A Controversial and/or Informative Site

[Saundra Hummer]

.
^^^^^^^
President Carter Rips Cheney Over Iraq: ‘His Batting Average Is Abysmally Low’
Last week, Vice President Cheney attacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) for supporting Iraq redeployment. He charged that their plan would “validate the al Qaeda strategy.”

Today, former President Jimmy Carter rejected Cheney’s charges, stating that calls for a change of policy in Iraq are “not playing into the hands of al Qaeda or the people who are causing violence and destruction over there.” He added, “If you go back and see what Vice President Cheney has said for the last three or four years concerning Iraq, his batting average is abysmally low. He hasn’t been right on hardly anything.”

Click on the following URL to view.

Watch it:

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/25/carter-cheney/
Digg It!

Transcript:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Vice President Cheney this week has been very harsh on those kinds of measures in the Congress.

[CHENEY CLIP]: If we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we’ll do is validate the al Qaeda strategy. The al Qaeda strategy is to break the will of the American people.

CARTER: If you go back and see what Vice President Cheney has said for the last three or four years concerning Iraq, his batting average is abysmally low. He hasn’t been right on hardly anything and his prediction of what is going to happen, reasons for going over there and obviously this is not playing into the hands of al Qaeda or the people who are causing violence and destruction over there, to call for a change in policy in Iraq.
^^^^^ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
.........
Iraq 101:
The Iraq Effect
The War in Iraq and Its Impact on the War on Terrorism - Pg. 1
All right, no more excuses, people. After four years in Iraq, it’s time to get serious. We’ve spent too long goofing off, waiting to be saved by the bell, praying that we won’t get asked a stumper like, “What’s the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” Okay, even the head of the House intelligence committee doesn’t know that one. All the more reason to start boning up on what we—and our leaders—should have learned back before they signed us up for this crash course in Middle Eastern geopolitics. And while we’re at it, let’s do the math on what the war really costs in blood and dollars. It’s time for our own Iraq study group. Yes, there will be a test, and we can’t afford to fail.



March 01 , 2007

By Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank
Research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law. Bergen is also a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.

"If we were not fighting and destroying this enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people." So said President Bush on November 30, 2005, refining his earlier call to "bring them on." Jihadist terrorists, the administration’s argument went, would be drawn to Iraq like moths to a flame, and would perish there rather than wreak havoc elsewhere in the world.

The president’s argument conveyed two important assumptions: first, that the threat of jihadist terrorism to U.S. interests would have been greater without the war in Iraq, and second, that the war is reducing the overall global pool of terrorists. However, the White House has never cited any evidence for either of these assumptions, and none appears to be publicly available.

The administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism: implications for the United States," circulated within the government in April 2006 and partially declassified in October, states that "the Iraq War has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists...and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

Yet administration officials have continued to suggest that there is no evidence any greater jihadist threat exists as a result of the Iraq War. "Are more terrorists being created in the world?" then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld rhetorically asked during a press conference in September. "We don’t know. The world doesn’t know. There are not good metrics to determine how many people are being trained in a radical madrasa school in some country." In January 2007 Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte in congressional testimony stated that he was "not certain" that the Iraq War had been a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and played down the likely impact of the war on jihadists worldwide: "I wouldn’t say there has been a widespread growth in Islamic extremism beyond Iraq. I really wouldn’t."

Indeed, though what we will call "The Iraq Effect" is a crucial matter for U.S. national security, we have found no statistical documentation of its existence and gravity, at least in the public domain. In this report, we have undertaken what we believe to be the first such study, using information from the world’s premier database on global terrorism. The results are being published for the first time by Mother Jones, the news and investigative magazine, as part of a broader "Iraq 101" package in the magazine’s March/April 2007 issue.

<< Breaking The Army << >> The Iraq Effect Pg. 2 >>

Iraq Effect (continued)
Our study shows that the Iraq War has generated a stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and thousands of civilian lives lost; even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one-third.

We are not making the argument that without the Iraq War, jihadist terrorism would not exist, but our study shows that the Iraq conflict has greatly increased the spread of the Al Qaeda ideological virus, as shown by a rising number of terrorist attacks in the past three years from London to Kabul, and from Madrid to the Red Sea.

In our study we focused on the following questions:

Has jihadist terrorism gone up or down around the world since the invasion of Iraq?
What has been the trend if terrorist incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan (the military fronts of the "war on terrorism") are excluded?
Has terrorism explicitly directed at the United States and its allies also increased?
In order to zero in on The Iraq Effect, we focused on the rate of terrorist attacks in two time periods: September 12, 2001, to March 20, 2003 (the day of the Iraq invasion), and March 21, 2003, to September 30, 2006. Extending the data set before 9/11 would risk distorting the results, because the rate of attacks by jihadist groups jumped considerably after 9/11 as jihadist terrorists took inspiration from the events of that terrible day.

We first determined which terrorist organizations should be classified as jihadist. We included in this group Sunni extremist groups affiliated with or sympathetic to the ideology of Al Qaeda. We decided to exclude terrorist attacks by Palestinian groups, as they depend largely on factors particular to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Our study draws its data from the MIPT-RAND Terrorism database (available at terrorismknowledgebase.org), which is widely considered to be the best publicly available database on terrorism incidents. RAND defines a terrorist attack as an attack on a civilian entity designed to promote fear or alarm and further a particular political agenda. In our study we only included attacks that caused at least one fatality and were attributed by RAND to a known jihadist group. In some terrorist attacks, and this is especially the case in Iraq, RAND has not been able to attribute a particular attack to a known jihadist group. Therefore our study likely understates the extent of jihadist terrorism in Iraq and around the world.

Our study yields one resounding finding: The rate of terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups and the rate of fatalities in those attacks increased dramatically after the invasion of Iraq. Globally there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year before and 199.8 after) and a 237 percent rise in the average fatality rate (from 501 to 1,689 deaths per year). A large part of this rise occurred in Iraq, which accounts for fully half of the global total of jihadist terrorist attacks in the post-Iraq War period. But even excluding Iraq, the average yearly number of jihadist terrorist attacks and resulting fatalities still rose sharply around the world by 265 percent and 58 percent respectively.

And even when attacks in both Afghanistan and Iraq (the two countries that together account for 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of deaths since the invasion of Iraq) are excluded, there has still been a significant rise in jihadist terrorism elsewhere--a 35 percent increase in the number of jihadist terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan and Iraq, from 27.6 to 37 a year, with a 12 percent rise in fatalities from 496 to 554 per year.

Of course, just because jihadist terrorism has risen in the period after the invasion of Iraq, it does not follow that events in Iraq itself caused the change. For example, a rise in attacks in the Kashmir conflict and the Chechen separatist war against Russian forces may have nothing to do with the war in Iraq. But the most direct test of The Iraq Effect--whether the United States and its allies have suffered more jihadist terrorism after the invasion than before--shows that the rate of jihadist attacks on Western interests and citizens around the world (outside of Afghanistan and Iraq) has risen by a quarter, from 7.2 to 9 a year, while the yearly fatality rate in these attacks has increased by 4 percent from 191 to 198.

One of the few positive findings of our study is that only 18 American civilians (not counting civilian contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan) have been killed by jihadist groups since the war in Iraq began. But that number is still significantly higher than the four American civilians who were killed in attacks attributed to jihadist groups in the period between 9/11 and the Iraq War. It was the capture and killing of much of Al Qaeda’s leadership after 9/11 and the breakup of its training camp facilities in Afghanistan--not the war in Iraq--that prevented Al Qaeda from successfully launching attacks on American targets on the scale it did in the years before 9/11.

Also undermining the argument that Al Qaeda and like-minded groups are being distracted from plotting against Western targets are the dangerous, anti-American plots that have arisen since the start of the Iraq War. Jihadist terrorists have attacked key American allies since the Iraq conflict began, mounting multiple bombings in London that killed 52 in July 2005, and attacks in Madrid in 2004 that killed 191. Shehzad Tanweer, one of the London bombers, stated in his videotaped suicide "will," "What have you witnessed now is only the beginning of a string of attacks that will continue and become stronger until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq." There have been six jihadist attacks on the home soil of the United States’ NATO allies (including Turkey) in the period after the invasion of Iraq, whereas there were none in the 18 months following 9/11; and, of course, the plan uncovered in London in August 2006 to smuggle liquid explosives onto U.S. airliners, had it succeeded, would have killed thousands.

Al Qaeda has not let the Iraq War distract it from targeting the United States and her allies. In a January 19, 2006 audiotape, Osama bin Laden himself refuted President Bush’s argument that Iraq had distracted and diverted Al Qaeda: "The reality shows that that the war against America and its allies has not remained limited to Iraq, as he claims, but rather, that Iraq has become a source and attraction and recruitment of qualified people.... As for the delay in similar [terrorist] operations in America, [the] operations are being prepared, and you will witness them, in your own land, as soon as preparations are complete."

Ayman al Zawahiri echoed bin Laden’s words in a March 4, 2006, videotape broadcast by Al Jazeera calling for jihadists to launch attacks on the home soil of Western countries: "[Muslims have to] inflict losses on the crusader West, especially to its economic infrastructure with strikes that would make it bleed for years. The strikes on New York, Washington, Madrid, and London are the best examples.

Iraq Effect (continued)
One measure of the impact of the Iraq War is the precipitous drop in public support for the United States in Muslim countries. Jordan, a key U.S. ally, saw popular approval for the United States drop from 25 percent in 2002 to 1 percent in 2003. In Lebanon during the same period, favorable views of the United States dropped from 30 percent to 15 percent, and in the world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia, favorable views plummeted from 61 percent to 15 percent. Disliking the United States does not make you a terrorist, but clearly the pool of Muslims who dislike the United States has grown by hundreds of millions since the Iraq War began. The United States’ plummeting popularity does not suggest active popular support for jihadist terrorists but it does imply some sympathy with their anti-American posture, which means a significant swath of the Muslim population cannot be relied on as an effective party in counter-terrorism/insurgency measures. And so, popular contempt for U.S. policy has become a force multiplier for Islamist militants.

The Iraq War has also encouraged Muslim youth around the world to join jihadist groups, not necessarily directly tied to Al Qaeda but often motivated by a similar ideology. The Iraq War allowed Al Qaeda, which was on the ropes in 2002 after the United States had captured or killed two-thirds of its leadership, to reinvent itself as a broader movement because Al Qaeda’s central message--that the United States is at war with Islam--was judged by significant numbers of Muslims to have been corroborated by the war in Iraq. And compounding this, the wide dissemination of the exploits of jihadist groups in Iraq following the invasion energized potential and actual jihadists across the world.

