBBLE

Major Ali Ahmed of the Ishaqi police said U.S. forces had landed on the roof of the house in the early hours and shot the 11 occupants, including the five children.

"After they left the house they blew it up," he said.

Another policeman, Major Farouq Hussein, said all the bodies had gunshot wounds to the head.

Pictures of the house targeted in the raid showed it had been reduced to rubble, while next to it lay the burnt-out wreckage of a truck.

Iraqi police said the U.S. military had asked for a meeting with local tribal leaders.

Photographs of the funeral showed men weeping as five children were wrapped in blankets and then lined up in a row next to freshly dug graves.

Police in Salahaddin province, a heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency and the home region of Saddam Hussein, have frequently criticised U.S. military tactics in the area.

In January a U.S. air strike on a house in Baiji, further north, killed several members of a family. In December U.S. fighter jets dropped two 500-pound bombs on a village, also in the region, killing 10 people. The U.S. military said the people targeted had been suspected of planting roadside bombs.

(Additional reporting by Ghazwan al-Jibouri in Tikrit and Aseel Kami in Baghdad)

Lawyer: Teacher Disciplined Over Bush Comments Wishes He'd "Picked Different Dictator"

2006-03-10T09:24:00.000-07:00

POSTED: 9:55 am EST March 10, 2006

DENVER -- A high school social studies teacher who was disciplined for comparing speeches by President Bush and Adolf Hitler stands by his lecture but wishes "he'd picked a different dictator," his lawyer said.

Teacher Jay Bennish also promised school district administrators that he would make sure future classroom talks immediately offered opposing points of view, his lawyer David Lane told KHOW-AM radio in Denver.

Lane did not return a telephone call from The Associated Press.

Bennish has been on leave from Overland High School in suburban Aurora since March 1 while Cherry Creek School District determines whether his lesson likening Bush's State of the Union address to talks by Hitler violated a district policy requiring teachers to present balancing viewpoints.

After meeting with school administrators Thursday, Lane said the teacher was "not ashamed of what he said. If you want to tape him, tape him. He wished he'd picked a different dictator."

The investigation began after a student recorded part of a Feb. 1 lecture in which Bennish said some of Bush's State of the Union address "sounds a lot like the things that Adolf Hitler used to say."

Bennish has since said he was trying to stimulate his students to think critically and that other parts of the 50-minute lecture balanced his comments about Bush. He has also said he did not necessarily believe that Bush and Hitler had made similar comments but was trying to encourage discussion and thought.

From now on, however, "when he puts out something controversial, he'll put the other side out right then and there," Lane said.

School district spokeswoman Tustin Amole declined to comment on Thursday's meeting and said another could be held Friday. She said the district expected to announce a decision on Bennish on Friday.

The incident prompted a state lawmaker to suggest giving school districts the power to fire instructors who don't present balanced viewpoints on controversial topics.

The Senate took no immediate action on the amendment, which GOP state Sen. Doug Lamborn offered Thursday.

Last year, Lamborn introduced a resolution urging the University of Colorado to fire a professor who had likened some Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE VEEP WHO COULDN'T SHOOT STRAIGHT: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN DICK CHENEY'S HUNTING "ACCIDENT"?

2006-02-14T10:58:00.000-07:00

(Updated)
February 13, 2006

A smart mid-western friend who has a lot of quail-hunting experience writes:
Quail The entire Cheney hunting accident story stinks. The delay in announcing it isCheney_2 suspicious, obviously. I'll bet Cheney had a few beers in him, but I'm not sure that is illegal in Texas (drinking and hunting is illegal in most states, but I couldn't find out if that includes Texas).

But a few other points that may be worth noting: [...]

British troops videoed 'beating Iraqis'

2006-02-14T10:40:00.000-07:00

Jo Revill and Ned Temko
Sunday February 12, 2006
The Observer

Details emerged last night of a shocking video which appears to show a group of British soldiers brutally beating and kicking defenceless Iraqi teenagers in an army compound.

The footage is said to show eight soldiers pulling four teenagers off the street following a riot and dragging them into their army base, before beating them with batons, as well as punching and kicking them.

An urgent Military Police investigation was under way last night into the events shown in the video. The Ministry of Defence issued the following statement: 'We are aware of these very serious allegations and can confirm that they are the subject of an urgent Royal Military Police investigation. We condemn all acts of abuse and treat any allegation of wrongdoing extremely seriously.'

But the emergence of the footage, given to the News of the World by an anonymous whistleblower, will spark a huge controversy about the conduct of the army in Iraq. There were also fears that it could lead to more attacks on the British soldiers currently serving there.

The MoD has repeatedly given assurances that Iraqis who are captured are treated with respect and decency by British troops. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal involving Americans, dating back to 2004, shocked the world but Downing Street was adamant that there could not be any similar scandal involving the UK forces. However, there have been investigations by MoD prosecutors into a series of serious allegations of abuse by its troops in southern Iraq.

The video was apparently shot in secret by a corporal at a time when troops around Basra were dealing on a daily basis with street riots and insurgencies. Taken from a rooftop, the footage is said to show troops engaged in a running battle with youths, who are seen throwing a grenade which hits their compound.

The footage shows soldiers in combat fatigues chasing the men away, but then cuts to eight soldiers who return with four prisoners, who are marched to the compound gate and dragged inside.

In one of the most brutal scenes, a soldier punches one of the prisoners in the head and the stomach. He is then headbutted and kicked further.

Another scene shows a soldier walking up to one of the boys and kicking him hard between the legs from behind. The boy is seen doubling up in pain.

In some of the worst footage, a prisoner is kicked in the back and the body six times by two soldiers. As he struggles on the floor, one of the soldiers grabs him again by the shoulder, kicks him twice and then begins to hit him on the legs with a baton.

According to the newspaper report, the video also shows shocking footage of a soldier drawing back the blanket over an Iraqi corpse to display it close up to the camera as if it is a trophy. Another scene is said to show an Iraqi man being grabbed by three soldiers and forced to kneel behind a wall where he is kicked hard in the chest.

The video, lasting just over three minutes, is said to show at least 42 blows rained upon the four teenagers. The cries of the prisoners can be heard clearly according to the newspaper report.

The News of the World said it had decided not to reveal the unit or regiment of the troops involved in the video for security reasons. A spokesman said they received the video a few days ago and had given a copy to the MoD.

The Attorney General Lord Goldsmith will also want to see that the fresh allegations of brutality are fully investigated. His office, along with the MoD, was made fully aware of the video last Friday when officials held discussions with News of the World over the contents. There appears to be little doubt on the part of officials that it is genuine footage.

The new allegations will put more pressure on the government to hasten the departure of troops from Iraq. At present, there are 8,500 troops serving in Iraq, and officials have said they plan to begin redeployment in the next few months, with a view to bringing some of them back home by the end of the year.

The whistleblower who gave the video to the News of the World told the paper his aim was to try to prevent further abuses. The informant is quoted as saying: 'These Iraqis were just kids. Most haven't even got shoes on.' He said the video had been shown by the corporal's friends at their home base in Europe.

Boo!

2006-02-12T14:17:00.000-07:00

by Missy Comley Beattie
9 Feb 06

When the going gets tough, the president talks terror, terror, terror. Does this man have any credibility? Only with those who think that Osama and Saddam are one and the same and, of course, the people who still believe that Iraq attacked us on September 11, 2001. Yes, that's the answer. Oh, and the scared.

Actually, I don't buy this foiled plot Bush announced today--that al Qaeda planned to fly a plane into the Library Tower. And one of the many reasons is because he had to read it to us. If there were any truth to his success at preventing a disaster, he would have been capable of telling it.

When I speak against this war and the lies of the Bush Administration that took us to Iraq where my nephew died, I don't have to look down at a piece of paper, look up, stumble, and, then, look down again. This boob didn't even give us the correct name of the tower. He called it the "Liberty Tower." If the plot were true, he'd sure as hell know what tower because it would have been discussed in the inner sanctum of the White House over and over. But George knows he's in trouble. His polls are down and he's using the same tired trick, this time with a little twist of creativity. One of his handlers should've told him to memorize it though. I guess Karl wasn't there to help plan this tactic and then stamp it with his seal of approval

Please, America, wake up. Bush is the boogeyman.

Right now, though, he's the one who's sweating. Jacko Abramoff says he was invited to the Crawford Compound, Republicans are abandoning the ship, and 'You're-doin'-a- heckuva-good-job-Brownie is ready to reveal his side of the Katrina disaster. "Hear that, George. Brownie's going to sing about the correspondence he was receiving from you while so many people lost everything."

And George W. Butcher was unable to escape his truth-teller tormentors at Coretta Scott King's funeral--all those luminaries who skewered him and his agenda. He shouldn't have been allowed to be in the presence of this great woman's coffin since every move he makes is a loud slap in the face to her ideals and dreams for this country.

We all know what we can expect from George, Dick, Karl, Rummy, and Condolethal in the months leading up to the 2006 elections--Bush will be out there reading about more terrorist plots he prevented, thus, saving thousands of lives. Oh, and he'll trot Laura out to talk about how focused he is. But those of us with good memories know he focuses best on biking and vacationing. Because that's exactly what he was doing after warnings about 9/11 crossed his desk. We're also thinking that Saddam, the one we've caught and spent a fortune in human life and money to pull out of that hole, is not the person who attacked us. Where's Osama? Could it be that Bush doesn't want to nab him because it's better to use him to scare us when the doo-doo is hitting George's fan and the impeachment word is becoming more than a whisper?

Things aren't looking good for the president and he's showing signs of wear and tear. It's about time.

How many lies have to be exposed before America says, "No more?" How many times does Bush get to tell us he's protecting us before there's a huge chorus screaming, "You must think we're stupid?"

And, finally, during all this turmoil over the Muhammad cartoons and Bush arrogantly says, "Stop the violence," isn't it time for Americans to say, "But, George, you started it?"

He did, you know. When George W. invaded Iraq, he ignited a fire that's engulfed our world.

Missy Beattie lives in New York City. She's written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. An outspoken critic of the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq, she's a member of Gold Star Families for Peace. She completed a novel last year, but since the death of her nephew, Marine Lance Cpl. Chase J. Comley, in Iraq on August 6,'05, she has been writing political articles.

Diana conspiracy book to become a film

2006-02-12T14:04:00.000-07:00

Feb 12, 2006, 13:30 GMT

LONDON, England (UPI) -- A book claiming Britain`s Princess Diana was killed by the CIA and FBI is getting made into a movie.

Jon King and John Beveridge`s 'Princess Diana: The Hidden Evidence' has been adapted for a British film called 'Hidden Truth,' Screen Daily reported on its Web site Friday.

William P. Cartlidge of 'Educating Rita' is producing with filming scheduled to start in the spring.

Princess Diana and her companion, Dodi Al Fayed, died in a Paris car crash in 1997.

The inquiry into her death is still being conducted in Britain.

Terrorism: a president's best friend

2006-02-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

Bush morphs 'War on Terror' into war on common sense

Robert Scheer
Creators Syndicate
02.10.06

Where would the Bush administration be without terrorism? Like the Cold War before it, the "war on terror" is a conveniently sweeping rationale for all manner of irrational governance, such as the outrageous $2.77 trillion budget the president proposed to Congress on Monday.

Without terrorism, how could Bush justify to fiscal conservatives the whopping budget deficits that he has ballooned via his tax cuts for the wealthy that he now seeks to make permanent? Without terrorism, how could he convince government corruption watchdogs that the huge increases in military and homeland security -- 7 percent and 8 percent, respectively -- aren't simply payback to the defense contractors who so heavily support the Republicans every election cycle? Without terrorism, how could the president get away with blindly dumping another $120 billion into the war in Afghanistan and the bungled occupation of Iraq that the Bush administration had once promised would be financed by Iraqi oil sales?

In order to pay for the money pit that is Iraq, the Bush budget demands draconian cuts in 141 domestic programs, led by a $36 billion cut in Medicare spending for the elderly over the next five years. This from a president re-elected after promising to expand, rather than curtail health-care services to seniors.

Many of the other proposed cuts are equally obscene, such as the termination of $1 billion in child-care funds over five years and the complete elimination of the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which provides food assistance to low-income seniors, needy pregnant women and children.

These attacks on the social safety net for the most vulnerable members of our society are not only patently unfair, in light of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, but the simultaneous blank check for the Pentagon cannot be honestly justified by the fight against terrorism. And although the president insists that it is unpatriotic to question his strategies in fighting terrorism, let me risk his opprobrium, and that of the pseudo-conservative bully boys that shill for him in the media, by doing just that.

To begin with, we must remember that this "war" was launched against an enemy, still mostly at large, who on Sept. 11 accomplished phenomenal destruction and suffering with armaments no fiercer or costly than some box-cutters. Their key weapon, in fact, was suicidal fanaticism.

Yet, rather than sensibly investing in aggressive global detective work, collaborating with our European allies, engaging meaningfully with an independent and skeptical Arab world, and working to protect vulnerable U.S. sites such as nuclear-power plants, our leaders decided to turn logic on its head and make ignorance about the enemy into a virtue, slash civil liberties and recklessly invade a major Muslim country that had no connection to the attacks.

In other words, our response to Sept. 11 has been almost completely military in nature, granting the Defense Department an excuse to increase spending by 48 percent in just four years. Yet, despite all this spending, and the loss of life that has accompanied it, our standing in the Muslim world has been in freefall since we invaded Iraq, we have never captured or killed Osama bin Laden or his top strongman, we don't know how to "fix" Iraq or Afghanistan and we have greatly strengthened the hand of our rivals in Iran.

We don't even know, as the Sept. 11 commission report revealed, much of anything about the 15 Saudi hijackers and their four leaders from other parts of the Arab world who committed the Sept. 11 attacks. We do know, however, that they weren't from Iraq, weren't funded by Iraq and weren't trained by or in Iraq. Nevertheless, the huge elephant in the Bush budget is the war and occupation of Iraq, now approaching its third anniversary, not the effort to dismantle al-Qaida.

"Since 2001, the administration ... liberated nearly 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan," boasts the Bush budget document. Ah, but if they have been liberated, then why the need for an additional $50 billion emergency "bridge funding" in 2007, itself coming on the heels of a supplementary $70 billion budget request last week? The answer provided by the report is that Iraq is far from being stabilized and that in Afghanistan "enemy activity has increased over the past year."

Unfortunately, the Democratic leadership in Congress is still unwilling to challenge the necessity of "winning" the war in Iraq, and as a result, its complaints about cutting needed domestic programs are framed exclusively as an argument against making Bush's tax cuts permanent. It is a losing argument, because it leaves Bush as both the big spender and the big tax-cutter once again, posturing as the savior of the taxpayer when he is in fact quite the opposite for all but the wealthiest Americans.

Growing questions about whether Bush lied today about the supposed threat to LA that he supposedly foiled

2006-02-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

by John in DC - 2/09/2006 04:58:00 PM

1. Los Angeles Mayor knows nothing about the supposed threat:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Thursday he was blindsided by President Bush's announcement of new details on a purported 2002 hijacking plot aimed at a downtown skyscraper, and described communication with the White House as "nonexistent."

"I'm amazed that the president would make this (announcement) on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels," the mayor said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I don't expect a call from the president but somebody."

2. Bush's claim to have thwarted an attack on LA is disputed by former FBI official

TODAY BUSH SAID: Bush Touted Thwarting of Post 9/11 U.S. Terrorism Plot. In a speech today, Bush told members of the National Guard Association of a foiled 2002 Al Qaeda plot to fly a plane into LA's US Bank Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. Bush said that the terrorist's plan was put into place after 9/11 but "was derailed in early 2002, when a Southeast Asian nation arrested a key al Qaeda operative." Bush added, "Subsequent debriefings and other intelligence operations made clear the intended target and how al Qaeda hoped to execute" the plot, and helped other allies capture the ringleaders." - Washington Post, 2/9/06

BUT IN 2004: FBI Counterterrorism Official Said He Knew of No Thwarted Al Qaeda Attacks. After a CIA official claimed last year that the government had "probably prevented a few aviation attacks against both the East and West Coasts" since 9/11, John Pistole, the FBI's counterterrorism director, said he was "not sure what [the CIA] was referring to." - 9/11 Commission Testimony, 6/16/2004; New York Daily News, 6/17/04

Only on Fox: Cable channel aired photos of aliens attacking Library Tower

2006-02-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

In a February 9 speech, President Bush disclosed details of what he described as a foiled Al Qaeda plot to fly a commercial plane into the tallest building in Los Angeles. Shortly after his speech concluded, Fox News aired numerous images from the 1996 film Independence Day (Twentieth Century Fox) showing the reported target of the attack -- the Library Tower, now known as the U.S. Bank Tower -- being destroyed by alien invaders.

On the February 9 edition of CNN Live Today, anchor Daryn Kagan also noted that the tower "was depicted as being blown up" in Independence Day, but, unlike Fox, CNN did not show movie images of the building being attacked.

The Devil lives in the detail: Demonising Iran

2006-02-10T18:37:00.000-07:00

by William Bowles
Friday, 10 February, 2006

The latest dissection by Medialens of the corporate media’s devious and misleading coverage of Iran, is an excellent dissection of how the media distort and lie about events and, as the article points out, alleged intent on the part of the Iranians is almost always presented as a ‘slip of the pen’ eg,

“I accept that it would have been better to have said ‘alleged nuclear threat’. I am sorry that my wording was not as precise as it could have been.” (Email to Media Lens from James Robbins, BBC correspondent, January 24, 2005)

“We should have said ‘nuclear activities’, not ‘nuclear weapons activities’.” (Corrections and clarifications, The Guardian, February 7, 2006)

But of course the damage has not only already been done, it continues to be done. Take for example, a ‘background’ piece on the Iran ‘crisis’ (though it’s a ‘crisis’ entirely of the West’s making) on the BBC’s Website where we read

The best perhaps that diplomacy can do is delay. Indeed a senior British official with close knowledge of the process is now talking of all this going on for several years.

“Five years ago,” he said, “we said that Iran was five years away from being able to make a nuclear weapon. Now we still say that. That is progress.” – ‘Iran stand-off moves to new level’ news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4677114.stm

Odd when all the experts are telling us that today, Iran is at least ten years away from the ability (let alone the reality) of being able to make a nuclear device. And note the choice of words, that the ‘crisis’ can at best be “delay[ed]”, by what? Five, ten, fifteen years? Using the word “delayed” implies that it is Iran’s intention to make a nuclear weapon, an implication that is further reinforced in the BBC ‘background’ piece when it ‘informs’ us that

Up till now, Iran has been reluctant to go ahead too fast … It has held back from abandoning all restraint.