How exactly has The Iraq Effect played out in different parts of the world? The effect has not been uniform. Europe, the Arab world, and Afghanistan all saw major rises in jihadist terrorism in the period after the invasion of Iraq, while Pakistan and India and the Chechnya/Russia front saw only smaller increases in jihadist terrorism. And in Southeast Asia, attacks and killings by jihadist groups fell by over 60 percent in the period after the Iraq War. The strength or weakness of The Iraq Effect on jihadist terrorism in a particular country seems to be influenced by four factors: (1) if the country itself has troops in Iraq; (2) geographical proximity to Iraq; (3) the degree of identification with Iraq’s Arabs felt in the country; and (4) the level of exchanges of ideas or personnel with Iraqi jihadist groups. This may explain why jihadist groups in Europe, Arab countries, and Afghanistan were more affected by the Iraq War than groups in other regions. Europe, unlike Kashmir, Chechnya, and Southeast Asia for example, contains several countries that are part of the coalition in Iraq. It is relatively geographically close to the Arab world and has a large Arab-Muslim diaspora from which jihadists have recruited.

European intelligence services are deeply concerned about the effect of the Iraq War. For example, Dame Eliza Mannigham-Buller, the head of Britain’s MI5, stated on November 10, 2006, "In Iraq, attacks are regularly videoed and the footage is downloaded onto the Internet [and] chillingly we see the results here. Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers. We are aware of numerous plots to kill people and damage our economy...30 that we know of. [The] threat is serious, is growing, and, I believe, will be with us for a generation." Startlingly, a recent poll found that a quarter of British Muslims believe that the July 7, 2005, London bombings were justifiable because of British foreign policy, bearing out Dame Eliza’s concern about a new generation of radicals in the United Kingdom.

While Islamist militants in Europe are mobilized by a series of grievances such as Palestine, Afghanistan, the Kashmir conflict, and Chechnya, no issue has resonated more in radical circles and on Islamist websites than the war in Iraq. This can be seen in the skyrocketing rate of jihadist terrorist attacks around the Arab world outside of Iraq. There have been 37 attacks in Arab countries outside of Iraq since the invasion, while there were only three in the period between 9/11 and March 2003. The rate of attacks in Arab countries jumped by 445 percent since the Iraq invasion, while the rate of killings rose by 783 percent. The November 9, 2005 bombings of three American hotels in Amman, Jordan, that killed 60, an operation directed by Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq network, was the most direct manifestation of The Iraq Effect in the Arab world. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has seen an upsurge in jihadist terrorism since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There were no jihadist terrorist attacks between 9/11 and the Iraq War but 12 in the period since. The reason for the surge in terrorism was a decision taken by Al Qaeda’s Saudi branch in the spring of 2003 to launch a wave of attacks (primarily at Western targets) to undermine the Saudi royal family. These attacks were initiated on May 12, 2003 with the bombing of Western compounds in Riyadh, killing 34, including 10 Americans. While Saudi authorities believe that planning and training for the operation predated the war in Iraq, the timing of the attack, just weeks after the U.S invasion is striking.

The fact that the Iraq War radicalized some young Saudis is underlined by studies showing that more Saudis have conducted suicide operations in Iraq than any other nationality. For instance, Mohammed Hafez, a visiting professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, in a study of the 101 identified suicide attackers in Iraq from March 2003 to February 2006, found that more than 40 percent were Saudi. This jihadist energy was not just transferred over the Saudi border into Iraq. It also contributed to attacks in the Kingdom. The group that beheaded the American contractor Paul Johnson in Riyadh in June 2004 called itself the "Al Fallujah brigade of Al Qaeda" and claimed that it had carried out the killing in part to avenge the actions of "disbelievers" in Iraq. In January 2004 Al Qaeda’s Saudi affiliate launched Al Battar, an online training magazine specifically directed at young Saudis interested in fighting their regime. The achievements of jihadists in Iraq figured prominently in its pages. Indeed, a contributor to the first issue of Al Battar argued that the Iraq War had made jihad "a commandment" for Saudi Arabians " the Islamic nation is today in acute conflict with the Crusaders."

The Iraq War had a strong impact in other Arab countries too. Daily images aired by Al Jazeera and other channels of suffering Iraqis enraged the Arab street and strengthened the hands of radicals everywhere. In Egypt, the Iraq War has contributed to a recent wave of attacks by small, self-generated groups. A Sinai-based jihadist group carried out coordinated bombing attacks on Red Sea resorts popular with Western tourists at Taba in October 2004, at Sharm el-Sheikh in July 2005, and at Dahab in April 2006, killing a total of more than 120.

One of the cell’s members, Younis Elian Abu Jarir, a taxi driver whose job was to ferry the group around, stated in a confession offered as evidence in court that "they convinced me of the need for holy war against the Jews, Americans, Italians, and other nationalities that participated in the occupation of Iraq." Osama Rushdi, a former spokesman of the Egyptian terrorist group Gamma Islamiyya now living in London, told us that while attacks in the Sinai were partly directed at the Egyptian regime, they appeared to be primarily anti-Western in motivation: "The Iraq War contributed to the negative feelings of the Sinai group. Before the Iraq War, most Egyptians did not have a negative feeling towards American policy. Now almost all are opposed to American policy."

Iraq Effect (continued)
Since the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan has suffered 219 jihadist terrorist attacks that can be attributed to a particular group, resulting in the deaths of 802 civilians. The fact that the Taliban only conducted its first terrorist attacks in September 2003, a few months after the invasion of Iraq, is significant. International forces had already been stationed in the country for two years before the Taliban began to specifically target the U.S.-backed Karzai government and civilians sympathetic to it. This points to a link between events in Iraq and the initiation of the Taliban’s terrorist campaign in Afghanistan.

True, local dynamics form part of the explanation for the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the use of terrorism, particularly suicide attacks, by the Taliban is an innovation drawn from the Iraqi theater. Hekmat Karzai, an Afghan terrorism researcher, points out that suicide bombings were virtually unknown in Afghanistan until 2005. In 2006, Karzai says, there were 118 such attacks, more than there had been in the entire history of the country. Internet sites have helped spread the tactics of Iraqi jihadists. In 2005 the "Media Committee of the Al Qaeda Mujahideen in Afghanistan" launched an online magazine called Vanguards of Kharasan, which includes articles on what Afghan fighters can learn from Coalition and jihadist strategies in Iraq. Abdul Majid Abdul Majed, a contributor to the April 2006 issue of the magazine, argued for an expansion in suicide operations, citing the effectiveness of jihadist operations in Iraq.

Mullah Dadullah, a key Taliban commander, gave an interview to Al Jazeera in 2006 in which he explained how the Iraq War has influenced the Taliban. Dadullah noted that "we have ‘give and take’ with the mujahideen in Iraq." Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who is writing bin Laden’s biography, told us that young men traveled from the Afghan province of Khost to "on-the-job training" in Iraq in 2004. "They came back with lots of CDs which were full of military actions against U.S. troops in the Mosul, Fallujah, and Baghdad areas. I think suicide bombing was introduced in Afghanistan and Pakistan after local boys came back after spending some time in Iraq. I met a Taliban commander, Mullah Mannan, last year in Zabul who told me that he was trained in Iraq by Zarqawi along with many Pakistani tribals."

Propaganda circulating in Afghanistan and Pakistan about American "atrocities" and jihadist "heroics" has also energized the Taliban, encouraging a previously somewhat isolated movement to see itself as part of a wider struggle. Our study found a striking correlation in how terrorist campaigns intensified in Iraq and Afghanistan. The rate of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan gathered pace in the summer of 2005, a half year after a similar increase in Iraq, and in 2006 the rate of attacks in both countries rose in tandem to new, unprecedented levels.

While the Iraq War has had a strong effect on the rise in terrorism in Afghanistan, it appears to have played less of a role on jihadists operating in Pakistan and India, though terrorism did rise in those countries following the invasion of Iraq. (Of course, neither Pakistan nor India has foreign troops on its soil, which accounts, in part, for the high terrorism figures in Afghanistan.) The rate of jihadist attacks rose by 21 percent while the fatality rate rose by 19 percent. There were 52 attacks after the Iraq invasion, killing 489 civilians, while there were 19 in the period before, killing 182. The local dynamics of the Kashmir conflict, tensions between India and Pakistan, and the resurfacing of the Taliban in eastern Pakistan likely played a large role here. That said, there is evidence that the Iraq War did energize jihadists in Pakistan. Hamid Mir says, "Iraq not only radicalized the Pakistani tribals [near the Afghan border] but it offered them the opportunity for them to go to Iraq via Iran to get on-the-job training."

There is also evidence that the Iraq War had some impact in other areas of Pakistan. In the summer of 2004, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the head of the Kashmiri militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba, told followers in Lahore, "Islam is in grave danger, and the mujahideen are fighting to keep its glory. They are fighting the forces of evil in Iraq in extremely difficult circumstances. We should send mujahideen from Pakistan to help them." And Pakistan, inasmuch as it has become Al Qaeda’s new base for training and planning attacks, has become the location where significant numbers of would-be jihadists--including some young British Pakistanis such as the London suicide bombers, radicalized in part by the Iraq War--have traveled to learn bomb-making skills.

In Russia and Chechnya, the Iraq War appears to have had less of an impact than on other jihadist fronts. This is unsurprising given the fact that jihadist groups in the region are preoccupied by a separatist war against the Russian military. Whilst following the invasion of Iraq there was a rise in the number of attacks by Chechen groups that share a similar ideology with Al Qaeda, the total rate of fatalities did not go up. The Iraq War does seem to have diverted some jihadists from the Russian/Chechen front: Arab fighters who might have previously gone to Chechnya now have a cause at their own doorstep, while funds from Arab donors increasingly have gone to the Iraqi jihad.