What, with it’s alleged nuclear weapons programme? Will we see yet another mea culpa from the BBC? So, five years ago did Iran also act with restraint? The devil lives in the detail, with every phrase minutely considered as to its effect on the reader, the net effect residing not in any single word or phrase but in the overall thrust, and one that is echoed in every news piece in every major media outlet.

An op-ed piece in the Guardian by Simon Jenkins on 20/1/06 puts the issue into some kind of perspective, and for once from the Iranian side

Iran … sits between nuclear Pakistan and [nuclear] India to its east, a nuclear Russia to its north and a nuclear Israel to its west. Adjacent Afghanistan and Iraq are occupied at will by a nuclear America, which backed Saddam Hussein in his 1980 invasion of Iran. How can we say such a country has “no right” to nuclear defence?

What is revealed from the alleged news we are constantly subjected to is the sheer hypocrisy of the West’s position, for nowhere do we see in the media’s presentation even an inkling of the idea that Iran has every right to build nuclear weapons. After all, the countries doing the threatening already have nuclear weapons. So which country poses the real threat to peace, Iran or the United States and its nuclear-armed allies?

The Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory, and to which the BBC reluctantly concedes Iran is in compliance with, was as Simon Jenkins points out, pretty much set up by the then nuclear ‘club’, with the view to keeping everyone else out. Meanwhile, the US is adding to its nuclear arsenal as is the UK (even if the US keeps its finger on the Brits’ nuclear trigger). To add insult to injury, we read today (10/2/06) that France has been secretly upgrading its nuclear arsenal. The stench of hypocrisy rises, a menacing cloud, above these ‘guardians’ of ‘democracy’.

Everyone (in their right mind) agrees we should get rid of the damn things but by what right does the only country in the world that’s used them, decide who else should possess them and, threaten anyone who looks like they might develop them, with nuclear weapons?

If the BBC was reporting the issue properly, it would be informing its readers of the fact that theoretically, Iran is still at least ten years away from being able to produce enriched uranium in order for the reader to make their own assessment. And, that it is a nuclear-armed West that’s doing all the threatening, not Iran. Lies by omission, are still lies.

Meanwhile, the West has its own crazies wracking up the anté under pretence of informing readers,

A frisson of panic shudders around the globe: he [President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] has already threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. Do something, someone! But what and who? – Polly Toynbee, the Guardian, Tuesday February 7, 2006

I love it, “A frisson of panic shudders around the globe”? Who, exactly is panicking here, Polly Toynbee, the war-crazed inhabitants of the White House and Whitehall or perhaps it should be the Iranians who are being threatened by at least three nuclear-armed belligerants, the US, the UK and Israel.

“Do something” Ms Toynbee? Perhaps you could start by not talking such utter bilge and making such outrageous statements. And the threats, are surely the ones emanating from the White House, with its talk of “all options being open”, not Tehran.

So what does Ms. Toynbee in her wisdom have to say on this?

Meanwhile, the Americans are grinding out ritual bellicose statements, Donald Rumsfeld refusing to rule out air strikes.

So as far the US is concerned, Toynbee presents it merely as “ritual”, whereas coming from Iran it’s a real threat? This is hypocrisy writ large, revealing the built-in prejudice of writers like Toynbee, literally schooled in imperial newspeak.

There are two messages that are hidden within all the OTT rubbish of Ms. Toynbee and her cohorts:

A deliberate demonisation of Islam and its ‘crazed fundamentalists’, a view that is intrinsic to the imperial culture that Ms. Toynbee is so much a part of, and one that is absolutely necessary to justify the imperial ambitions of the Anglo-US war machine.

This view is borne out by Ms. Frisson’s view of Iran

Even if no blood is spilt, the west may find itself in a cold jihad with a God-driven, nuclear-armed adversary, and no solution in sight. Nothing suggests that sanctions and fiery words will make the more moderate forces in Iran overthrow their mullahs and choose westernisation: under external pressure in this clash of civilisations, history suggests they will close ranks.

“God-driven, nuclear-armed adversary”? Ms. Toynbee’s choice of the term “adversary” is no idle, throwaway, it reveals exactly where she stands in the so-called clash of civilisations. Why should the Iranians ‘choose’ “westernisation” and do it under threat of nuclear attack no less? What makes Ms. Toynbee so sure about the superiority of Western ‘civilisation’, an especially galling view given the history of the Anglo-US involvement in Iran over the past century (and one that she also admits to in the same piece). Civilisation indeed!

Israel; where is Ms. Toynbee’s “frisson of panic” about the crazy God-driven Zionist fundamentalists of Israel who talk of exterminating the Palestinians, and who actually regard Palestinans as something less than human? Such outrageous statements made by individuals like Ariel Sharon are thick on the ground, yet draw no comparable ire from Ms. Frisson herself.

Ultimately, one has to ask the following question of Ms. Toynbee: what motivates her to become a mouthpiece for the imperial ambitions of the Anglo-US imperium? Is it her arrogant, racist views of anything that’s not white and European that drives her to make such virulent and poisonous statements?

One can understand the Cheneys and Rumsfelds of this benighted planet, they stand to gain directly from such war-mongering talk, but without the complicity of the Toynbees and her ilk as part of the state-sponsored media onslaught, the Cheneys and Rumsfelds are bereft of purportedly educated and ‘neutral’ mouthpieces. For whether Ms. Toynbee likes it or not, she is in actuality speaking directly on their behalf, peddling their poison to an ill-informed public under the guise of an outraged citizen, confronted by the ‘barbarians’.

The argument that it is merely a point-of-view and that counterviews are to be found avoids the fact that the central thrust of her ‘comment’ perpetuates a cynical mythology about such things as the ‘clash of civilisations’ and the all-pervading view found in the ‘news’ that ‘our’ way of life is under direct threat from the ‘jihadists’.

Thus Ms. Toynbee’s ‘comment’ is an integral component of a propaganda war being waged on an unsuspecting public by a specially trained elite. Ultimately the only difference between Ms. Toynbee and the British National Party is the choice of language and the intended target.

To argue that she is ‘merely’ an employee of the corporate media entirely misses point of the key role that she plays. Her piece is, after all presented as “comment” by the Guardian, comment that conveniently falls into line with the rest of the garbage rolled out by a compliant and complicit intelligentsia. Surely it’s time we stopped making excuses for the Ms. Toynbees of this world and called them out for what they are—the verbal rottweilers of the imperium.

Email connections for the above should you choose to accept the mission are:

Paul.Reynolds-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk

Credibility

2006-02-10T18:31:00.000-07:00

Eli Stephens
Left I on the News

February 10, 2006

Without exception in any media I've been listening to today, the story of what George Bush said today goes like this: "George Bush disclosed today new details of a terrorist plot aimed at the tallest building in Los Angeles." Why do they do that? George Bush and his administration have no credibility whatsoever. This is the administration which claimed there were WMD in Iraq. This is the administration which says that the people locked up in Guantanamo are all members of al Qaeda and the "worst of the worst," when a recent report reveals that only 8% of them were actually al Qaeda (and I suspect even that number utilizes a loose interpretation). This is an administration which has repeatedly lied to the American people and the world about all sorts of things. And yet, when George Bush says something like he did today, rather than reporting it accurately as "George Bush alleged today that an alleged terrorist plot to blow up a building in Los Angeles had been disrupted," they report it as I described above. If anyone was throwing around those "allegeds," it wasn't on any news I was listening to or watching.

If this plot was so concrete, as Bush alleges, and all of its intended participants were arrested, also as Bush alleges, why is it they haven't been put on trial? People were certainly tried and convicted after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But not, as far as I know, in this case. If Bush is telling the truth, why weren't they?

Update: More on this from Holden at First Draft, with focus on the press briefing specifically on the subject held yesterday. By the way, Holden and some other bloggers (and some reporter at the press "gaggle") are all verklempt about the idea that blowing a cockpit door with a shoe bomb doesn't make sense; the reporter claims "you either blow off your feet or you blow off the front of the airplane." But that's just silly. No one says you have to leave your shoes on when you ignite a shoe bomb, so there's no reason to "blow off your feet," and there's also no reason you can't make a charge weak enough to just blow a door and not blow up a plane. But the whole issue is a red herring, which is why I really think bloggers shouldn't dwell on it. The precise details of the alleged plot are completely beside the point. Anyway, read what Holden reports on.

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Harper can still do a lot of damage

2006-02-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

by Linda McQuaig
February 6, 2006

There was an almost audible sigh of relief in many parts of the country when Stephen Harper was denied a majority government. After all, how much damage can even an earnest right-wing ideologue do with only a slim minority?

Sadly, quite a bit.

First, Harper effectively has a majority for at least a year, since no party will be ready to face him in an election. Of course, he'll tread carefully during this period, since his eye is on winning a majority.

Still, Harper can do a lot of damage to Canada's relatively progressive social and political systems without entering into any high-profile battles in Parliament.

George W. Bush accomplished much of his agenda by appointing right-wing radicals who rolled back progressive regulations governing the environment, food and drug inspections and the legal system.

Harper could do the same. His government could, as business has been urging, adopt U.S. drug and biotechnology testing, dismantle plans to meet our Kyoto targets, and ease up on environmental regulations, particularly those that could stall development of Alberta's oil sands — Washington's key hope for reducing its Middle East oil dependency.

Harper could also press forward with ongoing talks aimed at integrating Canada more with the U.S., and could sign an energy-sharing deal ensuring Washington even greater access to our energy.

There is also a lot Harper could do to weaken medicare, without taking a direct shot at the Canada Health Act. He could allow private medicine to flourish. Indeed, his promise of a “wait-time guarantee” for health care will deliver patients into the arms of private health providers.

Until now, Canada has managed to resist some of the worst aspects of the right-wing tide of Thatcherism and Reaganism that swept Britain and the U.S. — despite vigorous efforts here by corporate-funded organizations to push us down the same path.

Harper has been in the thick of those organizations, serving as head of the anti-medicare National Citizens Coalition. Back in 1989, he urged the Reform Party to become “a modern Canadian version of the Thatcher-Reagan phenomenon.”

He doesn't talk like that now. Like other sophisticated right wingers, he's discovered that the most effective way to sell unbridled capitalism is to camouflage it.

At a conference in Vancouver last fall, medicare opponents openly discussed how to repackage their message to make it more palatable to Canadians. As The Star's Thomas Walkom reported, one privatization guru told the crowd they'd have more success selling private medicine if they pitched it, not as a way for the affluent to jump the queue, but as a way to “strengthen” medicare.

If Harper keeps his views wrapped in the garb of moderation, he'll have a good shot at winning a majority. And then our unique Canadian social system — preserved against great odds — will be in the hands of a man who's devoted much of his life to figuring out how to destroy it.

'Talkin' Texan' Means Lyin' Big

2006-02-05T15:52:00.000-07:00

By Robert Parry
February 5, 2006

On Feb. 1, the day after his State of the Union Address, George W. Bush stood on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry and delighted his audience by talking “Texan,” which in Bush’s lexicon must mean lying big.

Bush’s biggest lie that day was his claim that his warrantless wiretaps inside the United States were needed to intercept calls in which “one of the people making the call has to be al-Qaeda, suspected al-Qaeda, and/or affiliate.”

The President said, “Let me put it to you in Texan: If al-Qaeda is calling into the United States, we want to know.” His listeners laughed and applauded.

With his folksy style, Bush again got away with his false assertion that existing law wouldn’t let U.S. intelligence intercept these al-Qaeda telephone calls when, in fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 set up procedures for just such intercepts and even let the Executive tap first and get approval from a secret court later.

But “talkin’ Texan” is apparently like telling tall tales about Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill, except Texas-sized.

Bush’s wiretap lie was abetted a day later, when Deputy Director of National Intelligence Michael Hayden refused to divulge to the Senate Intelligence Committee – even in closed session – how many Americans were subjected to Bush’s warrantless wiretaps.

By keeping the scope of the operation secret, Hayden protected Bush’s account, since the President had depicted the eavesdropping as “limited,” affecting only a “few” people who supposedly were in direct touch with al-Qaeda operatives.

If Hayden had admitted the truth – that many thousands of Americans had been spied on under Bush’s warrantless wiretaps and few, if any, had any links to al-Qaeda – Bush’s story would collapse.

So, Bush administration officials have contended they can’t divulge the numbers or other details to avoid “helping al-Qaeda.” But people knowledgeable about U.S. eavesdropping capabilities say the number would be of no help to al-Qaeda, nor was the New York Times disclosure in December 2005 that Bush was conducting wiretaps without warrants.

Al-Qaeda operatives have long assumed the United States has the capacity to intercept their phone calls and e-mails, so they go to great lengths to deliver messages face-to-face or to send messages by courier. When they do communicate electronically, they make only brief cryptic references because they expect the message may well be intercepted.

Sept. 11 Prevention

Bush and Hayden also have tried to justify the warrantless wiretaps by speculating that the Sept. 11 terror attacks might have been prevented if this extra-legal “terrorist surveillance” program was in place in 2001.

But the September 11th Commission found that the failure to stop the terrorist attacks resulted from the U.S. government fumbling the interpretation of available evidence, not from a lack of electronic eavesdropping.

Bush’s first counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke faulted the President for failing to show decisive leadership and “shake the trees” of the federal bureaucracy after being warned in August 2001 about an impending al-Qaeda attack.

Yet, Bush appears to be counting on the weak memories of Americans and their susceptibility to emotional arguments. To make that work, however, Bush has had to keep the numbers of wiretaps secret so he can mislead about the scope of the operation.

What the domestic spying actually seems to entail is the National Security Agency scooping up conversations and e-mails of vast numbers of Americans – possibly in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions – and then mining that data.

Federal officials told the New York Times that this wiretap data generates thousands of tips each month, which are then passed on to the FBI for further investigation.

“But virtually all of [the tips], current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans,” the Times reported. “FBI officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. … Some FBI officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.” [NYT, Jan. 17, 2006]

In other words, this widespread wiretapping of Americans is not restricted to a small number of people who are chatting with al-Qaeda associates; it is prying into the communications of innocent Americans and burdening U.S. law enforcement with worthless tips that divert investigative resources away from more promising leads.

An investigation by the Washington Post reached a similar conclusion.

“Intelligence officials who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use,” the Post reported on Feb. 5, 2006.

The Post cited two “knowledgeable sources” who said the number of Americans spied on through the warrantless wiretaps was in the thousands, with one source putting the number at about 5,000.

But the Post added, “the program has touched many more Americans than that” because the technology sifts through hundreds of thousands of e-mails, faxes and phone calls before selecting Americans for closer examination.

These depictions of a vast program don’t square with Bush’s down-home claims about the government having the phone numbers of some al-Qaeda operatives and just wanting to know who they’re talking to in the United States.

Caught Lying

Though Bush is telling the American people to trust him, he already has been caught lying about this wiretapping program, which he first authorized in 2002. Two years later, he went out of his way to give assurances that he was following the law and getting warrants for terrorism-related wiretaps.

In 2004, Bush told a crowd in Buffalo, N.Y., that “by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires – a wiretap requires a court order. … Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.”

On New Year’s Day 2006, Bush lied again, insisting that his warrantless wiretaps only involved communications from suspicious individuals abroad who were contacting people in the United States. Bush said the eavesdropping was “limited to calls from outside the United States to calls within the United States.”

But Bush’s explanation was at odds even with what his own administration had previously admitted to journalists – that the wiretaps also covered calls originating in the United States. The White House soon “clarified” Bush’s remarks to acknowledge that his warrantless wiretaps did, indeed, involve communications from the United States. [NYT, Jan. 2, 2006]

But Bush apparently has decided that – if framed right – the wiretap issue can help him politically. Bush’s aides have begun counterattacking, accusing Democrats and the news media of jeopardizing the safety of Americans.

“Let me be as clear as I can be: President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why,” declared deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove in a speech on Jan. 20. “Some important Democrats clearly disagree.”

Rove didn’t specify who any of these “important Democrats” were, most likely because no prominent Democrat has disagreed with the need to know who al-Qaeda is calling or why. They only are saying that the existing FISA law set legal standards for permitting this surveillance and that Bush has chosen to circumvent the law.

For his part, Bush is painting his detractors as helping the enemy by just mentioning the wiretaps.

While talkin’ Texan at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tenn., Bush said, “I'm sure you can understand why you don't want the President or anybody talking about the operating details. … If you're at war, and you're trying to stop an enemy from attacking you, why in the world would you want to tell the enemy what they're doing to stop them, because they'll adjust.”

Bush then assured the appreciative crowd, “We are safeguarding your liberties.”

Killing Children

Bush also bathed his Grand Ole Opry listeners in feel-good rhetoric about the fundamental decency of the American people.

“What a fantastic country,” Bush said. “We deeply care about every human life. The life of a child in Baghdad is precious. And so when we see these killers kill somebody – a young child outside a hospital where one of our soldiers is handing out candy, we weep, because Americans have a deep compassion for every human being.”

But Bush didn’t mention how his invasion of Iraq has led to the killing and maiming of tens of thousands of civilians, including many children.

For instance, at the start of the war, Bush authorized the bombing of a restaurant in Baghdad because some faulty intelligence suggested that Saddam Hussein might be having dinner there. As it turned out, Hussein wasn’t there, but 14 civilians were killed, including seven children. One mother collapsed when her decapitated daughter was pulled from the rubble.

Some legal scholars have cited this bombing and similar incidents as evidence of war crimes committed by Bush, but the President has never apologized for killing civilians in Iraq, instead claiming that Hussein was the one who “chose war.”

Bush reprised that favorite chapter of his revisionist history during his Grand Ole Opry speech, too.

“We gave Saddam Hussein a chance to deal with the world in good faith by honoring the United Nations Security Council resolutions,” Bush said. “He chose – it was his choice – he chose to defy the resolutions. And so we took action.”

In other speeches, Bush has gone even further, rewriting the history to say that Hussein hadn’t let the U.N. inspectors in, even though the inspection teams entered Iraq in November 2002 and were citing good Iraqi cooperation before Bush forced them to leave in March 2003 so the invasion could proceed. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “President Bush, With the Candlestick…”]

New evidence also has emerged in Great Britain, revealing that Bush planned to invade Iraq regardless of what the U.N. inspectors discovered or whether the U.N. Security Council approved a war resolution.

“The US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would ‘twist arms’ and ‘even threaten’. But [Bush] had to say that if ultimately we failed, military action would follow anyway,” according to minutes of the Jan. 31, 2003, meeting obtained by human rights lawyer Philippe Sands for a new edition of his book, Lawless World. The minutes were reviewed by British Channel 4 News.

Bush and Blair also discussed the possibility of creating a pretext for war. According to Bush, “The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach” of U.N. resolutions.

”It was also possible that a defector could be brought out who would give a public presentation about Saddam’s WMD, and there was also a small possibility that Saddam would be assassinated,” Bush said, according to the minutes.

At the meeting, Bush added that after the invasion, he “thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.”

Though Bush was wrong about Iraq’s WMD stockpiles and the likelihood of sectarian violence under the U.S. occupation, he continues to urge the American people to trust his judgment on a plan for “victory in Iraq.”

Talkin’ Texan at the Grand Ole Opry, Bush said, “I want to describe right quick our plans for victory in Iraq. First of all, anytime we put our troops in harm's way we got to go in with victory in mind.” The audience responded with warm applause.

In his Nashville remarks, Bush did back away from one longtime canard that he’s used to justify seizing broad powers domestically, invading Iraq and ignoring international law. In speech after speech, Bush has insisted that before Sept. 11, 2001, Americans thought the Atlantic and Pacific oceans protected them from foreign attack.

But no American growing up during the Cold War felt that way. They knew that Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles could obliterate American cities in minutes.

At the Grand Ole Opry, Bush finally took note of complaints about this misleading argument by acknowledging the fact that the oceans really wouldn’t have protected Americans from nuclear attack.

“When we grew up, oceans protected us, it seemed like,” Bush said. “We felt pretty safe and secure from an attack on American soil. We were concerned about a nuclear threat, but nevertheless, we felt secure because we were isolated from threats it seemed like.”

In “talkin’ Texan,” the phrase “it seemed like” must be synonymous with “almost the same as true.”

Propaganda Alert! - Flight 93 Movie Ignores Officially Reported Facts About The Fate Of Flight 93

2006-02-01T18:50:00.000-07:00

SOTT
Joe Quinn
31/01/2006

While browsing the news websites recently, I noticed an advertisement for an upcoming movie about Flight 93 that 'crashed' in the Pennsylvannia countryside on September 11th 2001.

Here's the ad:

Without doubt, this is a deliberate government-sponsored/inspired attempt to further brainwash the masses about the truth of what happened on 9/11. Unfortunately for the Bush gang, the officially recorded events about the final moments of Flight 93 present us with some of the clearest evidence that the U.S. government is lying about what really happened to Flight 93, and by implication, about all other aspects of the 9/11 event. Consider the following facts:

According to NORAD’s initial statement, Flight 93 was hijacked at 9: 16 a.m., yet they were unable to say when the FAA notified them of the hijacking or how the FAA knew. Flight 93 is the only flight where NORAD could not at least supply this time of notification of hijacking. Despite this, the 9/11 Commission concluded that the hijacking of Flight 93 began at 9:28 a.m. saying only that the original statement by NORAD was incorrect without giving any explanation as to how or why such an error was made. At this same time, Cleveland flight controllers noticed Flight 93 climbing and descending in an erratic way, and shortly thereafter screams and shouts of “get out of here” were heard by controllers over the cockpit transmission. Arabic voices are also heard. At this point contact was lost with Flight 93. Yet despite this, we are told that no one notified NORAD.
According to the 9/11 Commission, at 9:36 a.m. Cleveland flight control specifically asked the FAA Command Center whether someone had requested the military to launch fighters toward Flight 93. Cleveland offered to contact a nearby military base. The Command Center replied that FAA personnel well above them in the chain of command have to make that decision and were working on the issue.

This single fact suggests that somewhere along the chain of command someone was preventing the implementation of standard procedures taken in respect of suspect aircraft, which is the immediate scrambling of fighter jets.

At about 9:36 am Flight 93 made a 180 degree turn and headed back to Washington. Still no fighters were scrambled.

From 9:30 am until Flight 93 "crashed", several passengers were alleged to have made calls to their family members and to phone operators specifying that a hijacking was taking place. According to NORAD, Flight 93 crashed at 10:03 am. However, a seismic study authorized by the US Army to determine when the plane crashed concluded that the crash happened at 10:06:05. Furthermore, according to a CNN report, the cockpit voice recording of Flight 93 was recorded on a 30-minute reel which started at 9:31am and ended at 10:02 am, with the last minute of recording apparently missing. This fact led some victim’s family members to wonder if the tape had been tampered with.

So what exactly happened in that last minute before flight 93 hit the ground in Pennsylvania? Several eyewitness reports of the crash of Flight 93 attest to the presence of a white unmarked military-style jet over-flying the crash scene. The mayor of Shanksville, the closest town to where Flight 93 "crashed" stated:

"I know of two people - I will not mention names - that heard a missile, They both live very close, within a couple of hundred yards...This one fellow served in Vietnam and he says he's heard them, and he heard one that day." The mayor adds that based on what he knows about that morning, military F-16 fighter jets were very, very close.

Another eyewitness stated that he heard two loud bangs before watching the plane take a downward turn of nearly 90 degrees. It is also a matter of record that the debris of the crash was strewn across an area of approximately 8 miles. Ask yourself: how could parts of a commercial jet that allegedly hit the ground intact be 8 miles from the crash site!?

Even CNN reported that:

"Near the end of [Flight 93’s] cockpit voice recording, loud wind sounds can be heard."

And the UK Mirror then confirmed:

"Sources claim the last thing heard on the cockpit voice recorder is the sound of wind—suggesting the plane had been holed."

All of these facts are clearly consistent with the idea that Flight 93 was shot down. Heck, the evidence that Flight 93 was shot down is so stark that even Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld couldn't help blurting it out:

According to the CNN transcript of the event, while he was addressing U.S. troops in Iraq in December 2004, Rumsfeld made the following remark:

DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: And to change
that way of living, would strike at the very essence of our country.

And I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten -- indeed the word "terrorized" is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be.

Of course, if Flight 93 was shot down and did not crash as claimed by the US government and 9/11 Commission, not only does this pose serious questions about the authenticity of the alleged phone calls made by passengers to the effect that they were going to try and "do something" to take control of Flight 93 from the hijackers, but it throws all other facets of the official story of what happened on 9/11 into doubt..

Assuming some kind of government conspriracy then, how, you might ask, could the conspriators have possibly faked at least some of the famous cell phone calls?

Consider a 1999 report in the Washington Post entitled When Seeing and Hearing Isn’t Believing, where it was stated:

“’Gentlemen! We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government.’ So begins a statement being delivered by Gen. Carl W. Steiner, former Commander-in-chief, U.S. Special Operations Command.

At least the voice sounds amazingly like him.

But it is not Steiner. It is the result of voice “morphing” technology developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.By taking just a 10-minute digital recording of Steiner’s voice, scientist George Papcun is able, in near real time, to clone speech patterns and develop an accurate facsimile. Steiner was so impressed, he asked for a copy of the tape.

Steiner was hardly the first or last victim to be spoofed by Papcun’s team members. To refine their method, they took various high quality recordings of generals and experimented with creating fake statements. One of the most memorable is Colin Powell stating, ‘I am being treated well by my captors.’

‘Once you can take any kind of information and reduce it into ones and zeros, you can do some pretty interesting things’, says Daniel T. Kuehl, chairman of the Information Operations department of the National Defense University in Washington, the military’s school for information warfare.

Digital morphing — voice, video, and photo — has come of age, available for use in psychological operations. PSYOPS, as the military calls it, seek to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and populations to pursue national and battlefield objectives.

To some, PSYOPS is a backwater military discipline of leaflet dropping and radio propaganda. To a growing group of information war technologists, it is the nexus of fantasy and reality. Being able to manufacture convincing audio or video, they say, might be the difference in a successful military operation or coup.”

“The nexus of fantasy and reality” indeed. Given the scope and depth of the conspiracy with which we are dealing, it is entirely possible that at least some of the cell phone calls that were made from the planes on 9/11 - if those reporting them are sincere and believe they received such calls - were actually the result of a ‘real time’ application of this voice morphing technology.

Who could forget the rousing reports of the “soldier citizens” on Flight 93 who courageously decided to “do something” about the hijackers with the words “let’s roll”?

Mark Bingham, a California PR executive, was a passenger on Flight 93 and one of those involved in the alleged attempts to take back the plane. According to his mother, Bingham called her to tell her that his flight had been hijacked. Bizarrely however, the very first words that Bingham said to his mother, with whom he was very close by all accounts, were, "hi mom, this is Mark Bingham."

The only other words he is claimed to have said before hanging up were, "I love you".

Now think about this: Why would anyone use their full name when calling their mother?! Would you, in a similar circumstance, call your mother and announce your full name? Really stop and think about it a moment. Could this small and seemingly innocuous detail be an example of the faking of the cell phone calls and just one of the many flaws in the general cover-up attempts by the conspirators?

Due to these many striking facts that point to Flight 93 having been shot down, we decided that it was our duty to modifiy the Flight 93 movie advertisement in such a way that it more closely reflects the reality of the situation

For the full details of what really went on behind the scenes on the day of September 11th 2001 and a unique expose on who was ultimately responsible for the attacks, see Laura Knight-Jadczyk's new book 9/11:The Ultimate Truth

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

2006-01-30T13:18:00.000-07:00

I was spending some leisure time cruising the internet and I came across this very poignant and beautifully written post that not only sums up the horrors of living on the planet earth at this point in history, but also offers realizable solutions for those of us, like myself, who sometimes feel helpless faced with a world of seeming unending cruelty and despair.

Read on if you dare...

Relic

Smoking Mirrors: And Down Will Come Baby, Cradle and All.

By Laura Knight Jadczyk

Reading the above linked blog nearly made me cry. Why? Well, because I have heard the same frustration and despair expressed by other sincere activists for World Peace in the past couple of weeks. The despair of the front line is setting in. Yes, it looks like COINTELPRO is winning. The depression is spreading among those who have been keeping up the good fight for so long; we are succumbing to the disease. But is that really true?

Perhaps with understanding we can find a remedy, a Bridge Over Troubled Water.

When you're weary, feeling small,
when tears are in your eyes, I’ll dry them all.
I'm on your side, oh, when times get rough
and friends just can't be found,
like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.
Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.

When you're down and out, when you're on the street,
when evening falls so hard, I’ll comfort you.
I'll take your part, oh, when darkness comes and pain is all around,
like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.
Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.

Sail on silver girl, sail on by.
Your time has come to shine, All your dreams are on their way.
See how they shine, oh and when you need a friend,
I'm sailing right behind
Like a bridge over troubled water, I will ease your mind.
Like a bridge over troubled water, I will ease your mind.
[© 1969 Paul Simon]

First of all, I think that Lobaczewski has produced about the most valuable document for our times (or any times) that I have ever encountered. Every activist needs to read this material and read it carefully. You can't go into battle without studying the opposition, knowing their strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and so on. Lobaczewski and those other activists and resistance fighters have already been through this. They studied it and mapped it. And the fact is, if you don't study what you are up against, you will make stupid mistakes, you will think you are winning when you are losing, and conversely, you will think you are losing when the opponent is just bluffing.

This information is crucial. A good activist can NOT ignore it. He or she does so only at his or her own peril. Yeah, sure, it seems like a huge burden to have to deal with accusations and counter-accusations in the COINTELPRO world, but if we don't, we are toast. As Lobaczewski tells us:

"If physicians behaved like ethicists, i.e. left in the shadow of their personal experience of relatively un-esthetic disease phenomena because they were primarily interested in studying questions of physical and mental hygiene, there would be no such thing as modern medicine. Even the roots of this health-maintenance science would be hidden in similar shadows. In spite of the fact that the theory of hygiene has been linked to medicine since its ancient beginnings, physicians were correct in their emphasis upon studying disease above all. They risked their own health and suffered sacrifices in order to discover the causes and biological properties of illnesses and, afterwards, to understand the patho-dynamics of the courses of these illnesses. A comprehension of the nature of a disease, and the course it runs, after all, enables the proper curative means to be elaborated. "[Political Ponerology]

Just now, activists are the physicians of society. We can't do a thing if we don't know the nature of the disease and that is what Lobaczewski lays out for us in all its horrible detail. We don't want to give up in despair thinking we have incurable cancer when it is just the measles or something that must run its course and can lead to full recovery if proper nursing is applied.

The questions about COINTELPRO backed groups and individuals MUST be asked, but it must be asked in the proper context. The question is: Are such groups and individuals just "victims" of the social disease, or are they a vectors? Are they innocently manipulated by the special psychological knowledge of those with serious psychological pathologies, or are they carriers?

Either way, COINTELPRO is deliberate and planned at some level, whether the individual or group is privy to that planning or merely it's dupe. The REAL "enemies" are those individuals pulling his strings. The bottom line is, if the individual cannot be cured, if their egos are so big they cannot admit that they have been or are being manipulated, then those who seek "health" need to contain them like Typhoid Mary.

Modern COINTELPRO has been developed to an all new level of complexity and sophistication even if they still use many of the old tried and true methods of defamation and slander. After all, they have had access to some excellent talent to figure out how the human mind works and to know how to get to people and even to "trigger" them at a distance. I'm not talking about mysterious "mind control" experiments here, but simple psychological knowledge, though I won't discount the direct experimentation. After all, if you have some control over what kind of psychological "diet" is being fed to a society, you can pretty well set them up to do what you want right there in front of God and everybody. Education, religion, television, video games, control of the media for "ideological vectoring," etc. It's a pretty formidable array.

But again, most of it is "terror tactics." We need to study it and find the curative means and employ them.

For example, John Kaminski and Kurt Nimmo have come under COINTELPRO fire quite a bit lately. They are accused of being on the CIA payroll, of being "ex-Navy intell" and so on. How do you tell the difference? If they say they are not, that's what everybody expects them to say if they ARE. It's also what they would say if they aren't. People tend to forget that. It's like Bush pointing the finger at Iraq saying "You have WMD and because you say you don't, you are obviously lying." Then, of course, the truth came out that Iraq was telling the truth. But for a considerable period of time, lots of people bought into the "plausible lie" argument. You might want to reread all the COINTELPRO posts here, especially the one about the above mentioned "Plausible lies," and try to remember that when two people are each saying something completely opposite, it is NOT usually a case of the truth being somewhere in the middle: one of them may very well be lying and the other telling the truth and nothing but the truth. I wrote there:

The truth - when twisted by good liars, can always make an innocent person look bad - especially if he is honest and admits that he has faults. If someone is telling the simple truth, and the other side is lying through their teeth, the basic assumption that the truth lies between the testimony of the two sides always shifts the advantage to the lying side and away from the side telling the truth. Under most circumstances, this shift put together with the fact that the truth is going to also be twisted in such a way as to bring detriment to the innocent person, results in the advantage always resting in the hands of liars.

Also, when you read the post about Plausible lies, you will read something else: how to evaluate the two sides:

Proof is a familiar concept to those used to conventional logical thinking. However what passes for proof in cultural, social, and even legal terms often bears only a superficial resemblance to what would be considered proof by those who really use their minds to think.

For example: in formal mathematics, proof rules are established - postulates are set out and a structure is built based on the postulates and the theorem. Mathematical proof is pretty much inarguable: once a proof is accepted as true it is added to the pool of known truths.

In legal proof there is a set of rules and a theory which the prosecution presents, and attempts to prove the theory by clever argumentation rather than facts. Truth is not the objective. Getting other people to believe the theory IS the objective. However, the prosecution's theory is whatever the prosecutor believes that he can get away with based on what is known about the case, or what he can PREVENT from being known. What legal 'proof' does is serve as a structure for convincing a group of people of the guilt of a person, about whom they know nothing.

There is another significant difference: Mathematical proofs are judged by experts in the particular case who are free to study any and all information about the case. Legal 'proof' is judged by people who are guaranteed to be ignorant of the case, who are only allowed to study the information presented during the formal trial, and who are not even allowed to consult the texts for what the rules say.

Our culture is so permeated with this “legal argument” system that it extends into our daily experience: the one who is the slickest at using the structure for convincing a group of people of something, is the one who is believed. Very few people take the time to obtain hard facts by carefully studying any and all information about a situation.

How do I know John Kaminski and Kurt Nimmo are NOT disinformation artists or in the pay of the CIA or Navy intelligence? I have done due diligence. Not only do they use their real names, they also have a real history of their public life and deeds that is written in an open book for anyone who cares to read it. I also know from personal information that if the CIA has them on their payroll, they haven't ever sent any checks and both of them struggle to survive every day just like the rest of us. They need help and they aren't getting it.

Speaking of which: We (Ark and I and our research group) are portrayed as either beneficiaries of funds from George Soros, French Intell, CIA, or we are thieves who take people in, fleece them by scaring them to death, and then cast them aside like used kleenex. Here is one of the latest posted to a public BB:

Anonymous Coward
User ID: 67366
1/28/2006 6:01 AMRe: Ok, enough about Nancy and the Zetas. What do you all know about Laura and the Cassiopaeans?

Is LKJ the same as Il_Bagattel on STA?

'ill bagman' is not laura

he is a retired used car salesman and health food drink peddler from
newport beach CA, in his early sixties he means well but is a total C
dupe, fanatical, obsessed

he sold his property in CA for over half a mil and followed the cult to
france he read some C crapola about CA falling into the ocean, and he was
genuinely afraid! laura reinforced the conviction and invited him intor her
spider's web

he moved in to the castleopia dungeons but was within days, due to his
rather cloying used car salesman personality, made unwelcome by the cult -
some of the cultists said he was making unwelcome sexual advances and
remarks to younger female C dupes he was banished to a local village
nearby, where he still remains the village idiot

what happened to his money?

LOL, take a guess

but even though he was ostracised he still is so mind controlled that he
suffers from stockholm syndrome and thus constantly writes (at STA mainly)
about apoclayptic and other paranoid crapola but always referencing the
larks and Cs and always in a good 'light'

he is a very sad man and he has no idea how his life has been ruined by
these archons - no idea

that story can be repeated in many other cases, and i hesitate to guess
quite how many, and quite how much money and property has been stolen by
these 2 hucksterfrauds, not to mention minds and lives and shattered
relationships and marriages

i wonder if the larks understand the concept of karma?

roll on interpol
please DO YOUR JOB

webmaster@maar.us

How to deal with nonsense like that? And believe me, this is a mild example. You ain't been COINTELPROd professionally until there are websites set up for the express purpose of destroying your reputation and thusly your ability to do anything positive for others in this battle against Fascism we face today! I reckon we are about the most attacked people on the net, and we were being attacked when it wasn't fashionable. Maybe we're onto something?