Southeast Asia has been the one region in the world in which jihadist terrorism has declined significantly in the period since the invasion of Iraq. There was a 67 percent drop in the rate of attacks (from 10.5 to 3.5 attacks per year) in the post-invasion period and a 69 percent drop in the rate of fatalities (from 201 to 62 fatalities per year). And there has been no bombing on the scale of the October 2002 Bali nightclub attack that killed more than 200. However, jihadist terrorism in Southeast Asia has declined in spite, not because of, the Iraq War. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was deeply unpopular in the region, as demonstrated by the poll finding that only 15 percent of Indonesians had a favorable view of the United States in 2003. But the negative impact of the Iraq War on public opinion was mitigated by U.S. efforts to aid the region in the wake of the devastating tsunami of December 2004--Pew opinion surveys have shown that the number of those with favorable views towards the United States in Indonesia crept above 30 percent in 2005 and 2006.

However, the main reason for the decline of jihadist terrorism in Southeast Asia has been the successful crackdown by local authorities on jihadist groups and their growing unpopularity with the general population. The August 2003 capture of Hambali, Jemaa Islamiya’s operational commander, was key to degrading the group’s capacity to launch attacks as was the arrest of hundreds of Jemaa Islamiya and Abu Sayyaf operatives in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore in the years after the October 2002 Bali bombings. Those arrested included most of those who planned the Bali attacks, as well as former instructors at Jemaa Islamiya camps and individuals involved in financing attacks. And in November 2005 Indonesian security services killed Jemaa Islamiya master bomber Azhari bin Husin in a shoot-out. The second wave of Bali attacks in 2005 killed mostly Indonesians and created a popular backlash against jihadist groups in Indonesia, degrading their ability to recruit operatives. And Muslim leaders such as Masdar Farid Masudi, the deputy leader of the country’s largest Islamic group, condemned the bombings: "If the perpetrators are Muslims, their sentences must be multiplied because they have tarnished the sacredness of their religion and smeared its followers worldwide."

Iraq Effect (continued)
Our survey shows that the Iraq conflict has motivated jihadists around the world to see their particular struggle as part of a wider global jihad fought on behalf of the Islamic ummah, the global community of Muslim believers. The Iraq War had a strong impact in jihadist circles in the Arab world and Europe, but also on the Taliban, which previously had been quite insulated from events elsewhere in the Muslim world. By energizing the jihadist groups, the Iraq conflict acted as a catalyst for the increasing globalization of the jihadist cause, a trend that should be deeply troubling for American policymakers. In the late 1990s, bin Laden pushed a message of a global jihad and attracted recruits from around the Muslim world to train and fight in Afghanistan. The Iraq War has made bin Laden’s message of global struggle even more persuasive to militants. Over the past three years, Iraq has attracted thousands of foreign fighters who have been responsible for the majority of suicide attacks in the country. Those attacks have had an enormous strategic impact; for instance, getting the United Nations to pull out of Iraq and sparking the Iraqi civil war.

Emblematic of the problem is Muriel Degauque, a 38-year-old Belgian woman who on November 9, 2005, near the town of Baquba in central Iraq, detonated a bomb as she drove past an American patrol. In the bomb crater, investigators found travel documents that showed that she had arrived in Iraq from Belgium just a few weeks earlier with her Moroccan-Belgian husband Hissam Goris. The couple had been recruited by "Al Qaeda in Iraq." Goris would die the following day, shot by American forces as he prepared to launch a suicide attack near Fallujah.

The story of Muriel Degauque and her husband is part of a trend that Harvard terrorism researcher Assaf Moghadam terms the "globalization of martyrdom." The London suicide bombings in July 2005 revealed the surprising willingness of four British citizens to die to protest the United Kingdom’s role in the Coalition in Iraq; Muriel Degauque, for her part, was willing to die for the jihadist cause in a country in which she was a stranger.

This challenges some existing conceptions of the motivations behind suicide attacks. In 2005 University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape published a much-commented-upon study of suicide bombing, "Dying to Win," in which he used a mass of data about previous suicide bombing campaigns to argue that they principally occurred "to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland." (Of course, terrorism directed against totalitarian regimes rarely occurs because such regimes are police states and are unresponsive to public opinion.) Pape also argued that while religion might aggravate campaigns of suicide terrorism, such campaigns had also been undertaken by secular groups, most notably the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, whose most spectacular success was the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a female suicide attacker in 1991.

Pape’s findings may explain the actions and motivations of terrorist groups in countries such as Sri Lanka, but his principal claim that campaigns of suicide terrorism are generally nationalist struggles to liberate occupied lands that have little to do with religious belief does not survive contact with the reality of what is going on today in Iraq. The most extensive suicide campaign in history is being conducted in Iraq largely by foreigners animated by the deeply-held religious belief that they must liberate a Muslim land from the "infidel" occupiers.

While Iraqis make up the great bulk of the insurgents, several studies have shown that the suicide attackers in Iraq are generally foreigners, while only a small proportion are Iraqi. (Indeed, the most feared terrorist leader in Iraq until his death earlier this year, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, was a Jordanian.) The Israeli researcher Reuven Paz, using information posted on Al Qaeda-linked websites between October 2004 and March 2005, found that of the 33 suicide attacks listed, 23 were conducted by Saudis, and only 1 by an Iraqi. Similarly, in June 2005 the Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute of Washington, D.C. found by tracking both jihadist websites and media reports that of the 199 Sunni extremists who had died in Iraq either in suicide attacks or in action against Coalition or Iraqi forces, 104 were from Saudi Arabia and only 21 from Iraq. The rest were predominantly from countries around the Middle East. And Mohammed Hafez in his previously cited study of the 101 "known" suicide bombers in Iraq found that while 44 were Saudi and 8 were from Italy (!), only 7 were from Iraq.

In congressional testimony this past November, CIA Director General Michael Hayden said that "an overwhelming percentage of the suicide bombers are foreign." A senior U.S. military intelligence official told us that a worrisome recent trend is the rising number of North Africans who have joined the ranks of foreign fighters in Iraq, whose number General Hayden pegged at 1,300 during his November congressional testimony. A Saudi official also confirmed to us the rising number of North Africans who are being drawn into the Iraq War.

<< The Iraq Effect Pg.4 << >> The Iraq Effect Pg.6 >>

Iraq Effect (continued)
The globalization of jihad and martyrdom, accelerated to a significant degree by the Iraq War, has some disquieting implications for American security in the future. First, it has energized jihadist groups generally; second, not all foreign fighters attracted to Iraq will die there. In fact there is evidence that some jihadists are already leaving Iraq to operate elsewhere. Saudi Arabia has made a number of arrests of fighters coming back from Iraq, and Jordanian intelligence sources say that 300 fighters have returned to Jordan from Iraq. As far away as Belgium, authorities have indicated that Younis Lekili, an alleged member of the cell that recruited Muriel Degauque, had previously traveled to fight in Iraq, where he lost his leg. (Lekili is awaiting trial in Belgium.)

German, French, and Dutch intelligence officials have estimated that there are dozens of their citizens returning from the Iraq theater, and some appear to have been determined to carry out attacks on their return to Europe. For example, French police arrested Hamid Bach, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, in June 2005 in Montpellier, several months after he returned from a staging camp for Iraq War recruits in Syria. According to French authorities, Bach’s handlers there instructed him to assist with plotting terrorist attacks in Italy. Back in France, Bach is alleged to have bought significant quantities of hydrogen peroxide and to have looked up details on explosives and detonators online. (Bach is awaiting trial in France.)

This "blowback" trend will greatly increase when the war eventually winds down in Iraq. In the short term the countries most at risk are those whose citizens have traveled to fight in Iraq, in particular Arab countries bordering Iraq. Jamal Khashoggi, a leading Saudi expert on jihadist groups, told us that "while Iraq brought new blood into the Al Qaeda organization in Saudi Arabia, this was at a time when the network was being dismantled. Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia could not accommodate these recruits so they sent them to Iraq to train them, motivate them, and prepare them for a future wave of attacks in the Kingdom. It is a deep worry to Saudi authorities that Saudis who have gone to Iraq will come back." That’s a scenario for which Khashoggi says Saudi security forces are painstakingly preparing.

Several U.S. citizens have tried to involve themselves in the Iraq jihad. In December an American was arrested in Cairo, Egypt, accused of being part of a cell plotting terrorist attacks in Iraq. And in February 2006 three Americans from Toledo, Ohio, were arrested for allegedly plotting to kill U.S. military personnel in Iraq. According to the FBI, one of these individuals, Mohammad Zaki Amawi, was in contact with an Arab jihadist group sending fighters to Iraq and tried unsuccessfully to cross the border into Iraq. However, to date there is no evidence of Americans actually fighting in Iraq so the number of returnees to the United States is likely to be small. The larger risk is that jihadists will migrate from Iraq to Western countries, a trend that will be accelerated if, as happened following the Afghan jihad against the Soviets, those fighters are not allowed to return to their home countries.

Already terrorist groups in Iraq may be in a position to start sending funds to other jihadist fronts. According to a U.S. government report leaked to the New York Times in November 2006, the fact that insurgent and terrorist groups are raising up to $200 million a year from various illegal activities such as kidnapping and oil theft in Iraq means that they "may have surplus funds with which to support other terrorist organizations outside Iraq." Indeed, a letter from Al Qaeda’s No. 2, Ayman al Zawahiri, to Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi in July 2005 contained this revealing request: "Many of the [funding] lines have been cut off. Because of this we need a payment while new lines are being opened. So if you’re capable of sending a payment of approximately one hundred thousand we’ll be very grateful to you."

The "globalization of martyrdom" prompted by the Iraq War has not only attracted foreign fighters to die in Iraq (we record 148 suicide-terrorist attacks in Iraq credited to an identified jihadist group) but has also encouraged jihadists to conduct many more suicide operations elsewhere. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there has been a 246 percent rise in the rate of suicide attacks (6 before and 47 after) by jihadist groups outside of Iraq and a 24 percent increase in the corresponding fatality rate. Even excluding Afghanistan, there has been a 150 percent rise in the rate of suicide attacks and a 14 percent increase in the rate of fatalities attributable to jihadists worldwide. The reasons for the spread of suicide bombing attacks in other jihadist theaters are complex but the success of these tactics in Iraq, the lionization that Iraqi martyrs receive on jihadist websites, and the increase in feelings of anger and frustration caused by images of the Iraq War have all likely contributed significantly. The spread of suicide bombings should be of great concern to the United States in defending its interests and citizens around the world, because they are virtually impossible to defend against.