Now, you want the truth? Can't you handle the earth-shaking revelation?

First of all, the individual referred to above is not a "used car salesman" or "health food drink peddler" except in the mind of the writer who denigrates him, and seeks to dirty everything he touches, especially us. The man's father was a Car dealer in the American Midwest. The individual in question owned several nightclubs in large cities there; he also was a musician and played drums in a couple of well-known 60s and 70s rock bands. Later, he joined a large vitamin manufacturer as marketing director. Normal life story. But somehow his life was cheapened and vulgarized in a few, short, sentences constructed by a psychopath.

This individual has been a long time reader of our website, a discussion group member, an activist, (he led a movement to stop the building of an airport in CA that would have destroyed an ecologically sensitive environment), and supporter. When he reached retirement age, he saw what was coming in the US - POLITICALLY and economically - and decided he wanted to retire to Europe. Yes, he was scared - nobody in their right mind wouldn't be - , and yes, he thought earthquakes in California were likely at some point in the future (as do many experts), but that isn't what was driving him: his main fear was Bush and the Neocons. Rightly so.

So, he wanted to get out. Since we were the only people he knew in Europe, and since we could sponsor him to come here, it was only natural that we do so. Yes, he sold his house before moving; that's natural. Yes, he stayed with us for 6 months while looking for his "ideal house," and then moved in there. I have no idea how much money he has or how much he made on the sale of his house. He helped out with groceries while he was here, made a loan to us when we needed additional funds to try to get a mortgage to buy a house (that fell through - loans get repaid) but that was it. We helped him, he helped us and that is pretty simple and ordinary stuff in anyone's life. But see what has been made of it? See the filthy allusions and insinuations? See how it has been twisted to contribute "proof" to the claim that we are just con-artists and run a doomsday cult?

Well, obviously, anyone who reads the work on our website knows better. That is why we take note of the sites that do and do not link to us. That is why it was so interesting to observe the reactions to the Pentagon Strike video which I have written about earlier. After the Washington Post made the mistake of publishing a link to our website, all of the damage control machine went to work and the ONE thing they wanted to avoid at ALL costs was publishing a link to our website.

We must scare them to death.

And I should note that the writer of the above nastiness is very likely Vincent Bridges, best buddy and co-author with Jay Weidner, who is best buddy of Jeff Rense. You know, you can follow these links around and with a little digging, figure out who is who... (hint)

Meanwhile, of course, Jeff Rense got listed on a government website as a major source of disinformation. As Robin Ramsay, Editor of Lobster, writes in February's issue of Fortean Times:

Recently, the US State Department has begun trying to rebut some of the current conspiracy theories about America. Their first targets were a couple of websites - www.rense.com and Conspiracy Planet - and the late Joe Vialls, an Australian. What a boost for the named sites! Attacked by the State Department![...]

[Y]ou don't have to be a PR genius to see that what you simply mustn't do is launch official attacks: all they do is amplify and legitimise the theories by announcing that they are deemed to be worth attacking. [Fortean Times 206, February 2006, p. 19]

Even though, as I noted in an earlier post here, Carol Morello of the Washington Post asserted that our Pentagon Strike video was single-handedly responsible for re-awakening the public interest in the "No-Boeing at the Pentagon" theory first put forward by Thierry Meyssan, never, EVER, have we been frontally attacked by any government agency. Nor will we be. As Ramsay notes above: "[Y]ou don't have to be a PR genius to see that what you simply mustn't do is launch official attacks: all they do is amplify and legitimise the theories by announcing that they are deemed to be worth attacking."

So certainly, we would expect real COINTELPRO operations to be attacked "officially" in order to legitimize them, (and that's what they did for Jeff Rense), but those who have figured out the real answers will not be martyred - at least not by the official government. It's way too dangerous. Rather, they will be crucified by "Third Party Agents" of COINTELPRO such as Vincent Bridges and his gang of cyber-psychos. And certainly, it is effective.

The problem is, because so few people really think, and most people are really programmed by the "Cult of the Plausible Lie," when folks like Vinnie and his buddy Storm Bear repeat this nonsense over and over again (and it started back in 2001), the average person tends to think "where there's smoke, there's fire." They don't know that it's ALL smoke and somebody else is blowing it!

The word "cult" has been deliberately made so pejorative that people actually cringe when they hear it. It was used with effective results in relation to the Jonestown people, the Branch Davidians at Waco, the Solar Temple, Heaven's Gate, etc. I certainly thought that those situations were as they were presented by the media myself at the time they happened. It was only later when WE were painted with the same brush that I started to wonder if there wasn't some psy-ops going on there: a deliberate manipulation of people's minds. I started looking into it and it sure looks that way. Do your own research, don't take my word for it.

What matters now is that 90 % or more of the US population still believe the lies about those people. (And I'm not defending their beliefs, whatever they might have been, just their right to have them and live peacefully which they were NOT permitted to do. They were hounded and flamed and infiltrated and lied about until they became so paranoid that they began to act erratically which then led to their destruction. Pure psychological manipulation.) I should mention here that the chief ranter of "cult, cult, cult!" in the case of the Waco tragedy, was Rick Ross, good buddy of Vinnie Bridges and Jay Weidner and probably, by extension, though it is hidden, Jeff Rense. (It is known that Rense has some decided Zionist connections so it strikes me that he could be a tar baby to collect all the anti-Zionist folks together, get info on them, and then subject them to later attacks by seemingly disconnected sources. There are also Zionist connections to Weidner and Bridges, by the way, and most definitely to Rick Ross.) By the way, has anybody but me noticed Jeff's ostensible "Christian Cult" bias?

Are we a cult? Hell no. If anything, we are anti-religion and anti-belief in anything. We prefer to collect data and assign probabilities based on scientific analysis. The REAL cults are protected by the so-called "anti-cult" people. They pretend to be "anti-cult" all the while they are subtly promoting a quite different agenda. Take a look at the maar.us website, the ostensible source of the libelous post I quoted above. This is supposed to stand for "Malevolent Alien Abduction Research." Now, get this: Colleen Johnston is saying that aliens are malevolent. WE are saying that, if aliens really exist as a great deal of evidence suggests they do, then they are malevolent because that is what the evidence points to. So what's Colleen's problem? Why does she have a beef with me?

Easy. And I'll tell you how I know. There are two people on her private discussion group who got curious about me because she wrote so vicious an article about me. (I don't think she wrote it, I think that Vinnie Bridges wrote it in her name - part of the COINTELPRO Greek Chorus strategy). So, these people came to our site to examine the evidence by reading the material we publish. Apparently, they were so disgusted with Colleen's obvious agenda, that they decided to forward to me all the exchanges she has with her group, her "teachings," so to say. It's quite a collection.

Reading this material was truly saddening:the blind leading the blind, but more than that, it was worrisome. You see, Colleen Johnston tells her followers that faith in Jesus is what is going to save them from Malevolent aliens.

Yup. Not a joke. And if they keep getting raped and abused (and how they glory in their descriptions of the "disgusting" sexual encounters with their reptoid tormenters!), then it is obviously because they haven't gotten the exact shade of feeling of faith to ward them off. Either that or it's "god's will" that they suffer.

Now, how can you be angry at something that ignorant and pathetic? (And by the way, if you want to listen in on a real exorcism where I never ONCE mention the name "Jesus," and do the job quite effectively anyway, go to our podcasts and listen to the one on "Channeling and Exorcism")

In any event, the "anti-cult" ranters have done a pretty effective job of making people afraid of the word to the point that it's like the Kitty Genovese case... a person can be being murdered - psychically, psychologically, and even literally - by these thugs and nobody will help because they are afraid of getting tarred with the same brush.

And THAT is the point. That's what COINTELPRO is set up to do. To divide and conquer the TRUE patriots and activists by slime propagated by the Third Party Attack Protocol.

Those who are really working for truth and peace will be attacked and marginalized. And then, if somebody starts to notice anything strange about this, they will set up "fake" attacks on each other to allay suspicion. No sooner had I made a public comment about the fact that Jeff Rense seemed to be curiously untouched by all of this than, lo and behold, within a few days he started publishing articles about how nasty letters were written to him from Zionists and his guests were being "threatened." However, he has never published an article about how *I*, as his guest, was certainly flamed and threatened by his pals Jay Weidner and Vincent Bridges and HE published it himself.

And then along comes Daryl Bradford Smith with his "diet coke COINTELRPO" attack on Rense - you know, the flame with just one calorie?

The other day I saw another piece on Rense.com about how the nasty Zionists were making anonymous phone calls to one of his guests and how upset that guest was. Well, gee whiz, I wish I ONLY got nasty anonymous phone calls! After many, MANY death threats, our names and address were published on the internet with invitations for some right thinking Neocon Zionists in our area to "take care" of us. Not long after, two of my children were nearly killed, (the car was totaled when an anonymous vehicle attacker deliberately ran my daughter off the road and if it hadn't been a Volvo, she would have been killed), our dog was poisoned, and we had enough. And then, of course, the "Greek Chorus" starts chanting: "oh, they are pretending to be activists but they really ran away because they are a cult and fleece people."

Yeah, right.

The problem is, the other side has no limits on what they can and WILL do. Every unethical option is open to them. It is NOT open to those who seek truth. For them, the end justifies the means. For us, the end IS the means: truth, as much as we can figure out, shouted as loudly as we can shout it. (Within safe limits, of course.)

But that doesn't mean that we can't take pages from their playbook.

We notice that their main weapon is something like a combination of a Greek Chorus and "clappers" planted in the audience, while the spellbinding actor weaves his illusion "onstage." It is a kind of psychological "herding" and "corraling."

I don't see anything wrong at all with utilizing a similar tactic.

But to do something like that, you have to have a network and that has to be created very carefully in order to weed out the "agents." That's where studying the phenomenon and doing due diligence comes in.

IF such a thing could be done, if such a group would come out in force whenever they see the stalker attacking a "Kitty Genovese", (i.e. any one of the members of said network), the network would come out in force and make it clear that they are NOT going to tolerate attacks on people who have proved themselves by their bona fides, and by their work.

The problem with forming such a unified network is Ego. So many people are invested in their beliefs and they have to hang on to them and if somebody over there doesn't believe the same way they do, they don't feel that they ought to support them. What we have to understand from the start is that most of these beliefs are PART OF THE PROGRAM. One has to be completely ruthless in examining the self and what one believes in order to get free of this stuff. Effectively that means that anyone who is attached to a "savior" scenarios is probably part of the program whether he or she is conscious of it or not. There aren't any saviors! No Jesus, no Avatar, no Aliens are gonna help haul our buns out of the fire. It's all up to us! That's it. And we can only do it with knowledge and awareness! But the kind of knowledge and awareness we need cannot be gotten alone!

Our Quantum Future Group has made a huge difference. Yeah, Vinnie and gang like to rant "cult" about the fact that we have a private, members-only group, and it's hard as hell to get in, but I can guaran-damn-tee that this is only because the PTB are afraid of people actually learning how to work together without egos. It's all about relationships and networking to do real research with all biases removed.

QFG is a blessing to me for a lot of reasons and one of these is that it is the members of this group that keep me fighting. Because many of them are there, in the U.S., even though I am here in France and COULD just relax and retire and let the world go to hell or let somebody else do the work,. Heck, I'm 54 this year, I don't have a lot of years left so why am I wearing myself out? I could shuck the whole nonsense, free myself of the grief that I suffer when I am unjustly attacked, the suffering my family has gone through because of those psychopaths, quit working 16 hour days, and just read and watch movies and prune roses. But I can't do that. There are too many people that I love. I will fight for them until I am cut down and I believe that they will do the same for me. I could be wrong, but I don't think so - they are very special people, every one of them!

Yes, there has been a period of "weeding out" COINTELPRO - that's a necessary stage for any group that hopes to remain cohesive and work toward a common goal. Those who have the seeds of selfishness have fallen away under various trials. In this sense, people like Vinnie and Jay are useful. Those who have the instinct for truth can see through them and their lies, and those who prefer lies because it makes things simple and keeps people from being mad at them for bucking the PTB, get taken in. Lobaczewski calls it "transpersonification." It's really that simple. We interact with people daily, monthly, year after year, and because of this they know us on a consistent, personal basis. Most of our group members have been to visit us and have visited each other. This group works together, researches together, and that means that each of them give of themselves daily just like in a family.

When you get to know people personally in such an exchange, you begin to care about them in a deep way. Our group is our real family and families help each other. The neighbors would not have ignored Kitty Genovese's cries for help if they had known her and interacted with her daily, or if they had been family, even "extended" family.

That's what is missing in the Anti-war and 9-11 truth movement. People working together, knowing each other well and personally, leaving their egos and prejudices at the door, doing good research with protocols, sharing and supporting each other for the sake of the goal and not personal fame and glory. The network needs to grow.

The members of the Quantum Future Group are our "Bridge Over Troubled Water." They work tirelessly alongside us on the "frontline," even if we do try to shield them from the flak and take the direct hits from the COINTELPRO gangs ourselves. We are able to stand up and do that because they are behind us, passing the ammunition, food and water, necessary intell, providing distractions and cover fire, and all kinds of things that can be expressed in battle metaphors. The cavalry may make the charge and attract the fire, but it cannot be successful without a kitchen, without an infirmary, without covering artillery fire, and without reconnaissance and foot soldiers.

So, the bottom line is, as long as the Quantum Future Group exists, as long as children who need a future exist, I'm not ready to give up yet. There is way too much at stake. Maybe I am clinging to hope because I am a mother and I want a future for my children and my extended family and their children. Maybe that hope is self-deception, just as a mother might cling to hope that her child will survive some terminal illness. I'll admit that up front. But even so, if my "child" dies, it won't be because I didn't do everything I could, right up to the last instant. And believe me, a desperate mother can be pretty creative when her child's life is at stake. There are all kinds of stories about mothers who did NOT take the diagnosis as the last word, who did their own research, who found new remedies, and who, in the end, healed their children by virtue of stubbornness, refusal to give up, and just plain cussedness. They can call me crazy, they can laugh at me, accuse me of whatever slime their filthy brains can come up with, gossip about me, flame and abuse me; it has nothing to do with me, and I ain't quittin'. I'll be your Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Iran blames Britain and US for bombings

2006-01-25T13:42:00.000-07:00

25/01/2006

Iran’s president today blamed Britain and the US for two bombings that killed at least nine people in the southwestern city of Ahvaz.

“Traces of the occupiers of Iraq is evident in the Ahvaz events. They should take responsibility in this regard,” state television quoted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying.

The station reported that Ahmadinejad had issued a decree ordering his foreign minister and intelligence minister to investigate the possibility that “foreign hands” might have been responsible for the explosions.

Comment from Signs of the Times: Sounds logical enough to us, after all, counter-insurgency tactics are SOP for Western intelligence agencies. Obviously the basic goal of counter-intelligence operations is to destroy the enemy. To achieve this, many different tactics can be used, but all aim to discredit and demoralize the enemy as a means to destroying it.

Today, an enemy can be universally discredited (at least in the public eye) if he can be portrayed as a "terrorist". To portray him as a terrorist, it is often necessary to carry out terrorist acts that your enemy would not normally engage in.

British army intelligence agents were caught engaging in exactly this type of operation late last year when the car they were travelling in was stopped and found to contain explosives. Both men were wearing full Arab dress. It seems that the plan was to create yet another Western media headline along the lines of "Iraqi insurgent car bomb kills dozens of Iraqis."

Homeland Security To Confiscate Bank Safe Deposit Box Contents

2006-01-25T13:15:00.000-07:00

by notepad
22 Jan 06

While all the other points I mentioned in a previous post are fairly well documented and discussed elsewhere on the Internet, the bank information I reported is not. This information is from my own experience and research. I discovered the disturbing news quite by accident - and by virtue of its importance, I decided to post my findings here and on a few other forums.

What did I hear?

A family member from Irvine, CA (who’s a branch manager at Bank of America) told us two weeks ago that her bank held a "workshop" where the last two days were dedicated to discussing their bank’s new security measures. During these last two days, the workshop included members from the Homeland Security Office who instructed them on how to field calls from customers and what they are to tell them in the event of a national disaster. She said they were told how only agents from Homeland Security (during such an event) would be in charge of opening safe deposit boxes and determining what items would be given to bank customers.

At this point they were told that no weapons, cash, gold, or silver will be allowed to leave the bank - only various paperwork will be given to its owners. After discussing the matter with them at length, she and the other employees were then told not to discuss the subject with anyone.

The family member has since given her notice to quit the bank.

I found the news alarming and decided to find out more myself. On a trip to my bank here in Houston, I remarked to a young bank employee (who’s new there), "well I guess you’ve been told all that stuff by the manager and the Homeland Security about what to tell your customers" - and to my amazement, the young woman came right out and said yes she’d been through all that, then whispered to me across the counter, "but we’re not supposed to talk about - I could lose my job."

Why haven’t you heard more about this?

First of all, since maybe only banks’ upper management is privy to the new "rules", the information doesn’t trickle down so easily.

Also keep in mind that employees have been told NOT to say anything about this, that it’s a matter of National Security (with an allusion toward arrest if they do). They face possibly losing their job too. Another reason is that bank employees may not think it’s important, or they believe they’re a unique part of the effort towards curtailing "terrorism" and helping America’s internal defenses.

It is also important to realize that not everyone’s a writer, or Internet savvy - even if the employees moved beyond their banks’ warnings & constraints, most people don’t know how to get their experience published on the Web in the public domain - it’s a mystery they are not familiar with so you never hear their story.

How to get the information yourself:

Visit your bank, ask a few well-worded questions, being careful not to arouse suspicion - if that doesn’t work, talk to friends and other family members - maybe they’ve heard something - or as a last resort, just point blank call the bank manager in private and demand to know what’s all this business with the Homeland Security deciding what I can have from my safe deposit box - tell me now or I’ll close my account today.

I’ll bet if you put forth the effort you’ll get the answers you want.

What should you do with this information?

I’m not trying to "scare" anyone - just providing some news I think is relevant to Americans. Each must find his way through this dark forest - you will do with this information what best suits you and your loved ones - me personally, I see this as another indicator of how the criminals in charge over our lives intend to fleece U.S. citizens completely then dispose of them as only refuse.

Be prepared.

America`outsourced torture'

2006-01-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

Investigator says detainees flown to secret prisons
`Highly unlikely' European nations unaware: Report

Jan. 25, 2006. 01:00 AM
JAN SLIVA
ASSOCIATED PRESS

STRASBOURG, France—The United States has developed a system for "outsourcing" torture, the head of a European inquiry into alleged CIA secret prisons said yesterday, accusing European governments of turning a blind eye to breaches of human rights.

But Swiss Senator Dick Marty's report failed to uncover tangible evidence proving clandestine detention centres existed in Romania or Poland as alleged by the New York-based Human Rights Watch.

His interim report, based partly on results of national investigations and recent media reports, did not break new ground and largely repeated his previous claims that U.S. policies in the war on terror contravene international law on human rights. Allegations the CIA hid and interrogated key Al Qaeda suspects at Soviet-era compounds in Eastern Europe were first reported Nov. 2 in The Washington Post.

"There is a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of `relocation' or `outsourcing' of torture," Marty said in the report to the Council of Europe, the human rights watchdog on whose behalf he is investigating.

"Acts of torture or severe violation of detainees' dignity through the administration of inhuman or degrading treatment are carried outside national territory and beyond the authority of national intelligence services," Marty said. He added that more than 100 suspects may have been transferred by U.S. agents to countries where they faced torture or ill treatment in recent years — a process known as "rendition."

"It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware,'' Marty added. [...]

Another nuke exercise -- your next 9/11?

2006-01-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

Jerry Mazza
January 23, 2006

Catch this! Some fresh-brewed Homeland Insecurity published today on WorldNetDaily. The Department of Defense (DOD) has scheduled its second major, three-day exercise to combat nuclear terrorism, this time in the Charleston, South Caroline area. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t know Charleston had a nuclear terror problem, shades of Sept. 11, 2001, the day on which some six drills were going, enough to distract anybody from doing anything when the drills went real.

But Charlestown is not a strategic town. It’s a vacation spot, nice beaches, good fishing, boat rides, excellent restaurants, southern cooking, and nice people, you say. So, kick back your heels and watch the thermal bomb go off like a Charleston sunset. No, no, no! But then why is the DOD goal coping with the catastrophic results of a terrorist nuclear attack here? Ah, you say, Charleston is a major US port city. And therefore the roast pig, bad term, test sight for nuclear holocaust by the sea.

But the exercise and the military’s Joint Task Force-Civil Support will be hosted (excuse me again) . . . headquartered at Fort Monroe, Virginia. And the three-day drill (which could go real, n'est-ce pas?) is for commanders and representatives of other federal agencies that would be involved in (catch this) the consequences of a 10-megaton nuclear blast, enough to decimate an American city. Let me fill you in on some of the particulars of such a blast, and remind you that what hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 20-meg blasts.

The 10 will crisp wood frame houses, common in this area, for a distance of more than a mile from ground zero and produce medium rare damage for a mile and a half. The damage radius increases with the power of the bomb, about in proportion to its cube root. When imploded at the ideal height, a 10-megaton bomb, 1,000 times as powerful as a 10-kiloton weapon, increases the distanced by 10, that is, out 11 miles for severe damage and 15 miles for moderate damage of a frame house.

Are you grokking this, strangers in a strange land? We’ve passed the science fiction stage. And now, folks are playing reality games with the concept in a military fort near a major American seaport city. Let me also tell you, the fireball for a 10-megaton explosion will have a diameter of about 4.8 miles across. A flash of thermal radiation is given off from the fireballs and spreads out over a large area, and with steady intensity.

The amount of surging thermal energy, penetrating radiation, climactic effects, and clean H-bombs effects, well, just click here to download details. They ain’t pretty. But then, neither were 9/11’s, remaining ugly as hell nearly five years later.

In fact, the real danger here is that an administration in danger of extinction itself for its wars, its financial bungling, its corruption, its catastrophic Katrina, its trillions in tax cuts for the rich and subsequent debt, its utterly inhumane cuts to social services, in short, its horrible five years . . . the real threat is that this administration will use this go-real nuclear holocaust to blame on Al Qaeda, and get itself off the hook and hanging platform, and elevate national terror into a national state of emergency, eliminating all democracy, with a call for martial law, under Der Bush & Company.

Think I’m kidding. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, remember them from New Orleans?) and senior Coast Guard brass will be on hand. The WorldNetDaily article claims that no part of the exercise will take place there, though the target of attack is Charleston. Maj. Gen. Bruce Davis, the task force’s commander, will oversee the exercise from Fort Monroe. What a blast (I hope not).

The Joint Task Force-Civil Support -- part of US Northern Command, which oversees the Defense Department’s domestic military activity -- is a standing joint task force composed of active, reserve and National Guard members from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard, as well as civilian personnel. Well, party on down. Just don’t you dare blow up Charleston.

Last summer, the article also tells us, a similar exercise, "Sudden Respond '05" was led by Virginia’s Fort Monroe-based Joint Task Force-Civil Support. It too, duh, was designed to simulate a nuclear terrorist attack that the highest US officials, including President Bush (one of the lowest), have said is the No. 1 threat facing the nation, and they if anyone, will make happen.

The drill, we’re told, is strikingly similar to a scenario detailed by Graham Allison, former Pentagon assistant secretary for plans and policy and current Harvard professor, in his book, "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe." It’s only preventable 'til it turns real, just like 9/11, bunky. And you don’t need to be a Harvard professor to know that, dumb ass idiot.

Nevertheless, Allison wrote, "A month after the Sept.11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Central Intelligence Agency presented Bush with a report that al-Qaida had smuggled a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb into New York City."

The president, according to the book, dispatched Nuclear Emergency Support Teams of scientists and engineers to New York to search for the weapon, which was never found. Never found, imagine that. And imagine that I live in New York and never heard a frigging word about that. And maybe some "terrorist" from al-Qaida, shorthand for CIA, took it and put it under the White House, because it has done an amazing job of decimating the agency, and laying blame for 9/11 at its feet.

Allison, sport that he is, described the devastation that a 10-kilaton nuclear bomb would bring to Manhattan if it were detonated in the middle of "historic Times Square." Some 1 million people would die almost immediately. Is everybody staining their trousers? I hope so. But ho, there’s more from Allison. Catch these hot chestnuts.

"The resulting fireball and blast wave would destroy instantaneously the theater district (and all those homos in it), the New York Times building (and all those gray stories), Grand Central Terminal (and all those gray commuters), and every other structure within a third of a mile to the point of detonation." And that’s not all he wrote. "The ensuing firestorm would engulf Rockefeller Center (melt the ice ring in a couple of seconds), Carnegie Hall, Empire State Building, and Madison Square Garden, leaving the Knicks and Rangers homeless (sorry), not to mention a landscape echoing the World Trade Center, the sons of bitches . . .

"From the United Nations headquarters on the East River and the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River, to the Metropolitan Museum in the eighties and the Flatiron Building in the twenties, structures would remind one of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building following the Oklahoma City Bombing," another black ops by our government friends, with a bomb placed on the east, a bomb in the center (which went off and rocked the building down) and a bomb placed on the west side of the building -- the east/west bombs for early and second responders, which were taken away and decommissioned. You don’t think it was that dumb-ass ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb in the Ryder truck that did anything but break the glass windows, do you? A team of men were working in the garage the week before the explosion, rewiring things, men in uniforms that read Government Agency Operations.

The monsters would like to strike again, folks, so take this very, very seriously. And take this WND article and substitute George Bush for Osama bin Laden and CIA for al-Qaida, who have planned to use nuclear weapons in a terrorist attack on the US. The plan is dubbed "American Hiroshima." In fact, as first reported in Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, captured al Qaeda (CIA) operatives and documents suggest the weapons have already been smuggled in the country.

For continuing and complete coverage of "American Hiroshima" plans, subscribe to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bullet, the premium, online, intelligence newsletter published (not) by the founder of WND.

Citizens of Charleston and America, get your butts out there from Jan. 31 to Feb. 3, to protest, intercept, act up, criticize, analyze, neutralize that Fort Monroe, Virginia, drill. Your lives and the lives of thousands, hundreds of thousands of others depend upon it. Do it now. And thank the tip slipped to me about this draconian drill. Wherever you are, you know who you are and I salute you.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, resident of New York who does not ever want to see 911 or anything like it happen again. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.

Above Top Secret - Unethical Google Bombers

2006-01-24T12:16:00.000-07:00

For an update on the status of Above Top Secret as a covert COINTELPRO operation please see the following stories on Laura Knight-Jadczyk's Blog...

Abovetopsecret: Ethics and Google Bombs

The Magus and The Swamps of Eugnosia

The Cult of the Plausible Lie

The Spider and The Fly: SkepticOverlord and COINTELPRO

More Inside Scoops on Abovetopsecret.com!

Sharon's stroke - not an accident???

2006-01-10T11:03:00.000-07:00

It's been interesting to watch the flurry of contradictory headlines surrounding the imminent demise of right-wing hardline Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The mainsteam media is awash in sentimental propaganda over this psychopathic leader, whose bloodsoaked past is conveniently forgotten as he faces his final hour. Hardly a mention though of his ongoing and systematic murder of Palestinian civilians, women and children that are hallmarks of his reign of terror.

Well, a new editorial at the Signs of the Times puts it all into perspective.

The Demise of Sharon - Engineering Armageddon

SOTT Editorial
09/01/2006

Sharon was recognised as a hawk by all. He was secretly proud of his reputation as a cold-blooded murderer of Palestinian civilians, as were many of his colleagues. In recent months however, Sharon was criticised by the hard right, lead by Netanyahu, for pushing through with the demolition of Israeli settlements in the Gaza strip. These hard right-wingers accused Sharon of offering a sop to "Palestinian terrorists". For his part, Sharon claimed that the Gaza withdrawal was necessary to secure Israel's security and to move the peace process forward.

Both claims were, of course, entirely untrue.

The Gaza withdrawal, far from being a concession, or a gesture of peace and goodwill, to the Palestinians, was a carefully planned maneuver by Sharon to try to persuade international public opinion that Israel was the real peacemaker in the Middle East conflict, despite all of the concealed evidence to the contrary.

The reality of the Gaza withdrawal is that the Gaza settlements were illegal from the beginning and their removal was simply a long overdue adherence to international law and the Geneva convention. The 8,000 settlers that were removed were compensated to the tune of $200,000 per family, despite the endless news footage of tearful settlers and 'poor Israeli soldiers' who could hardly bear to do their duty.

Anywhere else in the world, the return of stolen property to its rightful owners does not result in the thief being lauded as a righteous person, particularly when there is a long list of offences yet to be answered. Yet this was the result of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

In addition, the world was told that, following the Israeli withdrawal, the beleaguered Gazans would now enjoy freedom of movement, self-government and a slice of land to call their own. Not surprisingly, nothing has really changed in Gaza. Coincidence? Gaza's Palestinian inhabitants (women and children included) continue to suffer regular Israeli air raids, military incursions, lock downs and periodic assassination.

Sharon hated the Palestinians, and had the opportunity presented itself, he would not have hesitated to ethnically cleanse or expel the Palestinians from all of the land that Israel claims as its divine right. Yet Sharon was foolish enough to believe himself as somewhat of a realist and held to the idea that, at some point, Israel was going to have to live alongside the Palestinians. He reasoned that, at most, he could probably stomach a future with a Palestinian slave state next door to "greater Israel".

Sharon, however, was not on the same page as the real Middle East policy planners, who see no need to 'face reality' since they believe themselves to be its creators. The disturbing conclusion then is that, despite his years of dedicated service in establishing the nation of Israel on the blood of innocent Middle Eastern Arabs, Sharon's thirst for blood-letting was not 'pure' enough to make him eligible to direct the final phase in the Middle East "peace process".

Realising that a mutiny was in the offing and that he could not rely on the support of a majority of the Likud party, Sharon resigned as its head and formed the 'moderate' (in terms of Israeli politics where all significant parties are right wing) Kadima Party. Parliament was dissolved and new elections are scheduled for March 2006.

Benjamin Netanyahu, finance minister under Sharon, has since taken over the Likud leadership.

We are told that Sharon fell ill on Wednesday January 4th while resting at his ranch in the Negev. He was scheduled for a medical procedure on Thursday to close a small hole in his heart that was identified after his minor heart attack on December 18th. There are suggestions that Sharon's condition may have been complicated (worsened) by blood thinners he was given after his mild stroke on December 18th. Several neurologists are perplexed at the treatment that Sharon was given. The NY Times reported:

The decision to treat the hole in Mr. Sharon's heart - with all the attendant risks of blood thinners - surprised many neurologists, because recent studies have concluded that such holes are not likely to cause strokes in the elderly. "We've been scratching our heads about the care, since we would not recommend closure of the hole" Dr. Fink said, noting that, at 77, Mr. Sharon presumably had many other risks for stroke.

After "falling ill" on 6th Jan, doctors rushed Sharon to Jerusalem from his home in the Negev desert. He suffered the stroke during the hour-long drive. We will never know what really occurred during that hour-long drive, or why Sharon was treated in a way that increased his chances of suffering a massive brain haemorrhage. We do, however, know the result.

We should also make mention of the obvious attempt at emotional manipulation of the Israeli population through the release of conflicting reports about Sharon's condition. On the 6th Jan, the Guardian reported that Israeli doctors had claimed that Sharon's chances of survival were "slim". One day later, Reuters reported that doctors had claimed that he had a "very high" chance of survival. Just what is being achieved by this, other than to confuse the public about the real state of Sharon's health and the real cause of his condition, is anyone's guess.

Recent poll results suggested that Sharon would have defeated Netanyahu in the upcoming elections. With Sharon's 'demise' however, it seems inevitable that Netanyahu will now be Israel's next Prime Minister. 'Bibi' has made it clear that, at his earliest convenience, he will attack Iran, and in doing so, nonchalantly ignite the fuse that will blow the Middle East back to the stone age, and bring to the wider world the realisation of America's Israel-inspired never-ending war on terror, which, by then, will be recognisable for what it always was - a war of terror on the human race.

In this context, and in the context of the reality of political power plays and the apparent desire by the power elite to bring the world to the brink of destruction and beyond, it seems reasonable then to suggest that Sharon, like his nemesis Arafat, was the victim of a stealth assassination.

Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to play his appointed role of bogeyman, following up his call for Israel to be wiped off the map with an expression of his fervent wish that Sharon's condition prove fatal. Ahmadinejad's comment stands in stark contrast to the concern shown by the Palestinian leadership over Sharon's exit from the stage of Israeli-Palestinian politics.

PA Chairman Abbas knows only too well that, as cruel and ruthless as Sharon was, Netanyahu is a much worse prospect for the Palestinian people. Is it the case then that the Iranian PM is unaware that, with Sharon's departure, the destruction of his country and countless Iranian civilians has drawn one step closer? Or is it simply the case that Ahmadinejad is part of the setup?

Of course, the picture would not be complete without a word from the third member of the trio of organised religions - the fundie Christian corner - they that eagerly await the trumpet blast that will herald the beginning of Armageddon (or rather the fabled "rapture" that their bible tells them must precede it).

"Christian evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson linked Sharon's stroke to God's "enmity against those who 'divide my land,'" and added on his television program, "I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course."

We are not sure who should receive the award for the "MOST THRILLED" by Sharon's exit, but Ahmadinejad and Robertson appear as strange bedfellows indeed; but only until we realise that all three major organised religions were established with one ultimate goal in mind – to manipulate the human race to walk blindly down the road to its own destruction.

And from that perspective, things seem to be progressing quite nicely here on planet earth.

Good Night Moon

2006-01-08T16:36:00.000-07:00

Above Top Secret: Lies and Propaganda equals damage control

2006-01-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

What a week it has been!

As this blog deals primarily with propaganda produced by the mainstream media, once and a while it is important to deal with a subtler form a propaganda emanating from some so-called alternative news sites.

While most of these sites seem sincere in bringing to light many stories that are either ignored or covered up by the NYT and their ilk, there are a few that seem to be run by the very Powers-That-Be themselves, in order to minimize the damage done by the more genuine alt-news sites, as well as create division and noise with this small community.

Nowhere is this technique more apparent than in the 9/11 truth movement, where the efforts of sincere hard-working researchers like the Signs of the Times to get at the bottom of the greatest coup in recent history, are scuttled by COINTELPRO agents and government spooks at every turn.

After the resounding success of the SOTT's Pentagon Strike Video, whose debut last year has now been seen by over 600 million people around the globe, various agents of the PTB kicked into overdrive to debunk, minimalize, and distort the very important message contained within.

That being the truth that NO BOEING 757 CRASHED INTO THE PENTAGON.

One of the more cleverly outlandish pieces of damage control to appear in recent weeks is an dubious article by a poster named CatHerder at the Above Top Secret website and forum.

Whether a conscious "agent" of the Consortium, or niave and deluded "useful idiot" whose wishful thinking won't let him/her accept the possibility that factions within the United States government would willfully murder 3,00 of it's own citizens to further it's hegemonic agenda, the truth couldn't be more plainly obvious...

Above Top Secret is a full-fledged highly-funded government COINTELPRO ooperation.

The interested reader will first want to check out the very well-researched and objective rebuttal of CatHerder's article by Joe Quinn (one of the editor's at Signs of the Times) entitled; Evidence That a Frozen Fish Didn't Impact the Pentagon on 9/11 and Neither Did a Boeing 757.

Which sent the operatives over at Above Top Secret into full damage control as they engaged with Laura Knight Jadczyk, the owner of the Signs Alternative News Site, in a series of email exchanges which is chronicled here...

How to Spot COINTELPRO Agents

Then there is an excellent follow-up with up-to-the-minute new additions in her latest blog post...

COINTELPRO Updates: Above Top Secret Forum

All those interested in shining the light of truth across the dark side of the internet, please feel free to post these links and articles far and wide, on your own blogs or newsgroup discussion forums.

Cheers,

Relic

Wintertime in Hades

2006-01-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

Autumn part deux

2005-10-17T18:56:00.000-06:00

Is Bush Out of Control?