The Iraq War has also encouraged the spread of more hardline forms of jihad (the corollary to an increase in suicide bombing). Anger and frustration over Iraq has increased the popularity, especially among young militants, of a hardcore takfiri ideology that is deeply intolerant of divergent interpretations of Islam and highly tolerant of extreme forms of violence. The visceral anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Shiism widely circulated among the Internet circles around ideologues such as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Abu Qatada (both Jordanian-Palestinian mentors to Abu Musab al Zarqawi) and Al Qaeda’s Syrian hawk, Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, are even more extreme, unlikely as it may sound, than the statements of bin Laden himself.

Our study shows just how counterproductive the Iraq War has been to the war on terrorism. The most recent State Department report on global terrorism states that the goal of the United States is to identify, target, and prevent the spread of "jihadist groups focused on attacking the United States or its allies [and those groups that] view governments and leaders in the Muslim world as their primary targets." Yet, since the invasion of Iraq, attacks by such groups have risen more than sevenfold around the world. And though few Americans have been killed by jihadist terrorists in the past three years it is wishful thinking to believe that this will continue to be the case, given the continued determination of militant jihadists to target the country they see as their main enemy. We will be living with the consequences of the Iraq debacle for more than a decade.

Special thanks to Mike Torres and Zach Stern at NYU and Kim Cragin and Drew Curiel at RAND.
<< The Iraq Effect Pg.5 << >> The Data: The Iraq War and Jihadist Terrorism >> Go on-site for sources, charts, etc. Just click on the following URLs:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2007/03/iraq_101.html

http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2007/03/iraq_effect_1.html [B]....... .

[Saundra Hummer]

.~~~~~~~~~
"We have art to save ourselves from the truth."

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
~~~
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

Napoleon Bonaparte
(1769-1821)
~~~
"I think 'Hail to the Chief' has a nice ring to it."

John F. Kennedy
(1917-1963)
when asked what is his favorite song
~~~
"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."

H. G. Wells
(1866-1946)
~~~
"Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake a whole relationship."

Sharon Stone
~~~
"If you are going through hell, keep going."

Sir Winston Churchill
(1874-1965)
~~~
"Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions."

Frank Lloyd Wright
(1868-1959)
~~~
"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."

Frank Lloyd Wright
(1868-1959)
~~~
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."

Oscar Wilde
(1854-1900)
~~~
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."

Voltaire
(1694-1778)
~~~
"I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."

Sir Winston Churchill
(1874-1965)
~~~
"If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars."

J. Paul Getty
(1892-1976)
~~~
"Facts are the enemy of truth."

Don Quixote
"Man of La Mancha"
~~~
"When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world."

George Washington Carver
(1864-1943)
~~~
"How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself."

Anais Nin
(1903-1977)
~~~
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Thomas Alva Edison
(1847-1931)~~~~~~~ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
$$$$$$$$$
That's Just My Opinion
By
Mike Whitney

02/26/07 "ICH" -- -- Gold traders love Dick Cheney. Every time he opens his twisted lip and barks out another threat to Iran, the dollar takes a powder while gold futures shoot to the moon. Maybe that’s the way Cheney likes it. After all, he dumped about $25 million in euro-bonds before he took office. Judging by the way he and brother-Bush have flogged dollar, he must have doubled his investment by now.

The old greenback has dropped nearly 35% in the last 6 years while gold has just about tripled. In 2000 the dollar was a trim, sinewy pillar of strength. It entered the ring like a young Mohammed Ali; darting to and fro while pummeling ihis prey with quick laser-like blows that were barely visible. Now, the greenback plods along like a 60 year old Rocky Balboa, wheezing heavily and reeling with every punch; waiting for the one roundhouse that will leave him staring up from the canvas, spitting up broken teeth and blood.

Ooooh; that hurts.
The dollar’s in a heap o’ trouble and Cheney is doing his level-best to make sure that it hits the skids before he leaves office. Just yesterday the snappish Vice President said, "It would be a serious mistake if a nation like Iran were to become a nuclear power. Then he added ominously, "All options are still on the table."

That oughta put the dollar on life support, eh?
At present, the rest of the world is really wondering if dollar’s going to pull through. Central banks in Europe, Japan, and China have increased money supply and kept rates low in order to prop up the droopy greenback. But that won’t last. Eventually, they’ll all have to raise rates to slow inflation and stop equity bubbles from going haywire. (The Chinese stock market increased by a whopping 140% in one year. They probably don’t want a Dot.com-type meltdown like we had in the US.) Regrettably, once interest rates start to rise, the dollar slip quickly from view leaving only fetid trail of vapor behind.

It’s astonishing how cavalier Cheney and the gaggle of racketeers at the Federal Reserve have been regarding the dollar. After all, why kill the goose that lays the golden egg?

As the world’s “reserve currency” the fed can simply print out a couple trillion whenever it comes up short and bring back boatloads of sleek, Chinese manufactured goods or tankers weighed down with petroleum to power our boxcar-sized SUVs. Or, maybe, Bernanke would rather crank-out another $12 billion in crisp $100 bills, shrink-wrapped and loaded onto pallets and sent off to Iraq where they can vanish in the black hole of corporate malfeasance.

No prob-Bob.
But what happens when the rest of the world sees that the “stewards of the global economic system” (that’s us) are nothing but a bunch of Texas yahoos, religious zealots, and war-mongering boneheads?

See, the funny thing about money is that it requires confidence in the provider that he will honor his part of the deal and operate in good faith. Otherwise, no one would dream of exchanging valuable resources and manufactured goods for silly, green tokens of credit-based fiat money with squiggly writing and funny looking men in powdered wigs on it.

We all expect money to have value, and yet, the Bush team continue to sabotage the currency with their unfunded tax cuts, their $9 per month war in Iraq, and their 35% expansion of the federal government. (Remember when Clinton said the “era of big government is over”?) The result of this craziness was thoroughly predictable; central banks are running for the exits.

Last Firday, the government reported that net capital inflows reversed from the requisite $70 billion to AN OUTFLOW OF $11 BILLION!
The current account deficit (which includes the trade deficit) is running at roughly $800 billion per year, which means that the US must attract about $70 billion per month of foreign investment (US Treasuries or securities) to compensate for America's extravagant spending. When foreign investment stumbles, as it did in December, it puts downward pressure on the dollar.

So what does it all mean?
It means they don’t want our stinking greenbacks. And, if they don’t resume purchasing our debt (US Treasuries or securities) the dollar will join Rocky Balboa on the canvas peering up blankly at the klieg lights.

“The full faith and credit” of the USA does not mean what it did 6 years ago. That’s a fact.

The Bush-Cheney-Federal Reserve axis believe they can keep this ponzi-scheme going by cornering the oil market (attacking Iran) and forcing the oil-thirsty world to accept our feeble banknotes. But that’s just nuts. The Chinese are already killing us by buying up oil and natural gas leasing rights around the world WITH OUR OWN DOLLARS!

It wasn’t supposed to work that way. We thought we were being clever by destroying the American labor movement and shipping our industry to China. We figured we could vanquish the middle class at home while we put the “fear o’ god” in the Chinese with our “shock and awe military” that was supposed to be out of Iraq in 3 years at the most.

How’d that work out?
Now the housing-bubble millstone is pulling millions of home owners beneath the waves while the maxed American consumer is down to his last credit card. In other words, the $11 trillion of new debt that was cleverly engineered through Greenspan’s low interest rate bonanza is about to detonate and bring the whole, wretched tower of American debt crashing to earth.

The US economy hasn’t depended on productivity for years, even though the American people work harder and longer than their better-paid counterparts in Europe. This entire mess was brought on by stagnant wages, the wealth gap, and a system that rewards the villaso-raptures at the top of the economic food-chain. Like Cheney, they believe they can keep this scam going on forever; forcing the world to take worthless sheets green scrip that’s backed up by $8.7 trillion of debt and wouldn’t even make good bird-cage liner.

But, then, that’s just my opinion.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17182.htm
$$$$$$$
.

[Saundra Hummer]

. ~~~~~~~

"A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one!"

Alexander Hamilton
~~~
"The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded."

Charles-Louis De Secondat
(1689-1755)
Baron de Montesquieu
Source: The Spirit of the Laws, 1748

~~~
"A man’s liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited."

Herbert Spencer
(1820-1903)
British author, economist, philosopher -
Source: The Principles of Ethics Bd. II,
ed. T. Machan, Indianapolis 1978, S. 242-43
~~~
"The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes."

Thomas Paine
~~~
"In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."

Mark Twain

~~~~~.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
.............
Let's hope this is just so much speculation, something not based on facts! I do have to say that anything this administration may pull is expected at this point in time. We have it's past history to gauge it & them on. This scenario is pretty spooky. SRH

Operation Falcon and the Looming Police State

By
Mike Whitney

02/26/07 "ICH" --- - On 29th June, 1934, Chancellor Adolph Hitler, accompanied by the Schutzstaffel (SS), arrived at Wiesse, where he personally arrested the leader of the Strum Abteilung (SA), Ernnst Roehm. During the next 24 hours 200 other senior SA officers were arrested on the way to Wiesse. Many were shot as soon as they were captured but Hitler decided to pardon Roehm because of his past service to the movement. However, after much pressure from Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, Hitler agreed that Roehm should die. At first Hitler insisted that Roehm should be allowed to commit suicide but, when he refused, Roehm was shot by two SS men. (Spartacus.schoolnet.co)


Later, Hitler delivered a speech at the Reichstag in which he justified the murders of his rivals saying:
"If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people. It was no secret that this time the revolution would have to be bloody; when we spoke of it we called it 'The Night of the Long Knives.' Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot."

The Night of the Long Knives is seen by many as the turning point where Hitler made it clear that he was above the law and the supreme leader of the German people.


Operation Falcon: Blueprint for removing dissidents and political rivals

The Bush administration has carried out three massive sweeps in the last two years, rolling up more than 30,000 minor crooks and criminals, without as much as a whimper of protest from the public.

Operation Falcon is the clearest indication yet that the Bush administration is fine-tuning its shock-troops so it can roll up tens of thousands of people at a moment’s notice and toss them into the newly-built Halliburton detention centers. This should be a red flag for anyone who cares at all about human rights, civil liberties, or simply saving his own skin.