The greatest propaganda campaign and conspiracy theory this century, surely has to be the official version of 9/11, that postulates that a dozen or so cave dwelling Afghani's armed with nothing but box-cutters, highjacked four planes, infiltrating the strongest defense system on the planet.

The following story gives a major clue as to the REAL PREPETRATORS of the September 11th attacks...

THE ISRAELI ART STUDENTS AND MOVERS STORY

By Wayne Madsen

The presence in the United States of a number of young Israelis, most of whom had specialized military and intelligence backgrounds, in the months prior to 911 is a subject that has received inadequate attention from the major U.S. media and government investigators. [...]

Al-Qaeda, a Secret Service Operation?

Leave it to an average mother, whose son died in an unnecessary war, motivated by grief and a desire to get answers, to tell the whole truth about George W. Bush.

CINDY UNLEASHED: 'THE BIGGEST TERRORIST IN THE WORLD IS GEORGE W. BUSH'

Karl Rove's War Against Cindy Sheehan

Hypocrites and Liars By Cindy Sheehan, 08/20/05

U.S. Says Terrorists May Pose As Vagrants

Why Casey Sheehan was killed

On the Heels Of Death Threats Coming Out Of Washington, WTC Janitor Has Jersey City Apartment Burglarized

Anti-War Protesters Hateful and Ignorant

Most scientific papers are probably wrong

Synopsis for August

2005-10-11T21:13:00.000-06:00

In keeping with my last post. Here is another installment of important stories dealing with mainstream media propaganda that have polluted the airwaves in August.

Relic

Are We Losing or Winning The War On Terror?

A Summer of Double Super Secrecy: Fingerprints of Power
Comments here.

Pentagon to Increase Domestic Surveillance for Counterterrorism

Bush Insider Claim WTC Collapse Bogus Gets 'Huge Response' And Read By Millions Worldwide

The Neo-Shill Media
When Armageddon Gets No Press

The birth of 'mere terror'
Hiroshima wasn't uniquely wicked. It was part of a policy for the mass killing of civilians

Secret terror courts considered
Comment: At what point do we seriously begin to consider the clear parallels between what is currently happening in the UK and the US and events in Germany leading up to WWII? Using the excuse of a trumped up threat from dangerous groups that were, the NAzis claimed, seeking to sow discord in Germany society, the Nazis slowly imposed totalitarian rule on the German people. Today, Bush and Blair are using the equally bogus claim that "Islamic extremists" want to destroy Western civilisation and freedom to justify the imposition of a third Reich-sytle regimes in Britain and America, where any and all previously-held social freedoms must give way to the need to protect the people from those that our leaders claim want to take away those freedoms. Coincidentally, this "protection" involves the removal of those same social freedoms by our leaders who claim their goal is to protect them. It's a mind-job for sure, and Bush and Blair are betting on their subjects' inability to figure it out.

So tell us; how bad does it have to get before we all begin to stand up and point out the big, stinking dead elephant in the room? Remember, as it was in the case of Nazi Germany, the takeover of a previously Democratic country by a fascist cabal from within occurs in the absence of general awareness that anything untoward is happening. Precious few German citizens were able to admit to themselves the truth that was staring them in the face, being blinded by the government lies and propaganda that bombarded them daily. Those that did realise were surely only able to do so as a result of careful consideration of the facts, while at the same time dismissing any idealistic notions about what their government SHOULD be or what it would or would not do.

Terrorists Turn to the Web as Base of Operations
Comment: The web has become the only widely accessible source for real news in recent years. With the controlled media in those nations whose leaders support the war on terror - especially the major US news outlets - the masses read whatever their leaders want them to read. The internet is still relatively free and open, and with a little digging and fact-checking, one can learn volumes about the lies spread by our leaders.

Recently, we have seen a lot of talk about "al-Qaeda on the web". As we remarked previously, how many of us have actually seen these alleged terrorist web sites? The answer is most likely none of us, because we would all be too afraid to be associated with the "terrorists" who are detained indefinitely and rendered to countries like Egypt to be tortured.

Contrast these alleged sites with alternative news sites like Signs of the Times, where the reader is provided with information and news articles that can open the door into further research and verification. The reader has the possibility to discover the truth about Bush and Blair's current crusade, or at the very least to verify that we aren't just making things up. The same cannot be said for the supposed terrorist web presence that has received so much press in recent weeks. You really have to hand it to the powers that be: not only are people afraid of the idea of evil terrorists using the internet to plan attacks, but they are afraid of even attempting to verify that such terrorists exist or that they are in fact on the internet!

It seems that the whole point is to associate the internet and groups who communicate via the internet with terrorism in an effort to get an iron grip on the remaining bits and pieces of the media that remain relatively free. Censorship of the web will be accepted with open arms if it is couched in terms of "fighting the evil terrorists". Just as the Bush Reich's recent moves on the Patriot Act and the use of US troops inside the "homeland" met with little resistance despite Bush's rock-bottom ranking in the polls. We do not expect much of an uproar when the internet is effectively locked down.

If the Bush gang follows its standard operating procedure, the entire internet will not be shut down; rather, heavy censorship will be employed to maintain the illusion of the "free internet". Why else would the US want to retain such tight control of the internet's DNS servers?

US Military Plans For (Domestic) Terrorism

Authorities Getting Ready To Throw Anti-War Protestors From Bush Ranch For Trespassing

The gates of hell
Comment: Chaos. Such was the real aim of the invasion of Iraq, and it is an unqualified success. Chaos just goes to confirm the dominant view of the Arabs in the media: "they're beasts who don't appreciate democracy". We wonder what the USA would look like if an invading army had taken control.

There is an argument to be made that an invader has indeed taken control of the US: the neocons, many of whom are citizens of both the US and Israel. Why does the US so actively pursue an agenda that was so clearly written in Tel Aviv? The "Peak Oil" meme and its sister meme, "We're in Iraq for the oil", give a cover to the Israeli agenda; with Americans and their love of gas-guzzlers, the idea that "we are there for the oil" or that oil is running out, seems to make sense. Yes, there is a lot of waste. The entire US economy is structured around the car. To go anywhere if you live in towns without public transit is to be dependent upon a car. And the killing of public transit and the use of public transit as a class marker (rich people don't ride the bus) means that everyone who wants to "be" someone needs a car. Just look at how important cars are for people's sense of identity.

So it appears logical that we are running out of oil, it appears logical that "we are in Iraq for the oil", but that doesn't make it true; it only makes it the perfect alibi.

Man Arrested at Okla. Airport With Device

FBI Warns Police of Possible Terror Attack

Key General fired as nuke terror drill set for Aug 17

BUSH PROTESTING MOM CALLS FOR 'ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE'; VOWS NOT TO PAY TAXES
Comment: The right-wing talking points, slander mill is burning up important quantities of energy resources as these fossils fuel the hate machine with lies and foul shots at Cindy Sheehan, as the next few articles well document. The idea that someone would begin to question the wisdom of the elected appointed-by-God commander-in-chief is too much for the Bush hit gang.

Drudge, one of the early neocon Internet storm troopers, recounts Sheehan's statement on Iraq and Palestine as if they were a bad thing! Oh, yeah. For the loonies in charge of the US, such statements are subversive aid to the enemy.

Indeed, if Israel didn't exist and if the US was out of Iraq, there would be no more terrorism, but that only underlines that most of it, including the "suicide bombs" they tell us are delivered by Islamic fundamentalists, are the work of the US and Israel, the world champions and record breakers in false flag operations.

Soon, it'll be a crime to make such statements. People will be hauled away for giving succour to the enemy. The pundits, such as the vile-mouthed Michelle Malkin, have been laying the groundwork for such arrests by upping the rhetoric over the last few years. They are paid for this and are promoted via propaganda factories like Fox News. We recently received a copy of OutFoxed from a reader. We weren't able to stomach the entire film at one sitting such was the depth of the cesspool. Using the tricks of music videos to spin the news, Fox has found a powerful way of programming the population on a vast scale. And it is successful.

US warns of new attacks on London

Playing Ketchup

2005-09-18T20:49:00.000-06:00

It's been over 2 months since my last blog post, and try as might to keep up with the numerous stories concerning our beleaguered planet that cross my inbox each day, certain personal issues have taken precedence over my internet time.

So, seeing that I may not be as consistent on this forum as I'd like, I thought it would be a good idea to do a monthly compilation of relevant news stories on how the mainstream media uses propaganda to further the designs of their totalitarian masters in enslaving humankind.

So, without further ado, starting with the month of July, here are a few of what I consider to be some of the more important stories compiled mostly from my favourite alternative news service; the Signs of the Times.

U.S. Terror Attack - 'Ninety Days at Most'

How the Government Staged the London Bombings in Ten Easy Steps

Canadian teen faces sentencing in U.S. on bomb charges; family fears prison

FLIGHT 93 SHOT DOWN

More Explosions in London: Psy-ops in Progress

LaRouche Warns:
Cheney's `Guns of August' Threaten the World

London Bombings... an inside job?

2005-07-17T16:08:00.000-06:00

Trying to catch up on my blogging which has been seriously neglected in the last month or so, several recent events have caught the world's attention and an alternative veiwpoint deserves mention.

London has now suffered another terrorist attack that the media immediately blamed on Al-Qaeda. Many different bloggers have taken up the task to show numerous inconsistencies with the official government version of events, and point to a great deal of evidence that suggests the London bombings were likely orchestrated and carried out by high level government inteligence agencies; namely MI-6, Mossad and/or the CIA, and that the five Muslim "suicide bombers" were patsies being set up to take the fall.

For one of the best commentaries and in-depth analyses of the real perpetrators behind the 7/7 bombings see last weeks Signs of the Times pages, starting on July 7,2005 and culminating with a downloadable podcast discussion with the editors of that informative page.

Relic

Here we go again....

SOTT

Yesterday we spoke of the slow, drip, drip, drip of the Chinese water torture. It was the calm before the storm.

The "inevitable" has finally happened, the attack that has been expected against London has occurred. Were you surprised?

After all they have been setting us up for this since September 11, 2001, with the PR machine going into overdrive since Blair jumped into Bush's lap the summer prior to the invasion of Iraq. And who are they going to pin it on? Our favourite CIA asset, Osama bin Laden...

Show your Independence on the 4th; Burn a Flag

2005-07-17T15:52:00.000-06:00

By Mike Whitney
July 03, 2005

"This 4th of July, I ask you to find a way to thank the men and women defending our freedom, by flying the flag"
- George W. Bush, Fort Bragg address 6-28-05

"If the flag needs protection at all, it needs protection from members of Congress who value the symbol more than the freedoms that the flag represents."
- Jerrold Nadler, (D-New York)

"Some folks are born made to wave the flag, ooh, they're red, white and blue. And when the band plays "Hail To The Chief", oh, they point the cannon at you, Lord"
- John Fogerty, "Fortunate Son"

"ICH" - - It's odd that Congress would pass a bill banning flag burning on the same week that reports confirmed the US military used napalm in Iraq. Apparently, it's alright to incinerate Iraqis, but not okay to burn a 5'x7' piece of tri-colored cloth.

For the Republican faithful, the action was just another cynical demonstration of feigned patriotism meant to divert attention from an increasingly bloody war. Only a handful of these uber-nationalists ever served a day in uniform so they try to limit their loyalty to meaningless displays of political buffoonery. No one believes for a minute that any one of these stuffed-shirts would ever venture into an angry crowd to save Old Glory from the torch. They'd rather pontificate from the safety of the House, where their high-flown rhetoric can be mistaken for courage.

If the Congressman were sincere in their regard for the Bill of Rights they'd honor the basic tenets of the 1st amendment; (that) "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech;" a clear defense of unpopular forms of expression, like flag burning. Instead, they choose to ignore the principle behind the icon and flaunt their ignorance like a badge of honor.

The Supreme Court got it right in a 1989 ruling that settled the issue of flag burning: "If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable. Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered, and worth revering."

The Court decided that flag burning was "symbolic speech" and was protected under the 1st amendment. The act, however offensive, belongs in the same category as "virulent ethnic and religious epithets, vulgar repudiations of the draft, and scurrilous caricatures".

Unfortunately, the Congress is so subsumed in the prevailing culture of chauvinism and religious zealotry that our founding principles have been tossed on the slag heap and replaced with a hard-right ideology and empty proclamations of devotion. As the polls indicate, Congress has devolved into little more than a staging ground for the regular emission hot gas from windy politicos.

The flag burning issue is mainly a way for puerile congressman to entertain themselves while the matters of state are conducted by an iron-fisted White House. Never the less, freedom of expression is central to our constitutionally protected civil liberties and should be taken seriously. And, besides, maybe it takes a smoldering flag or two to wake up a somnolent nation.

"The flag", Einstein wrote, "is proof that man is still a herd animal". We gather around these tribal symbols to identify ourselves with the gaggle of humanity, excluding "the other" as a vital threat to our survival. Entire industries (Public relations) evolve in order to harness this fear of external threats and exploit it for their own purposes. The Bush Administration has been particularly astute at marshalling the dormant energy of terror and putting it to use in carrying out its radical agenda. As America's center has shifted, so too its symbols have been transformed by the policies. Now, an American flag on the lapel of a sports-coat immediately pigeon-hole's one as a hard-right ideologue or a "Ditto-head". Similarly, an American flag bumper sticker identifies one as a Bush-supporter as surely as a "yellow ribbon" car-magnet. In other words, the flag has lost its original meaning and no longer includes the values of all the people. It is entirely the province of Christian fundamentalists, neocons, super-nationalists, and war-mongers.

Let's face it; the flag is Bush and Bush is the flag.

Democrats vehemently refute this, but it is true nonetheless. The principles that may have imbued the flag with some real meaning have long since disappeared. Five years of Bush have transformed a perfectly decent bit of weaving into a menacing symbol of brute force and intolerance. The question isn't whether someone has the right to burn the flag but, rather, who really cares if they do?

No reasonably decent individual would ever defend a banner that waves over torture-camps like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. So, why should we take the provincial attitude that the flag is still sacrosanct?

It's not. It has morphed into the mottled image of its corporate owners; a ruddy, savage emblem of marching armies, windowless jail cells, and sneering, well-groomed men in blue suits.

The flag has become a stage-prop for executive speechifying; a tawdry backdrop for Bush's war-oratory. It's become companion for fatuous politicians who think that valor can rub off through proximity or osmosis. It's morphed into a blood-splattered pennant waved in front of high-school boys; drawing them to the killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan; a bloody shroud that cloaks the national idol of aggressive war. It's become a beacon of dwindling freedom; hanging limply behind the concertina-wire and cement abutments at the White House fortress.

This isn't your flag anymore, or mine. Perhaps, we should just burn it and preserve the memory.

The stars-and-stripes no longer fly over "purple mountains majesty or fruited plains", but over the warlord dominated drug-colony in Afghanistan and the battered Green-Zone ramparts in occupied Iraq.

The flag has fallen from its once lofty perch and merged with the sludge of corporate profiteering, calculated sadism and pre-emptive war. No dousing of gasoline could ever compare to the disgrace brought on by Bush's laser-guided munitions, messianic proselytizing, and orgy of carnage.

In such times, flag burning becomes the ultimate form of non-violent dissent; a commanding symbol of individual defiance and protest. It registers the absolute contempt of the citizen for the policies of the state and provides a venue for a lawful and appropriate demonstration of personal outrage.

It is senseless to carry on about personal liberty if the citizen is not free to take an unpopular point of view and rail against the government. Free speech needs to be protected particularly if it IS "offensive". Flag burning is the benchmark for measuring the extent of our personal freedom. We shouldn't deny ourselves that right for the sake of political correctness.

Any attempt by the Congress to prevent this form of expression will only generate greater distain for the authority of the state. Let Congress stick to its own business and leave the 1st amendment alone.

Why not enjoy the "last throes" of the Republic? Express yourself while you can; defend your personal liberty; burn a flag on Independence Day.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

Copyright: Mike Whitney. All rights reserved. You may republish under the following conditions: An active link to the original publication must be provided. You must not alter, edit or remove any text within the article, including this copyright notice.

Sacrificing Our Kids for Their War

2005-07-17T15:27:00.000-06:00

SOTT Commentary

Foreign wars need cannon fodder, the youth of a country to go out and give and take the bullets and bombs in the name of policy established by leaders who are safe at home. In the case of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, an illegal war carried out under false pretences against an "enemy" that was no threat to the invaders, the leaders, many of whom were of draftable age during the war in Vietnam, managed to avoid the military altogether or active service in that war. They are referred to as the Chickenhawks: people who talk a belligerent game but who are unwilling to put their own lives on the line for their beliefs. Let the sons and daughters of the less fortunate die and be maimed.

The current US Commander-in-Chief went AWOL from his cushy post as a pilot with the Texas National Guard when he avoided the medical exam that would have shown traces of his cocaine habit in his blood. Now he struts his stuff in custom-made military garb to quicken the drug-primed hearts of military studs like Jeff Gannon.

We are talking hypocrisy and corruption on a massive scale. It is so unbelievable for most people that when you bring it up, they look at you as if you were putting money on the Vikings winning the Superbowl.

But wars need soldiers to give their lives or their arms and legs, eyes or minds. With 140,000 troops in Iraq, thousands more in Afghanistan, and plans to overthrow Iran and Syria, army recruiters have quotas to fill. In spite of the filtered coverage of the occupation of Iraq shown to Americans, enlistment is down. For four months in a row, the quotas have not been met.

What's an empire to do?

The first is to elect war-mongerers who can set the right example:

Chickenhawk Headquarters

The New Hampshire Gazette

Name: George W. Bush (R-TX)
Born: 1946
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: You know when a guy walks away from a National Guard obligation during wartime and gets away with it, he must come from "a good family." Not that his daddy had anything to do with his getting a Guard slot in the first place - oh, no ...

Name: Richard "Dick" Cheney (R-WY)
Born: 1942
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Says he had "other priorities." You bet he had other priorities. Imagine how early in life you must begin scheming to get away with what this guy has. He was too busy thinking about Halliburton to go fight Charlie.

Name: I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby
Born: 1950±
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby is Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff. He’s had a string of no-doubt well-paying government jobs in State and Defense. He’s also practiced law. In fact, he was Marc Rich’s lawyer for years. Yes — the Marc Rich whose pardon from President Clinton was excoriated by so many high and mighty Republicans. Maybe if Scooter had been a better lawyer, his client wouldn’t have needed that pardon. Speaking of legal questions, “Scooter” is alleged by some to have traded energy stocks while helping his buddy Dick Cheney cook up a new energy policy in secret. He’s also suspected of having inserted the bogus “Niger yellowcake” reference into the President’s State of the Union address. As if all that weren’t enough, he’s also a top suspect in the outing of CIA operative Valeria Plame. Clearly “Scooter” is a ballsy kind of guy, so it’s a complete mystery to us why, when he graduated from Phillips Andover in 1968, he didn’t enlist in the Marines or go Airborne instead of going to Yale.