Operation Falcon was allegedly the brainchild of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his counterpart in the US Marshal's office, (Director) Ben Reyna. But its roots go much deeper into the nexus of right-wing Washington think tanks where fantasies of autocratic government have a long history. The name, Falcon, is an acronym for “Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally.” It relates to the more than 960 state, local and federal agencies which are directly involved in the administration’s expansive criminal dragnets.

Typically, law enforcement agencies are protective of their own turf and wary of outside intervention. The Falcon program overrides these concerns by streamlining the information-sharing processes and setting up a chain-of-command structure that radiates from the Justice Department. This removes many of the traditional obstacles to agency interface. It also relocates the levers of power in Washington where thy can be manned by members of the Bush administration.

Dictatorships require strong centralized authority and the Falcon program is a logical corollary of that ambition. It creates new inroads for Bush to assume greater control over the nationwide police-state apparatus. That alone should be sufficient reason for alarm.

The first Operation Falcon took place during the week of April 4 to April 10, 2005. According to the US Marshal’s official website, “The emphasis centered on gang related crimes, homicides, crimes involving use of a weapon, crimes against children and the elderly, crimes involving sexual assaults, organized crime and drug related fugitives, and other crimes of violence.” More than 10,000 criminal suspects were arrested in a matter of days. It was the largest criminal sweep in the nation’s history and, according to U.S. Marshall chief Ben Reyna, “produced the largest number of arrests ever recorded during a single initiative.” The Washington Times noted, “The sweep was a virtual clearinghouse for warrants on drug, gang, gun and sex-offender suspects nationwide.”


The emphasis was clearly on quantity not quality.

Still, this doesn’t explain why state and federal agencies had to be integrated with local law enforcement simply to carry out routine police work.

More importantly, it doesn’t explain why local police ignored their duty to protect the public just so they could coordinate with outside agencies. According to one report “162 accused or convicted of murder” were picked up in the first sweep. That means that the police knowingly left murderers on the street and put the public at risk while they orchestrated their raids with federal agencies.

That’s irresponsible. It also suggests that there may be a more sinister motive behind the program than just ensuring public safety. The plan appears to have been devised to enhance the powers of the “unitary” executive by putting state and local law enforcement under federal supervision. Once again, it’s an attempt by the administration to extend its grip to the state and local level. We saw a similar strategy unfold after Hurricane Katrina when the Bush administration used the tragedy to seize control of local police and National Guard units so they could establish de facto martial law. Troops, armored vehicles and mercenaries were deployed to New Orleans to fight lawlessness and looting even though desperate people were still stranded on their rooftops waiting for food, water and medical attention.

Operation FALCON II was another massive dragnet which covered the western half of the country and focused primarily on “violent sex offenders”. The raids took place from April 17-23, and succeeded in apprehending 9,037 alleged fugitives. The US Marshals web site boasts that the operation “took some of the country's most dangerous wanted criminals off the streets and made America's communities safer”.

Nonsense. Despite the claims of success, only 462 “violent sex crime” suspects were arrested, along with 1,094 “unregistered sex offenders” and other minor “sex crime” suspects. That leaves 7,481 suspects who were rounded up for other unrelated reasons.

Who are they and what crime did they commit? Were these drug violations, dads who were delinquent on child-support payments, traffic tickets, jay-walking?!?

7,481 people who were incarcerated are unaccounted by the government’s estimate. This means that the bulk of them were probably undocumented workers who were shunted off to the INS (Immigration and Naturalization) or dispatched to Cheney’s tent-city gulags in western Texas. (See: Democracy Now “Human Rights Groups Call for Closure of Texas Jail Holding Undocumented Immigrants” 2-23-07)

Similar inconsistencies appear in “Operation FALCON III, which covered the eastern half of the country from October 22 - 28, 2006.” State, local and federal police-units arrested 10,773 fugitives; including 1,659 sex offenders, 971 unregistered sex offenders, 364 gang members, 140 homicide suspects, and 3,609 drug violations. Once again, the US Marshal’s official tally doesn’t pencil out. This time, 4,030 extra people were rounded up without any further explanation.

Who are they and have they been charged with a crime?

Furthermore, sex offenders, drug users and gang-bangers are not what we normally consider “some of the country's most dangerous wanted criminals”. In fact, there are indications that the great majority of these people are not violent at all. For example, of the 30,110 total fugitives who were apprehended in all three Falcon sweeps, a measly 586 firearms were seized.

Clearly, the people who were arrested for the most part were not “armed and dangerous” nor were they a serious threat to public safety. They were probably just the unwitting victims of an overzealous US Marshals office and an ideologically-driven Justice Department.

So, what was the real impetus for the Falcon raids? Was it just a bean-counting exercise to see how many people would fit in the back of a Paddy-wagon or are they a dress rehearsal for future crackdowns on potential enemies of the state?


Bogus News Reports
The Falcon operation illustrates the incestuous relationship between the media and the state. They are two wings on the same plane. The Justice Department provided the TV networks with official footage of policemen and government agents raiding homes and handcuffing suspects; and the media dutifully aired the video on stations across the country. The scenes were accompanied by a reassuring commentary lauding the administration’s new crime fighting strategies and linking homeland security with the nebulous war on terror.

Attorney General Gonzales told reporters, “Operation FALCON is an excellent example of President Bush’s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime.” He added, “This joint effort shows the commitment of our federal, state, and local partners to make our neighborhoods safer, and it has led to the highest number of arrests ever recorded for a single initiative of its kind.”

So far, not one of the more than 30,000 victims has been charged with a terror-related crime.

The media-hype surrounding the raids has been celebratory and uniform; cookie-cutter articles appeared throughout the US press (most of them unsourced) highlighting the cooperation between the divers agencies while providing an upbeat account of what amounts to police repression. Thousands of nearly identical articles appeared in the nation’s newspapers which seem to have been authored by high-ranking officials at Homeland Security and protégés of George Orwell; although the difference between the two is far from certain.

Even stranger, most of the articles in the mainstream media can no longer be retrieved via a Google search. They seem to have vanished into the black-hole of Homeland propaganda.

No matter. If the media was supposed to make Gestapo-like crackdowns look like normal police operations; they succeeded admirably. Mission accomplished.

Former Governor of Louisiana, Huey Long once opined, “When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag.” Indeed, he could have added that the corporate media will gladly provide the flag and the public relations campaign as they have with Falcon.


Falcon; new drills for a new world order

The Falcon operations can only be understood in the broader context of the ongoing assault on the constitutional system of checks and balances; including the repeal of habeas corpus, warrantless wiretaps and searches, and the use of torture.

For the last 6 years, the Bush administration has been busy dismantling the legal safeguards which protect the citizen from the arbitrary and, oftentimes, ruthless actions of the state. To that end, detention camps are being prepared by Halliburton within the U.S., secret courts have been established which deny due process of law, American citizens are arrested without charge, law enforcement is increasingly militarized, and the media has strengthened its alliance with the central government.

Additionally, in October 2006, George Bush quietly changed the Insurrection Act, which prevented the President from deploying troops inside the United States. Bush’s revision effectively overturns the Posse Comitatus Act which put strict limits on the executive’s power to use US troops in domestic situations. Just days earlier Bush signed a similar bill, "The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" which gives Bush the power to take command of National Guard units across the country which are traditionally under the control of the state governors.

Without fanfare, Bush has taken control of all armed forces and militias inside and outside of the country and now has a monopoly on all the state-sanctioned tools of organized violence. It’s a coup that could never have succeeded without the tacit cooperation of the media.

Bush is now free to declare martial law in response to a natural disaster, a pandemic or a terrorist attack. The congress is powerless to stop him.

Also, Bush recently signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows the president to arbitrarily declare citizens and non citizens “enemy combatants” and imprison them indefinitely without charge. The new law gives Bush the authority to disregard the Geneva Conventions and the 8th amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment and apply “harsh interrogation” which may include torture. The act effectively repeals habeas corpus, the cornerstone of American jurisprudence and the Bill of Rights.

The Military Commissions Act cannot coexist with the US Constitution; the two are mutually exclusive.

The Military Commissions Act, The John Warner Defense Authorization Act, the Homeland Security Act, the Patriot Act, and the myriad presidential signing statements have conferred absolute power on George Bush. The question is whether or not some incident will arise that will persuade Bush to use his extraordinary new powers.

General Tommy Franks predicted that a “massive, casualty producing event” might cause “our population to question our own Constitution and begin to militarize our country;” a scenario that many see as likely now.

Is that it? Will another terrorist attack provide the rationale for overturning republican government and declaring martial law?

If so, then we should know what to expect.

According to FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) it would mean “the suspension of the normal functions of civilian government, implying the cancellation or postponement of state and federal elections.” (Global Research) It would also “close public and government facilities not critical for continuity of essential operations.” (FEMA)

Northern Command would assume control and under “the classified 'Continuity of Government” (COG) Operations Plan' a secret 'shadow government' would become functional, redeploying key staff to secret locations.” (Global Research)

Also, “all forms of public gatherings or citizen's protests which question the legitimacy of the emergency procedures and the installation of a police state” would be banned. The military would be deployed to carry out “police and judicial” functions.

Martial law in the US would be applied with the utmost attention to public sensibilities and perceptions, avoiding the garish display of force we see in Iraq. It would be a “kinder and gentler” martial law with a limited number of military personnel on the streets (just enough to remind us that things have changed) and an emphasis on “preemptive” policing operations. (Expect Falcons’ 4, 5 and 6 etc) It would probably be disguised by a carefully crafted public relations campaign and a predictably cheery moniker, such as, “The Security Enhancement and Homeland Fortification Act”. The possibilities are limitless.

The Bush administration is also prepared if some unforeseen tragedy befalls congress, like another anthrax attack.

In fact, the American Enterprise Institute, to which the Bush team is closely aligned, has already "issued proposals for the operation of Congress following a catastrophic terrorist attack". They advocate the "APPOINTING" of individuals to the House of Representatives "to fill the seats of dead or incapacitated members, a first in American history" "The Continuity of Government Commission is self-commissioned', its members being neither elected nor appointed by any government body and mostly made up of professional lobbyists". (Read the whole article: http://www.conservativeusa.org/cog-ronpaul.htm) (Coincidentally, Newsweek article “White House Rehearses for Domestic Attack” 2-23-07; “The White House is staging a high-level exercise Saturday to test responses to the prospect of a massive domestic terrorist attack.” These drills are a critical part of the C.O.G. regimen dating back to the Reagan administration)

According to the AEI’s plan, the future United States congress will be comprised of lobbyists and industry representatives. What else would one expect from an organization that believes that corporate interests should determine policy?

These are the chilling precedents which have paved the way for further government lawlessness and abuse. They foreshadow the ominous transition from representative government to autocratic rule; from inalienable rights to martial law.

The Falcon operations are just a small part of this larger paradigm. The program is not designed for rounding up minor crooks and drug dealers, (which no one really cares about anyway) but for removing leftists, dissidents and political rivals. These are the real targets. The power of the state is measured in terms of how effectively it defeats or eliminates its enemies. And, the Bush administration has shown a remarkable aptitude for crushing its rivals.


The Crawford Fuehrer
One day, after a particularly savage domestic purge; we can expect President Bush to stride to the presidential podium and reiterate the same words that were uttered by his German predecessor 60 years ago:

"If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the American people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the American people….Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot."


To go on-site click on the following URL:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17190.htm
................. .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
^^^^^^^^^^^
Neocon Imperialism, 9/11, and the Attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq

By
David Ray Griffin

02/27/07 "ICH" -- - -One way to understand the effect of 9/11, in most general terms, is to see that it allowed the agenda developed in the 1990s by neoconservatives—-often called simply “neocons”---to be implemented. There is agreement on this point across the political spectrum. From the right, for example, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke say that 9/11 allowed the “preexisting ideological agenda” of the neoconservatives to be “taken off the shelf . . . and relabeled as the response to terror.”1 Stephen Sniegoski, writing from the left, says that “it was only the traumatic effects of the 9/11 terrorism that enabled the agenda of the neocons to become the policy of the United States of America.”2

What was this agenda? It was, in essence, that the United States should use its military supremacy to establish an empire that includes the whole world--a global Pax Americana. Three major means to this end were suggested. One of these was to make U.S. military supremacy over other nations even greater, so that it would be completely beyond challenge. This goal was to be achieved by increasing the money devoted to military purposes, then using this money to complete the “revolution in military affairs” made possible by the emergence of the information age. The second major way to achieve a global Pax Americana was to announce and implement a doctrine of preventive-preemptive war, usually for the sake of bringing about “regime change” in countries regarded as hostile to U.S. interests and values. The third means toward the goal of universal empire was to use this new doctrine to gain control of the world’s oil, especially in the Middle East, most immediately Iraq.

In discussing these ideas, I will include recognitions by some commentators that without 9/11, the various dimensions of this agenda could not have been implemented. My purpose in publishing this essay is to introduce a perspective, relevant to the debates about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, that thus far has not been part of the public discussion.

1. Neoconservatives and Global Empire
The “neo” in the term “neo-conservative” is a remnant of the fact that the first generation neoconservatives, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, had moved to the right after having been members of the left. Kristol, often called “the godfather of neoconservatism,” famously defined neoconservatives as liberals who had been “mugged by reality.” No such move, however, has characterized most of the second-generation neocons, who came to dominate the movement in the 1990s. As Gary Dorrien says in Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana, “the new neocons had never been progressives of any kind.”3 The term “neoconservatism” is, in any case, used here to refer strictly to an ideology, not to any biographical facts about those who hold this ideology.

I mean “biographical facts” to include ethnicity. Although many of the prominent neoconservatives have been Jewish, leading some people to think that Jewishness is a necessary condition for being a neo-conservative, this is not so. As Dorrien points out, “a significant number of prominent neocons were not Jews.”4

This discussion has its primary importance in relation to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. If neoconservatism is understood to be entirely a matter of ideology, not also partly a matter of biography, then there is no reason not to think of Cheney and Rumsfeld as neocons. As former neocon Michael Lind, says: “[N]eoconservatism is an ideology, like paleoconservatism and libertarianism, and Rumsfeld and Dick . . . Cheney are full-fledged neocons, . . . even though they are not Jewish and were never liberals or leftists.”5

Neoconservatism in its early decades was a multi-faceted phenomenon, but the focus here is on its foreign policy. Neoconservative foreign policy was originally oriented around opposition to Communism. This fact meant that the end of the Cold War produced a crisis for neocons. In 1991, after the fall of the Berlin wall, Podhoretz said that he was not sure what “America’s purpose should be now that the threat of Communism . . . had been decisively eliminated.” Five years later, he even published a eulogy to the movement, declaring it dead.6

Unipolarity
Other neocons, however, believed that they had a new cause to champion. Already in 1986, Irving Kristol argued that the United States needed to move toward a foreign policy of “global unilateralism.” But that would be difficult, he pointed out, as long as America is “an imperial power with no imperial self-definition.”7 The new cause was to shape this new self-definition, thereby getting Americans ready to accept a policy of global unilateralism.

As soon as the Cold War ended, this cause was taken up by others. At the close of 1989, Charles Krauthammer, one of the best-known neocon columnists, published a piece entitled “Universal Dominion,” in which he argued that America should work for “a qualitatively new outcome--a unipolar world.”8 In 1990, he argued that unipolarity has already arrived and that the United States, being the “unchallenged superpower,” should act unilaterally. Saying that “[t]he alternative to unipolarity is chaos,” Krauthammer explained what unipolarity requires of the United States: “unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.”9 The following year, in an argument for a “robust interventionism,” he said of this unipolar world: “We Americans should like it---and exploit it.”10

The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance
The first effort to turn such thinking into official policy came in 1992, which was the last year of the presidency of George H. W. Bush and hence also the end of Dick Cheney’s tenure as secretary of defense. Before leaving office, Cheney had Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense for policy, prepare---with the help of his top assistant, Lewis “Scooter” Libby---a draft of the Pentagon’s “Defense Planning Guidance” (DPG).11 Stating that America’s “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” this DPG draft was, in Andrew Bacevich’s appraisal, “in effect a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony.”12

This draft produced, after portions of a leaked copy were published in the New York Times and the Washington Post,13 an outpouring of criticism. The ideas did get some support, especially from neoconservative publications such as the Wall Street Journal, which praised the draft’s plan for a “Pax Americana.”14 But most of the reaction was critical. Senator Alan Cranston complained that the Bush administration was seeking to make the United States “the one, the only main honcho on the world block, the global Big Enchilada.”15 Senator Robert Byrd said that the document’s stance seemed to be: “We love being the sole remaining superpower in the world and we want so much to remain that way that we are willing to put at risk the basic health of our economy and well-being of our people to do so.”16

Seeking to calm the waters, especially because it was an election year, the administration of George H. W. Bush distanced itself from this draft, depicting it, in Bacevich’s words, “as the musings of an insignificant lower-tier appointee acting without official sanction.”17 Although Wolfowitz would refer to it as “my 1992 memorandum” many years later,18 he claimed at the time that he had not seen it.19 Cheney also claimed not to have seen it, even though one long section began by acknowledging “definitive guidance from the Secretary of Defense.” This latter fact has, incidentally, been pointed out by David Armstrong, who calls this draft an early version of Cheney’s “Plan . . . to rule the world.”20 Although this draft came to be known as “the Wolfowitz plan,” it is important to recognize that it was Cheney who, in Dorrien’s words, “hatched the original unipolarist blueprint in 1992.”21 Indeed, as Nicholas Lemann has reported in the New Yorker, the DPG draft resulted from a secret team that Cheney had set up in the Pentagon “to think about American foreign policy after the Cold War.”22

The recognition that this unipolarist blueprint was inspired by Cheney is important in light of the unprecedented power that he would exercise in the second Bush administration. As presidential historian Douglas Brinkley would say in 2002: “Cheney is unique in American history. . . . He is the vortex in the White House on foreign policymaking. Everything comes through him.”23

In any case, Cheney, under pressure from the White House, had the document significantly rewritten by Libby, in language more acceptable at the time. For example, whereas the first draft spoke of spurning collective action through the United Nations, this new version spoke of strengthening the U.N.24 Cheney put an end to this brief public debate about the wisdom of a unipolarist foreign policy by having this softer version, which was later published,25 leaked to the press.26

The 1990s and PNAC
This rewriting did not mean, however, that the ideas were dropped by Cheney and other neoconservatives. Indeed, after the election was over, Cheney, before leaving office, put out another revision, in which some of the neo-imperial language was restored.27 Then Zalmay Khalilzad, who had joined Cheney’s team in 1991, put out a book early in 1995 entitled From Containment to Global Leadership? America and the World after the Cold War, which expresses quite forthrightly the idea of preventing, by military force if necessary, the rise of any rival power.28 In 1996, Robert Kagan, “who emerged in the 1990s as perhaps the most influential neocon foreign policy analyst,”29 argued that the United States should use its military strength “actively to maintain a world order which both supports and rests upon American hegemony.”30 In 1998, Kagan and William Kristol, who in 1995 had founded the Weekly Standard (which quickly became the main organ of neocon thinking), wrote that unless America takes charge, we will have “world chaos, and a dangerous twenty-first century.”31 In January of 2001, as the Bush-Cheney administration was ready to come to power, Kagan criticized “Clinton and his advisers” for “having the stomach only to be halfway imperialists.”32

It is important to understand the development of this neoconservative ideology, given the fact that after 9/11, the neocon agenda became the agenda of the United States. As Halper and Clarke said in 2004, “if one wishes to understand the direction of American foreign policy today, one must read what neo-conservatives were writing ten years or more ago.”33

The most important development within the neocon movement in the 1990s was William Kristol’s founding, in 1997, of a unipolarist think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).34 Closely related to the American Enterprise Institute ideologically and even physically and financially, PNAC differed primarily in focusing entirely on foreign policy.35 In its “Statement of Principles,” PNAC called for “American global leadership,” asking whether the United States has “the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.”36

In September of 2000, just three months before the Bush-Cheney administration took office, PNAC published a 76-page document entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses (RAD). Saying that “[a]t present the United States faces no global rival,” RAD declared that “America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position” and thereby “to preserve and enhance [the] ‘American peace.’” To “enhance” the “American peace” means, of course, to increase the size of the American empire. Explicitly referring back to the Cheney-Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guidance draft of 1992, RAD said that “the basic tenets of the DPG, in our judgment, remain sound.” The continuity between the two documents is no surprise, partly because Libby and Wolfowitz are listed as participants in the production of this 2000 document.37