Name: Karl Rove
Born: 1950
Employer: Baal
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: This little cherub was born on Christmas Day, 1950. Karl “Bush’s Brain” Rove ran George W.’s campaign, right down to the tiny detail of deciding Bush was going to run. The hardest part was convincing a horde of Republican skeptics that it could be done.

He is said to have said of his boss, he’s "the kind of candidate and officeholder political hacks like me wait a lifetime to be associated with."

Now Karl’s Senior White House advisor. If he really is “Bush’s Brain,” and if the fondest wishes of former US Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV come true, one fine day Karl will be “frogmarched out of the White House in mandcuffs.”

Will history record that event as “Bush’s Lobotomy?”

Name: Donald "The Don" Rumsfeld
Born: 1932
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Korea
Notes: When the shooting started in Korea Rummy here was either 18, or about to turn 18. Not to worry for him, though — he spent the war at Princeton, wearing a ROTC uniform. Once the war was over he flew jets for the Navy for a few years. Defenders of Rumsfeld will say he’s no chickenhawk — he served, and it’s not his fault the war ended before he got his commission. To which others answer, “plenty of farmers and mechanics and kids just out of high school served. Anyone as full of whatever that stuffing in him is, could have tried out for a battlefield commission.”

Name: Paul Wolfowitz
Born: 1943
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Deputy Secretary for Defense - yet another Bush administration man in the Pentagon who has no idea what it's like to wear a uniform. He got a BA at Cornell in 1965. Maybe if we'd had a guy as bright as he thinks he is in Vietnam, it would have turned out differently.

Child Abuse

2005-07-17T15:25:00.000-06:00

Chris Floyd – Moscow Times June 24, 2005

When the public liars sat down together – in Crawford, in the Pentagon, in the Oval Office, at 10 Downing Street – and very deliberately, very guilefully and very knowingly devised their act of mass murder in Iraq, it is unlikely they gave any thought to the most vulnerable targets of their war crime: the children. So in considering this aspect of the bloodbath, we should give the liars the benefit of the doubt. Let's not make them more monstrous than they are. Let's stick to the facts.

Let us say -- as the incontrovertible facts compel us to say -- that they were willing to kill tens of thousands of innocent people in an action they knew to be illegal, reckless, ill-planned and unsupported by evidence; that they knew their public statements about the plans for war were lies; that they started the war with a vicious bombing campaign months before obtaining even a fig leaf of approval from their respective legislatures, a clear and treasonous violation of their own national laws; that long before their blitzkrieg rolled across the border, they were already divvying up the loot of conquest: the oil rights, the "privatizations," the crony contracts.

In short, let us say that, yes, they are killers, liars, thieves and incompetent fools. But let's not imagine that as they settled their safe and cosseted backsides into the fine upholstery of their elegantly appointed war rooms, they gleefully regaled each other with visions of the exquisite tortures they would soon inflict upon the children of Iraq.

Let's not imagine George W. Bush nudging Tony Blair in the ribs as they masticated their pork together, saying, "Cholera, eh? Typhoid fever. Malnutrition! By God, we can grind these Iraqi children lower than the slum rats of Haiti!" Let's not picture Dick Cheney chiding Donald Rumsfeld over the steak tartare: "Damn it, Don, if there's a single pregnant Iraqi woman left without hepatitis before we're through, heads are going to roll! I want the wombs of those Arab cows swimming in lethal viruses. Lethal, do you hear me?"

Of course it wasn't like that. Such suppositions do these honored national leaders a grave injustice. No doubt their discourse was elevated, focused on lofty matters of state and strategy, on the practicalities of logistics and presentation. If anyone there spoke of the "human factor" -- the actual reality of bleeding flesh, of death, wounds, disease and rot -- it would only have been as part of the political calculations: What level of casualties would the American people accept, how do we keep the dead and maimed out of the public eye? It was all about numbers, processes, abstractions. Nothing to disturb the moral imagination, nothing to put them off the hearty meals and tasty snacks discreetly laid before them by the servants.

So when leading international agencies -- including the World Bank, now headed by one of the chief liars, Paul Wolfowitz -- find that Iraq's children are dwindling and dying twice as fast under the coalition's benevolent care than under the despotism of Saddam Hussein, we should not conclude that this was the liars' conscious intention. Yes, it's true that Iraq's child malnutrition rate is now worse than the broken nations of Uganda or Haiti, as the Japan Times reports. Yes, cholera and typhoid are cutting swaths through the population, with especial virulence in the "stable" areas of the Shiite south. Yes, epidemics of hepatitis are killing pregnant women. Yes, antibiotics are scarce, leaving children, the old and the weak to die of common infections -- that is, when they can get treated at all in a health system ravaged by the liars' war and its atrocious aftermath. (Such as the destruction of Fallujah, for example, when coalition forces deliberately destroyed the city's health clinics and imprisoned doctors to prevent news of civilian casualties from leaking to the press, as the Pentagon's own "information specialists" told The New York Times.)

And yes, it's true that Iraq -- once a modern and prosperous nation -- has suffered "one of the most dramatic declines in human welfare in recent history" during the occupation, as the UN says. But again, this was not part of the liars' deliberate design. The torment of children was outside the parameters of their "metrics of success." It was not a factor one way or the other.

In fact, let's go even further and declare forthrightly that if the liars could have established a client regime and a permanent military presence in Iraq without harming the hair of a single child, they would have done so. If they could have transferred more than $300 billion from the public treasury to the pockets of their family members and business partners without having to concoct a brutal and baseless war of aggression, they would have done so. If they could have legitimized their radical, rapacious domestic agenda without engineering the slaughter of innocent people in order to assume the politically expedient role of "wartime leaders," they would have done so.

But they couldn't. So like all murderers, they did whatever they had to do to get what they wanted, regardless of the consequences for others. Like all terrorists, they rationalized their atrocities with noble rhetoric, citing the unassailable righteousness of their cause as justification for the unspeakable evil they were unleashing. And like all abusers of innocent children, they covered up their baser motives with self-serving lies.

THE MOTHER OF ALL HOAXES? - World Trade Tower 'Controlled Demolition'?

2005-06-20T16:47:00.000-06:00

MER Editorial

MIDDLEEAST.ORG - Washington - 15 June: MER has never before published this story, this 'conspiracy theory' if you will. Though under much pressure over the years to do so we always held back and never published anything about this 'possibility'...until today that is. But now the fact that a ranking former Bush Administration official, in fact the man who was the top government economist in the Labor Department on 11 September 2001, has now gone public saying 9/11 may have been a historic hoax and the World Trade Towers were 'most likely' destroyed by a 'controlled demolition', causes us to reconsider. This is far too important to simply dismiss at this point. At the least we conclude this story now deserves far more attention that it has gotten in recent days with nearly the entire corporate media focused on Michael Jackson and various frivolities while this paragraph -- published this week on the UPI wire from Washington in fact -- has hardly had any attention:

A former Bush team member during his first administration is now voicing serious doubts about the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush's first term Morgan Reynolds comments that the official story about the collapse of the WTC is "bogus" and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7. Reynolds, who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and is now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University said, "If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling." Reynolds commented from his Texas A&M office, "It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings."

MER CALLS FOR UNPRECEDENTED
INTERNATIONAL MEDIA INVESTIGATION

We think an unprecedented international press investigation is now called for to match this unprecedented historical situation -- one totally independent of all governments, intelligence agencies, and pressure groups; and one bringing together a coalition of major international media from various political and national dispositions. What happened is a totally modern-day sui generis event with the greatest of history-changing consequences. Taking place so soon after Ariel Sharon came to power in Israel, and the Bush/Cheney Administration put so many former Israeli-Jewish lobby 'Neocons' in key power positions throughout Washington was suspicious from the start. But in the past we thought these suspicions had more to do with what the U.S. and Israeli governments really knew in advance, and what steps they were fast preparing to take whenever they had the excuse to do so regardless of the actual facts.

But now we have to add to the larger picture that there is quite a long history of major political/military deceptions and hoaxes originating both with the Israelis and from Washington. To mention just a few that history has so far unraveled includes the sinkings of the Maine and the Lusitania, the Lavon Affair, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the deceptions behind the 1967, 1982 and Gulf Wars, the Iraq-Kuwait-US invasion, the 'Oslo Peace Process', and most recently the 'Stealth Assassination' of Yasser Arafat after the assassinations of the senior Hamas leadership. Add to this historical brew quite a few other very suspicious developments that have come to light including the jubilant Israelis caught after photographing the WTC's collapse, all the unexplained developments in Lebanon, the blatant lies and cons surrounding the Iraq invasion including Colin Powel's testimony before the Security Council, and looking ahead at the moment the considerable preparations to take down Iran one way or another. And so we conclude that such an unprecedented situation on top of such already proven lies and deceptions dateline Washington, London, and Israel, all call for an unprecedented coalition of credible major media from many countries to come together for a White Paper investigation of 9/11 focusing on the following specific issues:

1) What really happened on 9/11 and who knew what in advance?

2) Had the U.S. government prepared in advance to exploit such an event as 9/11, whether the full story is now known or not, in order to pursue geostrategic goals decided upon in advance regardless of the actual facts of the situation?

3) What is known about the behind-the-scenes contacts and coordination between the U.S. and Israeli governments, and the crucial role played by the leading American Jewish Neocons who held key power and intelligence positions in Washington at the time of 9/11?

Comment: (from Signs of the Times) - We extend a hand to the people at MER and say "Welcome aboard".

The left in the US has by and large refused to discuss the possibility that 9/11 was in inside job. They have tended to dismiss it out-of-hand as "conspiracy theory" -- and readers of this page will likely have a good idea of all the baggage that term carries with it. That is why we think this change of heart on the part of MER is significant.

A refusal to consider the possibility that Bush and his friends were behind the attacks of 9/11 and the deaths of nearly 3000 people has hampered the left and other progressive groups in fighting against the imposition of fascism on the American people. Without the understanding that the Bush Administration is capable of planning and carrying out an attack of that scale on its own people, one is seriously underestimating the opponent, permitting them to get away with murder. And we mean that literally. It has been particularly frustrating to see because groups like MER have done so much good work in cataloguing the litany of horrors brought upon people the world over by these same forces while denying that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and company would be capable of doing the same thing at home. What kind of a blind spot is that!

It raises another point: the appeal to and trust in authority. The triggering element in MER's decision to begin discussing 9/11 in these terms was the revelation that a former member of the Bush Administration has questions about the collapse of the three towers of the WTC, citing evidence that it seems more like a demolition than a collapse caused by the planes. Given no plane hit Building 7, that has always been an important hole in the official theory. So the evidence has been there for people who were willing to do the research and figure it out for themselves, who were not waiting for some authority figure to give the "conspiracy theory" his OK.

The 9/11 Truth movement has been bringing forward this evidence for years, presenting in great detail all the points where the data and the official story don't mesh. The evidence raised by Reynolds and so disturbing to MER has been discussed publicly for a long time. MER, unfortunately, appears to have changed its position because of the remarks of Mr. Reynolds, that is, because of who raised the questions, not based upon a reading of the evidence itself.

We do not think that this changes the importance of MER's decision. Perhaps they have had their doubts about the official story but were unwilling to discuss them in public because of a fear of being ostracised or dismissed as "conspiracy theorists", the death knell for "serious researchers".

We also applaud MER for seeing the important role of Israel in these events, a role that many 9/11 researchers refuse to admit. Of course, given its primary focus, MER is well-placed to know about the deceptions and false flag operations of Israeli intelligence.

Now that MER has decided there is enough evidence to begin to publicly raise these questions, we hope that other groups, such as ZNet and CounterPunch to name but two, will bring this same information to their readers, giving it the stamp of legitimacy that so many progressives in the US seem to need before confronting the biggest swindle and horror story of our time, before being able to open their eyes to reality and to see and think for themselves. To understand what is happening in Iraq today, one needs to understand 9/11. To understand how and why the last two presidential elections were rigged and stolen, one needs to understand 9/11. To understand that the situation in the US is far worse than the left has been willing to admit, one needs to understand 9/11. To understand how deeply the fascist beast has its talons sunk into the American political body, one needs to understand 9/11. To understand the true nature of the US/Israeli alliance, one needs to understand 9/11.

We hope, as well, that Mr. Reynold's remarks will be heard by the many Republicans who no longer recognise the GOP in its current incarnation, that they will find the courage to speak out against the ideologues who have taken over their party, and join in a movement to impeach Bush and those in his administration who are responsible for the war crimes committed in their name around the world and the murder of 3000 people at home. The full public hearing of the truth and the prosecution of the quilty for their crimes is the only true honour that can be paid to the victims.

Open Independent Media is the Future of Real Democratic Journalism

2005-06-15T19:35:00.000-06:00

Tuesday 14th June 2005 (04h56)

The following describe a potential scenario:

Using secrecy works to cover propaganda perfectly with the concept of protecting your news sources You can source a story perhaps from inside lets say the CIA and even control it from their and have players or agents from other corporations play their parts in the story and under the law you "can protect your sources" This is a wonderful form of white, grey and of black propaganda, depending on the level the agency would like to employ to insure success of the operation and the corporation agendas and politcial agendas that are behind this kind of government sponsered propaganda and Psy Ops work.

Warfare is based on secrecy. And any organization of warfare and thus politcial or social domination has at its core secrecy. So any use of secret organizations in the domain of the press is a potential to use the cloak of secrecy as a cover for covert operations requiring the influence of public opinion, because by using the freedom of the press you can publish information and drive it through the channels of news - and thus public trust - producing the needed influence to determine wars, elections, agendas of social change and a whole range of things that would be most useful to an oligarchy that would use such methods to remain in power and to continue the use of money to gain influence.

In this way consent can be manufactured and because the information is presented from a "known source" of news distribution that has been "branded in the public mind" it is the ideal vechicle to operate for propaganda purposes.

Only in a future where all events that relate to any social organization that is fully open in its knowledge management and distribution does it have a chance at acheiving actual people oriented government - like a global internet driven democracy. No secrets. Operates at light speed. And is fully open, multilanguage, and multicultural. Only in this way would I consider a "free press" actaully FREE. And without an actual free press all you have is a SHAM of a democracy.

How Philosophy Overcomes Propaganda

2005-06-14T08:56:00.000-06:00

Norman D. Livergood

"See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
George W. Bush

In this essay, we'll explore how the embodiment of the Perennial Tradition 1 called philosophy overcomes indoctrination, brainwashing, and conditioning. Every advanced teacher within the Perennial Tradition has provided insight into how false communication--propaganda, lies, deception, and mind-control-- can be defeated.

Of all the varied embodiments of the Perennial Tradition--the Hermetic Writings, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Jewish Wisdom Tradition, the Pythagorean System, Esoteric Christianity, Neo-Platonism, Sufism, European Gothic Cathedrals, the Cambridge Platonists, the 18th Century Enlightenment-- Plato's writings constitute the most potent, comprehensive, and detailed exposition of the Perennial Tradition still extant. It is through study of Plato's works that we will explore the domain of communication. [...]

Plato's writings help us to understand that the chasm between us and arcane reality is not entirely bridgeable by ordinary sensation. Naive realism assumes that we see, hear, feel, touch, or taste this reality and thereby know its true and complete essence. This view fails to take into cognizance the many "filters" between us and the enigmatic reality.

Part of what each of Plato's dialogues reveals is how widespread ignorance of reality actually is, how extensive and common the delusion is that we understand reality because we sense something we call "the external world" and act on it in ways which seem to prove our complete grasp of its essence. We fail to recognize the myriad distorting elements between us and reality, assuming that our naive grasp of the external world brings complete comprehension.

Plato's dialogues only make sense to persons who have committed themselves to the search for wisdom (philosophy), because they've recognized that there are vast continents of ignorance within their psyche which they need to illuminate. Only if they have an intense desire to understand the veiled aspects of reality will Plato's philosophy have any appeal for them. [...]

"This morning my good friend and confidant . . . alerted me to your document on Plato's philosophical struggle against tyranny. Like everyone else I am suffering from the insanity of the present system and the way you presented the theme of the struggle for truth helps me better understand the overall situation and my little place in the food chain."

"Thank you for your excellent article----it now explains the reason why Plato's Republic is quiety being pulled from library shelves. God forbid, we the masses, should be taught virture and goodness. That is not in keeping with the takeover of our Republic and the moral decay which is happening, every day, from this evil cabal, in the form of 'entertainment.'" [...]

At a time when millions of Americans fail to see the evil of the criminal cabal and its Bush II puppet junta, rediscovery of the insights of the Platonic philosophy--enabling us to overcome propaganda and brainwashing--is of crucial importance: our personal and social lives depend on it.

In an era of mass propaganda, deception, and murder--of American soldiers and Afghans and Iraqis--what might appear mere "philosophical" issues, such as truth and dialectic, can now be seen to be critical powers of discernment we must develop if we're to survive. [...]

We begin the dialectical process by relating these issues to present difficulties. We can legitimately call George W. Bush's statement in his State of the Union speech a LIE when he said: "There are weapons of mass destru ction in Iraq." There were no weapons of mass destruction--as determined by American weapons inspectors themselves. So Bush lied.

The issues can become clouded only if we allow the Bush junta propagandists to operate without challenge. We must set the terms of discourse, not allowing the Bush indoctrinators to define the issues or the concepts. The terms we're investigating possess commonly acknowledged meanings:

1. To lie: 5

* to express an innacurate or false statement

* to convey an untruth

* to make an untrue statement which may or may not be believed by the speaker

2. A lie:

* an untrue or innacurate statment that may or may not be believed true by the speaker

* something that misleads or deceives

* something intended or serving to convey a falsehood

3. Truth: 6

* conformity to fact or actuality

* reality, actuality

* that which is considered to be the supreme reality and to have the ultimate meaning and value of existence

Karl Rove and his legion of falsifiers and deceivers (throughout the mainstream media outlets, all owned by right-wing extremists) make such statements as these:

* "A statement is not a lie if it was caused by incomplete or false
information.