What is said in the PNAC’s documents is highly important because many of PNAC’s early members, including Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Eliot Cohen, Paula Dobriansky, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, James Woolsey, and---most significantly---Cheney, Libby, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, became central members of the new Bush administration. PNAC neocons thereby took key positions in the Vice President’s Office, the Pentagon, and the (only semi-independent) Defense Policy Board. They did so well primarily because of Cheney, who was put in charge of the transition team, and secondarily because of Rumsfeld, after Cheney chose him to head the Pentagon.38

9/11 and Empire Talk
With the new administration in place, neocon commentators such as Krauthammer became even more explicit and exuberant about the use of America’s power for imperial ends. Mocking Clinton for being concerned to be “a good international citizen” and praising Bush for understanding that “the U.S. can reshape, indeed remake, reality on its own,” Krauthammer said: “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms . . . and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”39

However, it was not until after 9/11, and especially after the devastating assault on Afghanistan, that the neocon effort to get Americans to accept an imperial self-definition started showing widespread success. Early in 2002, Krauthammer, having noticed the difference, said: “People are coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire.’” Driving home his main message, Krauthammer added that Americans needed to face up to the responsibilities entailed by the fact that they are now “undisputed masters of the world.”40

A year later, this unilateralist idea was voiced in the Atlantic Monthly by neocon Robert Kaplan, who argued that America should use its power unilaterally to “manage an unruly world,” leaving behind “the so-called international community,” especially the United Nations, with its “antiquated power arrangement.”41

9/11 and the 9/11 wars---meaning those that have been justified by appeal to the attacks of 9/1142---resulted in empire talk beyond the circles of neocons. Early in 2002, after the American assault on Afghanistan, Paul Kennedy, who had 15 years earlier been predicting America’s decline as a great power,43 declared: “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power.” Describing America’s empire as the greatest of all time, he said: “Charlemagne’s empire was merely Western European in reach. The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia, and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison.”44

A very important development that same year was the publication of Andrew Bacevich’s American Empire, which closes by saying that the question before Americans is “not whether the United States has become an imperial power” but only “what sort of empire they intend theirs to be.”45 Bacevich himself, while a conservative, strongly distanced himself from the imperial agenda of the neocons.46

But it was their agenda, not Bacevich’s cautionary critique, that would determine the “sort of empire” that the United States would seek to become during the Bush-Cheney administration. And it was 9/11 that allowed this agenda to be implemented. As Claes Ryn said, the neoconservatives “have taken full advantage of the nation’s outrage over 9/11 to advance their already fully formed drive for empire.”47

2. Military Omnipotence
The tool for fulfilling this drive for empire, neocons have always held, is military power. To a great extent, in fact, the neoconservative movement began in reaction to the widespread view after the Vietnam war that American military power should never again be used for imperialistic purposes. In the early 1980s, rejecting the left’s conclusion that force had become “obsolete as an instrument of American political purposes,” Norman Podhoretz argued that military power constitutes “the indispensable foundation of U.S. foreign policy,” adding that “without it, nothing else we do will be effective.”48

The Cheney-Wolfowitz DPG of 1992, having said that “[o]ur first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” added that “we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a regional or global role.” These “mechanisms” referred, of course, to various kinds of military power.

Space and Full Spectrum Dominance
The U.S. military in the 1990s developed concepts to attain the kind of military superiority envisaged in this document. One of these concepts was “Full Spectrum Dominance,” which, says Bacevich, is the attempt “to achieve something approaching omnipotence.”49 He is here referring to a document entitled “Joint Vision 2010,” which was first published by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1996. Defining “Full Spectrum Dominance” as “the capability to dominate an opponent across the range of military operations,” this document says that it “will be the key characteristic we seek for our Armed Forces in the 21st century.”50 Given the fact that the U.S. military was already dominant on the land and the water and in the air, the new component needed was dominance in space.

Space dominance was described in a 1997 document entitled “Vision for 2020,” published by the U.S. Space Command, a division of the Air Force. The unique mission of the Space Command is to “dominat[e] the space dimension of military operations.” By merging this “space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority,” the U.S. military will have Full Spectrum Dominance.51

This notion was further developed in the Pentagon’s “Joint Vision 2020,” which first appeared in 2000.52 It speaks of full spectrum dominance as involving not just four but five dimensions: “space, sea, land, air, and information.” In addition, this document says, “given the global nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain its overseas presence forces and the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full spectrum dominance.” This statement gives support to Bacevich’s observation that after the end of the Cold War, “the Department of Defense completed its transformation into a Department of Power Projection.”53

PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses appeared in September of that same year. Written to influence the next administration, RAD’s main point was that “the next president of the United States . . . must increase military spending to preserve American geopolitical leadership.”54

Besides arguing for increased spending across the board, RAD argued in particular for increased funding for the U.S. Space Command. Saying that “the ability to have access to, operate in, and dominate the aerospace environment has become the key to military success in modern, high-technology warfare,” it advocated not only “missile defense” but also “placing . . . weapons in space.” The weapons, moreover, are not simply for defensive purposes, but also for “the ability to conduct strikes from space,” which will give the U.S. military a “global first-strike force.”55

The Revolution in Military Affairs
This development of space-based weapons was presented as simply one part, albeit probably the most important part, of a more general transformation of the military that exploits the “revolution in military affairs” (RMA), which has been made possible by information technologies.56 This RMA transformation of the military was said to be “sufficiently important to consider it a separate mission.”57

In spite of this importance, however, the authors of RAD, ever mindful of budgetary constraints and widespread commitment to more traditional ways, warned that the needed transformation would not occur quickly, at least if the present climate continued. In a statement that has been widely quoted in the 9/11 truth movement, they wrote that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event---like a new Pearl Harbor.”58

The emphasis in RAD on exploiting the RMA to transform the Pentagon’s approach is no surprise, since one of the participants in the project to produce this document was Wolfowitz, who had long before fallen under the spell of Albert Wohlstetter (one of the models for “Dr. Strangelove”59). Wohlstetter had been the main early proponent of the ideas that came to be dubbed the “revolution in military affairs” by Andrew Marshall, who later became the main proponent.60 Marshall, who at this writing was still serving as the RMA guru in the Pentagon, numbers Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld among his disciples.61

Rumsfeld, in fact, was at the same time heading up a special commission to make recommendations about the military use of space. This “Rumsfeld Commission,” endorsing the idea of military transformation, including the weaponization of space, said that the United States should “[e]mploy space systems to help speed the transformation of the U.S. military into a modern force able to deter and defend against evolving threats directed at . . . [our] forward deployed forces.”62 (In other words, although the language of “defense” and “deterrence” is used, part of the purpose of the space weapons is to prevent attacks on America’s offensive operations.) This report, interestingly, also used the Pearl Harbor analogy. Warning against the tendency to consider an attack on U.S. space satellites as too improbable to worry about, the report of the Rumsfeld Commission said:

History is replete with instances in which warning signs were ignored and change resisted until an external, “improbable” event forced resistant bureaucracies to take action. The question is whether the U.S. will be wise enough to act responsibly and soon enough to reduce U.S. space vulnerability. Or whether, as in the past, a disabling attack against the country and its people—-a “Space Pearl Harbor”—-will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the U.S. Government to act.63

9/11 as the New Pearl Harbor
The attacks of 9/11 were widely referred to as a new Pearl Harbor. President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary on the night of 9/11: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.”64 Immediately after the attacks, many people, from Robert Kagan to Henry Kissinger to a writer for Time magazine, said that America should respond to the attacks of 9/11 in the same way it had responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor.65

Moreover, just as the attack on Pearl Harbor gave the United States the opportunity to enter World War II, which in turn allowed it to replace Great Britain as the leading imperial power, the attacks of 9/11 were widely regarded as an opportunity. Donald Rumsfeld stated that 9/11 created “the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world.”66 Condoleezza Rice reportedly told senior members of the National Security Council to “think about ‘how do you capitalize on these opportunities’ to fundamentally change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the wake of September 11th.”67 In a public address, she said that “if the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 bookend a major shift in international politics, then this is a period not just of grave danger, but of enormous opportunity.”68 According to Bob Woodward, the president himself said that the attacks provided “a great opportunity.”69 Only two days after 9/11, in fact, Bush said in a telephone conversation with Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor George Pataki of New York: “[T]hrough the tears of sadness I see an opportunity.” The next day, he reportedly used exactly the same words while talking to the press.70

Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker, dealing with this response to 9/11 as an opportunity, reports that he was told by a senior official of the Bush administration (who insisted on anonymity) that, in Lemann’s paraphrase, “the reason September 11th appears to have been ‘a transformative moment’ is not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat of which officials had previously been unaware as that it drastically reduced the American public's usual resistance to American military involvement overseas.”71 We did not, of course, hear that stated publicly by any member of the Bush-Cheney administration.

The attacks of 9/11 also reduced Congressional resistance to providing increased funding for Pentagon programs. On the evening of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld held a news briefing on the Pentagon attack. At this briefing, Senator Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was asked: “Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress have voiced fear that you simply don’t have enough money for the large increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defense. . . . Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending?”72 Congress immediately appropriated an additional $40 billion for the Pentagon and much more later, with few questions asked.

The attacks of 9/11, moreover, aided those who favored a transformation of the military along RMA lines. In the weeks before September 11, Bacevich reports, “military transformation appeared to be dead in the water,” because the military brass were “wedded to existing weapons systems, troop structure, and strategy.”73 But, Bacevich continues:

President Bush’s decision after September 11 to wage a global war against terror boosted the RMA’s stock. After 9/11, the Pentagon shifted from the business of theorizing about war to the business of actually waging it. This created an opening for RMA advocates to make their case. War plans . . . became the means for demonstrating once for all the efficacy of the ideas advanced by Wohlstetter and Marshall and now supported by . . . Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz.74

After the removal of Saddam Hussein, Richard Perle, who had long shared Wolfowitz’s enthusiasm for Wohlstetter’s ideas, said: “This is the first war that’s been fought in a way that would recognize Albert’s vision of future wars.”75

These ideas for achieving military omnipotence became official policy with the publication, one year after 9/11, of the Bush-Cheney administration’s National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS 2002), which said: “We must build and maintain our defenses beyond challenge” so that we can “dissuade future military competition.”76

The conviction that 9/11 provided an opportunity was also reflected in NSS 2002, which said: “The events of September 11, 2001, . . . opened vast, new opportunities.”77 One of the things for which it most clearly provided an opportunity was the doctrine of preemptive-preventive war.