* "I don't believe Bush lied."

* "Bush mispoke--but he didn't lie."

* "Bush didn't intend to deceive, so what he said wasn't a lie."

The purpose of all these Bush junta obfuscations is to redefine a lie as the truth. The statement Bush II made in his State of the Union address was untrue: there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Bush lied. It doesn't matter if there were--or weren't--innacurate or false intelligence reports about the WMDs; Bush's statement was still a lie.

It is of no significance what Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity feel about whether or not Bush lied; their feelings don't change the fact that Bush lied. Lying doesn't necessarily involved the intent to deceive; if a statement served to convey a falsehood it is a lie. We can't know what Dubya's intentions were, since those are subjective (and he doesn't have the moral fibre to admit them), but from his track record the most compelling hypothesis would be that he knew he was lying and intended to deceive the American people into an unnecessary, murderous war.

Any person interested in being honest has the responsibility of determining if what he says is true. If you don't know whether something is true or false, then you indicate that you don't know and make it clear that you're merely putting forward a likely hypothesis (as in the paragraph above). That is not what Dubya did. He deliberately and expressly made a statement which was false. [...]

In the twenty-first century, we must make certain to set the field of inquiry and controvert the criminal cabal's deliberate prevarications and dissimulations:

* Bush is a great leader

* Bush started the Iraq war to bring democracy to the Iraqi people

* Americans must sacrifice their freedom for security

* The criminal cabal had no complicity in 9/11

* Spending over $1 trillion on the Iraq war is good for America

* Social Security is in genuine difficulty and Bush has only good intentions in trying to solve the problems

* Bush did not lie about weapons of mass destruction

The present enemies of truth and justice believe they can call a lie a truth; an aggressive, senseless, unnecessary war a struggle against terrorism; an illiterate moron a great leader; and the destruction of America through fascism, deficit spending and militarism, sound policies. They believe they can call anything whatever they want to and the American people will accept it. [...]

When trying to dialogue with persons in the present era, we must limit our efforts to persons committed to honesty and truth, asking the same question Socrates did in the Cratylus:

"Is there anything which you call speaking the truth and speaking falsehood--is there true speech and false speech?"

Dialogue is only possible with those persons who genuinely believe there is objective Truth--beyond personal belief, feeling, or desire. [...]

At present, it would be impossible to dialogue with Bush junta members or any of their fellow-travelers (media propagandists and brain-dead, reactionary citizens), since they simply have no commitment to truth whatsoever. They will tell any lie and commit any atrocity which leads to their goals: power and wealth. Even if one were the host of a radio or TV interview program, trying to dialogue with a person such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, Condoleeza Rice, or Karl Rove would be a total waste of time. Their entire output would be nothing but sophistry and propaganda: lies, obfuscations, and posturings.

A person like Hermogenes can believe that truth can be expressed in words without knowing how to express truth in words. But if a person doesn't believe there is a reality named "truth," then there is no purpose in engaging in dialectic--searching for truth--when they don't believe there is truth.

Some people say they believe there is truth, when what they really believe is that each person's beliefs express an individual, subjective truth. This is the denial of the reality of Truth, which is invariable, not subjective, possessing a fixed reality of its own, as Socrates explains.

"It is clear that things have some fixed reality of their own, not in relation to us nor caused by us; they do not vary, swaying one way and another in accordance with our fancy, but exist of themselves in relation to their own reality imposed by nature." [386e] [...]

Entities and actions have a fixed nature and are not subjective in the sense of having a reality relative to a person's beliefs. A name is, Socrates explains, an instrument for separating one kind of reality from another, a horse from a human, for example. Each name refers to a fixed reality. Even if we change a name referring to a specific reality, the reality is the same.

If a propagandist such as Dubya, with the clear intention of deceiving, gives the false name of democracy to the forms of government in America and Iraq, he's still referring to the same, objective realities: American plutocracy (the rule of the wealthy) and Iraqi puppet government. False and deceptive names are used by indoctrinators to try to fool heedless people into believing they're referring to a reality (true democracy: a government for the people) when they're not. [...]

The search for truth is a serious matter, and Socrates is engaged in an earnest investigation into questions of critical importance--then and now. It's possible for a society to become so relativistic and intellectually bewildered that people lose the ability to comprehend reality. War is seen as peace. Tyranny is seen as sound government. An illiterate, degenerate President is seen as a great leader. Ignorance becomes suicidal. Intentional unawareness becomes lethal. [...]

Part of what Socrates is investigating is the phenomenon of our possessing a knowledge of reality in our very being. Entities have a definite, unique composition; one thing is not another thing. We know, primordially, when we are in our right mind, whether a name correctly or incorrectly refers to a particular reality. Mind control, propaganda, and social conditioning can so corrupt the human mind that it does not function correctly; then lies are taken for truth, our destroyers are taken for beneficent leaders. But even when programmed by an oppressive regime, humans retain some connection to their primordial awareness of reality.

The American mind is very far gone: people suffer from generalized possession 9 and hysteria 10-- the loss of the ability to use our senses and our minds. But there is still a preexistent, ineradicable power of understanding in even the most subverted personality that can be awakened.

There has to be this primordial ability to understand reality because we recognize when a name correctly or incorrectly refers to a particular entity. If we required a name in order to recognize a reality, then we would never have been able to know realities and know when names are correct. [...]

As we examine instances of government, for example--America, Britain, fifth century BCE Athens, the 1776 Constitution of Pennsylvania--we find that none of them contains the total reality which we primordially know to be Good Government.

Intuitively, we recognize that Good Government does not involve a leader lying to the people, a regime supporting only the rich and impoverishing the poor. With each investigation of a particular government, we find a specific aspect of the reality--Good Government--we apprehend in our inner being. Thus there must a complete totality, a wholeness--Good Government--to which the particulars point and which they embody partially. There must be Forms of which Plato spoke. Unless there were Forms, we could not name, since naming presupposes the existence of unchanging natures by reference to which names are meaningful and correct.

We recognize that the form, Good Government, is embodied partially in each of these particular instances of government. What we experience are partial and ever-changing embodiments of Good Government only. But this very actuality implies a changeless, eduring reality embodied in all the instances and containing the perfection of the Idea or Form. [...]

When we use the words "Good Government" in speaking to people, they intuitively know what those words mean. That implies, as we've seen, that they have a primordial knowledge of the reality of Good Government. If humans didn't possess a preexistent awareness of realities--including Forms-- then we could not communicate, since human communication presupposes meaning. [...]

With Socrates' enlightened use of dialectic the dangers of everyday discourse are countered. In common verbal interchange a word such as "Democracy" can cease to serve its natural function of pointing to a reality we all know. The word "Democracy" is uttered by Bush continually, but is no longer used to make manifest a specific nature. It is simply tossed back and forth between people who have a vague feeling that it means something posit ive but have no genuine grasp of the reality to which it refers. Bush propagandists deliberately misidentify the word "Democracy" so that it ceases to serve the function of referring to genuine Democracy.

Even a reality such as "right speech" is known by people intuitively. So someone who uses words in any way he pleases is not speaking correctly. A person must speak according to the way in which things are correctly spoken of, in the way that words refer to a specific reality that we know.

We must regain the understanding, taught by Perennialist sages throughout the ages, that there is a magic in language which contributes to human evolution. Language in some way creates the very world in which we live. Words and concepts point to realities beyond the sensory world and assist us in making contact with a higher dimension.

Intangible Ideas, in Plato's conception--supersensible realities beyond human thought--are appropriated through words, as birds in our hands, and released by the act of discernment, setting the birds free. These Ideas reside in the words independent of the books or the sounds in which the words are encased.

Humans today are rapidly losing the intellectual ability to realize or be concerned that their very lives are threatened by the loss of the ability to use language to understand and communicate. As Thomas Jefferson made clear, "no people can be both ignorant and free." [...]

Contemporary Bush junta propagandists do not even feel the need to disguise their deliberate lies and deceptions. In a recent speech to a captive audience (people screened to ensure Republican sympathies), Bush indicated that his job was "catapulting the propaganda" about Social Security. The Bush junta now broadcasts propaganda disguised as "news stories," witholds vital information from members of Congress, and lies with impunity at every turn.

Even though many Americans have been taken in by this propaganda, we can be sure--as Plato's dialogues demonstrate--that there is still some primordial understanding of enduring realities in all humans. A heartening example of this awareness is now manifesting in the increasing number of Americans who are seeing Bush's war on Iraq as a war crime perpetrated for oil, American corporate profits, and the restructuring of the Middle East. Their awakening to this reality means that the Bush military is now having immense difficulty in recruiting men and women as cannon fodder for their senseless wars of aggression.

The awareness of the essence of Good Government is also reawakening in Americans in increasing numbers. Ultimately, this preexisstent knowledge of reality will make it clear to Americans that the criminal cabal that has seized their government is working against the best interests of U.S. citizens. In our arsenal against the current tyranny, one of our most potent weapons is a penetrating understanding of the wisdom embodied in Plato's dialogues.

Rondi Adamson says `gulag' attack on U.S. reveals Amnesty bias

2005-05-29T10:08:00.000-06:00

Can anyone say damage control?

Leave it to a pundit whose work is published in the CSM and USA Today (both bastions of a free and independent press, to be sure ;p), to come up with this lovely piece of western media propaganda.

Her indignation with the Amnesty International report seems to stem from their liberal use of the word "gulag" to describe conditions at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. But rather than deal with numerous reports of abuse and torture that have been documented by guards, visitors and prisoners alike, she immediately shifts blame away by insisting that the word "gulag" be reserved for countries like Cuba, North Korea, and pre-invasion Iraq.

(One can only wonder if Ms. Adamson is aware that Guantanamo Bay is actually in Cuba and the irony of her statements therein.)

She then goes on to divert even more attention away from ongoing United Statesian war crimes by rambling on about Darfur. This is another well-worn trick of punditry, whereby the paid mouthpiece for the Bush Reich takes one little item out of context and magnifies it so that the original point is buried in gloss and obfuscation.

It is literally quite painful to watch as she tries to justify the lies and crimes of her chosen country, but one assumes she must literally believe such nonsense or perhaps as long as it keeps putting food on the table.

Time will tell.

Anyway, here is her entire essay, with lies intact.

Read at your own risk!

Relic

May 29, 2005. 01:00 AM

The Canadian government should not investigate allegations made about the United States in the Amnesty International report because the report itself is impossible to treat with respect.

Much attention has been focused on the report's claim that the U.S. detention centre at Guantanamo Bay is the "gulag of our times," and rightly so. This comparison is preposterous. A gulag of our times exists in Cuba, or North Korea, and existed in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, until the United States intervened.

But there is more, and much is revealed — if we didn't know already — about Amnesty International's ideological persuasion.

Take the section in the report that purports to dissect the brutality in Sudan. Guess who is held, at root, responsible for the ongoing horrors in Darfur? (You have three guesses, and the first two don't count). Sectarian militias and/or Sudanese government backed groups keen to slaughter those of a different racial background?

No.

The United Nations, champions of peace, they would have us believe, but now seemingly stunned into powerlessness? No. The forces most to blame are in Washington. While the 308-page report generously concedes that "the world stands idly watching" as Darfur unfolds, it also suggests that the world does so because of the United States.

As the "unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power," the United States "sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide." It is the war on terror, the report asserts, that erodes human rights and "grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity."

One wonders, if we are all so influenced by the United States, and prone to following their example, why don't we all live in utterly free countries?

I hope Irene Khan, Amnesty International's secretary general, will answer that question in an upcoming report.

In insisting that governments around the world investigate or arrest Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, Amnesty is suggesting that the war on terror be fought in criminal courts.

But the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere, are not defendants, or political dissidents. They are captured enemy combatants. It is not illegal to detain them until the conflict is over, according to the rules of war.

PoWs during World War II did not get a day in court, or a public defender. The prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere, is another matter and inexcusable. But it is being dealt with in a swift and transparent manner, as it should be, by American military justice. Some perpetrators have already been sentenced.

If the people at Amnesty wish to address human rights abuses, they will have to put aside their political agenda. Practical help for true political dissidents, all over the world, is lacking.

Spreading lies about the United States and going after the wrong people won't help any of them a lick.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto writer whose work has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal Europe, USA Today and Tech Central Station.

Oklahoma -Ten Years On and Still The Truth Lies Buried

2005-05-27T09:15:00.000-06:00

SOTT Analysis
April 19, 2005

"Coincidences just aren't coincidences, there's some reason for it."

So said former FBI agent Danny Coulson in an April 17th Fox news report which investigates (to the extent that Fox news really investigates anything) the possiblity that McVeigh and Nichols were not alone in their alleged plot that blew up the Alfred P Murrah Building in Oklahoma on April 19th 1985, which killed 168 people.

The Fox report tell us:

One month after the bombing, authorities demolished what was left of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

Officials said the implosion was a necessary part of the psychological recovery for the citizens of Oklahoma City. But critics question the FBI's tactics and argue the building came down too soon and the implosion is one piece of a government cover-up.

Survivor VZ Lawton remembers the events after the attack.

"I was in my office at my desk signing papers and all of a sudden the building began to shake," said Lawton. "The lights went out, debris started falling and then something hit me on the head and knocked me out before the truck bomb ever went off."

The above paragraph is the most interesting of the entire Fox report, yet Fox completely ignores it, preferring to continue on with its implications that the "Aryan Republican Army" were the hidden accomplices and that the US government, for some reason, does not want this revealed to the public. The fact that a survivor of the explosion reported that the building began to shake and debris started to fall BEFORE McVeigh's alleged fertiliser truck bomb went off, is apparently not interesting to the pundits at Fox. The report reveals a number of other rather interesting facts which Fox either overlooks or attempts to use to further its "domestic terrorism" schtick. For example:

"Pictures made from surveillance video at the Regency Tower Apartments are the only images related to the attack that have been released to the public.

Oklahoma City attorney Michael Johnston said the FBI was not given all the tapes from as many as twenty-five cameras that he says were in and around the Murrah Building.

"If they're really non-consequential, it wouldn't hurt anything. If indeed they show something I think the American public, after a decade, has the right to know," he said.

Johnston, on behalf of twenty-five victims' families, filed a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for all of the surveillance videos. FOX News also filed a FOI request. The FBI has denied both cases on account that the case is still open.

We wonder how many other videotapes of defining "terror" moments in US history the FBI has stashed away. Yet it was not only video tape evidence that the FBI refused to release in the Oklahoma bombing case, they also refused to hand over more than 3,000 pages of documents to the defence lawyers of Timothy McVeigh, who was subsequently executed by the US government. Pat Shannan of American Free Press has done much research into the events of the Oklahoma bombing and we present below an excerpt of his article FEDERAL MURDER INC. TIED TO OKC TERROR BOMBING:

It has been nearly 10 years since Oklahoma City's Murrah building was blown apart one quiet April morning. Contrary to news reports, the persons found guilty and sentenced for the Murrah bombing atrocity could not have been solely responsible. An Oklahoma City police sergeant became aware of this before anyone else, apparently during the first hour of rescue. He paid for that discovery with his life.

Yeakey, an African-American hero if there ever was one, was a giant of a man with a heart as big as the rest of him. As the first cop on the Murrah building scene following the explosions, he became a crusader for truth.

There is a memorable news photo of his 6-foot, 3-inch, nearly 300-pound frame sprinting down NW 5th Street toward the building on one of the many rescue missions he performed that ugly day. He worked for 48 hours without sleep.

After numerous private investigators produced evidence of multiple explosions, unexploded bombs being hauled away by the authorities, and the incapability of an ammonium nitrate fuel oil bomb to cause the kind of devastation seen in downtown Oklahoma City, a giant government cover-up became obvious.

But Yeakey knew it long before the rest of us. Only a couple of hours into the rescue, Yeakey became painfully aware of something disturbing. Did he somehow figure out that the building had been blown from the inside and that the news reports were fabrications?

Did he overhear a strange conversation from some of the many Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) agents who were on the scene sooner than they should have been?

Whatever it was, Yeakey was upset. He called his wife that morning crying, "It's not true. It's not what they are saying. It didn't happen that way."

Yeakey ran back and forth into that concrete mess of bricks and mortar all day long and continued beyond exhaustion, far into the night.

In a cadre of heroes that day, Yeakey's performance was outstanding. On May 11, the following year he was scheduled to receive the Medal of Valor from the Oklahoma City Police Department (OCPD). He never got it. He was murdered on May 8, 1996, in the country, two and a half miles west of the El Reno Penitentiary. His body was found a mile from his blood-soaked car.

The official report said "suicide." However, many people who knew Yeakey have questioned that, as the inside of Terry's private automobile was described by witnesses as looking like someone had "butchered a hog" on the front seat. There was much blood on the back seat, too, but little or none where his body was found a mile away.

More suspiciously, his private bombing reports were missing from his car and have never been found.

According to the report, while still inside his Ford Probe that he had parked on a lonely country road, Yeakey slashed himself 11 times on both forearms before cutting his throat twice near the jugular vein. Then, apparently seeking an even more private place to die, he crawled 8,000 feet through rough terrain and climbed a fence before shooting himself in the head with a small caliber revolver, which he apparently took with him to the hereafter.

Independent investigators speculated that had Yeakey shot himself with his own gun, a Glock 9mm, there would have been significantly more damage to his head than was evident.

What appeared to be rope burns on his neck, handcuff bruises to his wrists, and muddy grass embedded in his slash wounds strongly indicated that he had some help in traversing his final distance.

However, the information about the victim undergoing a violent beating prior to his "suicide" was left off the medical examiner's report.

The bullet's entrance wound was in the right temple, above the eye. It went through the policeman's head and exited in the area of the left cheek, near the bottom of the earlobe line. The trajectory was from a 40-45 degree angle above his head. There were no powder burns.

According to unnamed officers, 40 or more law enforcement personnel were at the scene combing the area for the "suicide" weapon, but were unsuccessful for more than an hour.

But after an FBI helicopter landed at the scene carrying FBI SAC Bob Ricks, "Yeakey's weapon" was suddenly discovered only five minutes later. Of course, it was not Yeakey's police issue handgun, and the description of the weapon has never been made public, but the official record immediately became that of "suicide."

Yeakey had told friends that he was going out of town to hide or secure "evidence of a cover-up of the bombing by federal agents."

The case of Sgt. Terry Yeakey is only one of a myriad of dramatic stories that could be told - stories just waiting for Hollywood, but out of bounds for public consumption.