3. Preemptive-Preventive War

This hyphenated term is used here for clarity. The doctrine in question, which involves attacking another country even though it poses no immediate threat, is technically called “preventive war.” This doctrine, which violates international law as reflected in the charter of the United Nations, is to be distinguished from what is technically called “preemptive war,” which occurs when Country A attacks Country B after learning that an attack from Country B is imminent---too imminent to allow time for the U.N. to intervene. These technical terms, however, are problematic, because although preventive war, being illegal, is worse than preemptive war, to most ears “preemption” sounds worse than “prevention.” As a result, many people speak of “preemptive war” when they mean preventive war. The term “preemptive-preventive war,” while somewhat cumbersome, solves this problem.78

Historical Emergence of the Doctrine
This doctrine of preemptive-preventive war had been advocated by neocons long before 9/11. It was contained already in the Cheney-Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, which said that the United States should use force to “preempt” and “preclude threats.”79

In 1996, Richard Perle and other neocons prepared a strategy paper entitled “A Clean Break” for Benjamin Netanyahu, who had recently been elected prime minister of Israel. This paper recommended that Israel, in making a clean break from previous strategies, establish “the principle of preemption.”80

In 1997, PNAC’s “Statement of Principles” argued that to exert “global leadership,” America needs to “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values.”81

In 1998, a letter from PNAC, signed by Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and 15 other members, urged President Clinton to “undertake military action” to eliminate “the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.”82

The Doctrine of Preemptive-Preventive War after 9/11
Although these neocons were anxious to have their doctrine of preemptive-preventive war accepted as national policy, this did not occur during the Clinton presidency or even during the first eight months of the Bush-Cheney administration. After 9/11, however, it did. “The events of 9/11,” observes Bacevich, “provided the tailor-made opportunity to break free of the fetters restricting the exercise of American power.”83

The idea of preemptive-preventive war, which came to be known as the “Bush doctrine,” was first clearly expressed in the president’s address at West Point in June 2002 (when the administration started preparing the American people psychologically for the attack on Iraq). Having stated that, in relation to the “new threats,” deterrence “means nothing” and containment is “not possible,” Bush even took aim at the traditional understanding of preemption, saying: “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” Then, using the language of preemption while really meaning preemptive-prevention, he said that America’s security “will require all Americans . . . to be ready for preemptive action.”84

NSS 2002
However, although the West Point speech provided a first statement of this new doctrine, it was in NSS 2002, published that September, that the new doctrine was laid out at some length. The covering letter, signed by the president, says that with regard to “our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies,” America will, in self-defense, “act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.”85 The document itself, saying that “our best defense is a good offense,” also states:

Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today's threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries' choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.86

To justify this doctrine, NSS 2002 argues that the United States must “adapt” the traditional doctrine of preemption, long recognized as a right, to the new situation, thereby turning it into a right of anticipatory (preventive) preemption:

For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. . . . We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. . . . The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, . . . the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.87

With this argument, the authors of NSS 2002 tried to suggest that, since this doctrine of anticipatory preemption simply involves adapting a traditionally recognized right to a new situation, it involves no great change. But it does. According to the traditional doctrine, one needed certain evidence that the other country was going to launch an immediate attack. According to the Bush Doctrine, by contrast, the United States can attack another country “even if uncertainty remains” and even, more flagrantly, if the United States knows that the threat from the other country is not yet “fully formed.”

The novelty here, to be sure, involves doctrine more than practice. The United States has in practice attacked several countries that presented no imminent military threat. But it always portrayed these attacks in such a way that they could appear to comport with international law. The attack on North Vietnam after the alleged incident in the Tonkin Gulf provides an example. But “[n]ever before,” point out Halper and Clarke, “had any president set out a formal national strategy doctrine that included [preventive] preemption.”88 This is a step of great significance, because it involves an explicit statement by the United States that the basic principle of international law, as embodied in the United Nations, does not apply to its own behavior.

Zelikow as Primary Drafter of NSS 2002
Max Boot, a neocon who has become well known through his newspaper columns, has described NSS 2002 as a “quintessentially neo-conservative document.”89 Now that the basic ideas of this document have been laid out, we can see the accuracy of his observation.

We can also see the importance of a still little-known fact: that Philip Zelikow, who would later become the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, was chosen by Condoleezza Rice to be the primary drafter of NSS 2002.90

According to James Mann in The Rise of the Vulcans, after Rice saw the first draft of this document (which had been prepared by Richard Haass, the director of policy planning in Colin Powell’s State Department), she “ordered the document be completely rewritten. She thought the Bush administration needed something bolder. . . . Rice turned the writing over to her old colleague, . . . Philip Zelikow.”91 (Rice and Zelikow had worked together in the National Security Council in the administration of the first President Bush; when the Republicans were out of power during the Clinton presidency, they wrote a book together; and then when she was appointed National Security Advisor for the second President Bush, she brought on Zelikow to help with the transition to the new National Security Council.) Given the content and tone of the document, one might assume that Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz had been involved in the process of creating it. According to Mann, however, “the hawks in the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney’s office hadn’t been closely involved, even though the document incorporated many of their key ideas. They had left the details and the drafting in the hands of Rice and Zelikow, along with Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley.”92

Some insight into Zelikow’s views before coming to this task might be garnered from an essay he co-authored in 1998 on “catastrophic terrorism.” In this essay, which suggests that he had been thinking about the World Trade Center and a new Pearl Harbor several years prior to 9/1, Zelikow and his co-authors say:

If the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or had effectively dispersed a deadly pathogen, the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.93

In any case, in light of Zelikow’s close relationship with the Bush administration and especially his authorship of NSS 2002, we cannot take seriously the claim of the 9/11 Commission that it sought to be “independent.”94 As executive director, he had tremendous power to shape the work of the Commission, deciding which issues it would investigate and which not, and he was primarily responsible for the final form of The 9/11 Commission Report.95 The Family Steering Committee, which represented families of victims of the 9/11 attacks, vigorously protested his appointment, calling for “Dr. Zelikow’s immediate resignation” and for the “Commission to apologize to the 9/11 families and America for this massive appearance of impropriety.”96 But these calls were dismissed.

Given Zelikow’s close relationship with the Bush-Cheney administration and his own authorship of NSS 2002, it is certainly no surprise that, as I reported in The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions,97 there is no mention of imperial interests that might have served as motives for the Bush-Cheney administration to have orchestrated or at least permitted the attacks of 9/11. The Zelikow-led Commission did not, for example, mention that PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses had suggested that the transformation of the military, through which unipolarity could be enforced more effectively, could occur more quickly if there were to be “a new Pearl Harbor”; it did not mention that the administration had had plans, to be discussed below, to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq prior to 9/11; and it did not mention that 9/11 had been described as presenting “opportunities” by Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, and, in fact, NSS 2002. Once we know of Zelikow’s authorship of that document, moreover, it is also no surprise to see that The 9/11 Commission Report contains a chapter---“What to Do? A Global Strategy”---that provides propaganda for the Bush-Cheney administration’s post-9/11 foreign policy.

I return now to the discussion of possible imperial motives for 9/11 within the Bush-Cheney administration.

4. The Attack on Afghanistan
Many times since the formal enunciation of the doctrine of preemptive-preventive warfare, the Bush-Cheney administration has defended it as necessitated by 9/11. In an address to the nation in 2004, for example, Bush said that the two lessons of 9/11 are that this country “must deal with gathering threats” and that it “must go on the offense and stay on the offense.”98 The first victim of this claimed right to “go on the offense” was Afghanistan.

Although the attacks of 9/11 were, according to the official story, planned and carried out by a non-state organization, al-Qaeda, rather than by some state, the Bush-Cheney administration used the attacks as a pretext to launch attacks on states---attacks that had been planned before 9/11. The justification for this switch was provided by Bush’s address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, in which he declared: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”99 The attack on Afghanistan was then justified on the grounds that the Taliban was “harboring” Osama bin Laden, the evil genius behind the 9/11 attacks, whom Bush on September 17 said he wanted “dead or alive” (after Cheney had said that he would willingly accept bin Laden’s “head on a platter”).100

But this was a pretext rather than the real reason for attacking Afghanistan---as illustrated by the fact that when the Bush administration had an opportunity to take bin Laden alive, it showed no interest. A week after 9/11, the Taliban said that it would hand OBL over---if the United States presented proof of his involvement in 9/11. But Bush refused to provide any such evidence, saying that there would be no negotiations or even discussion.101 Again, four weeks after the U.S. attack on Afghanistan began, a Taliban spokesman said: "We will negotiate. But . . . [w]e are not a province of the United States, to be issued orders to. We have asked for proof of Osama's involvement, but they have refused. Why?"102

There are probably two answers to this question. First, there is much evidence that the Bush administration did not want bin Laden, either dead or alive. One part of this evidence consists of several reports that the U.S. military in Afghanistan deliberately let bin Laden escape more than once.103 A second reason is that the Bush administration, besides knowing that bin Laden was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks, evidently decided that it could not even marshal convincing (albeit false) case that he was (as suggested by the fact that, after a White Paper presenting this proof was promised, it was never produced104). More recently, the FBI, in response to a query as to why does not list 9/11 as one of the crimes for which bin Laden is wanted, has said: “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11”105(a rather astounding admission that, one might think, should have been reported on the nightly news and in The New York Times).

To understand the real reasons for the attack on Afghanistan, one needs to look at some developments prior to 9/11. One such development was the publication in 1997 of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. As the subtitle shows, Brzezinski, while not a neoconservative, shared the neocons’ concern to maintain and enhance U.S. “primacy.” Portraying Central Asia, with its vast oil reserves, as the key to world power, Brzezinski argued that America, to ensure its continued primacy, must get control of this region, which would mean establishing several military bases there.

However, Brzezinski added, American democracy posed an obstacle:

America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. . . . The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.106

Brzezinski, however, then suggested a way in which this obstacle could be overcome. Having said that in the United States “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion,” he then added: “except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well being.”107 The American people would be willing to make the economic and human sacrifices needed for “imperial mobilization,” he suggested, if there were “a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”108 The kind of threat he had in mind was suggested by his statement, earlier in the book, that the public was willing to support “America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”109

It is possible that Brzezinski’s discussion here inspired the statement about a “new Pearl Harbor” in PNAC’s 2000 document, which can be read as a call for a false-flag operation that would provide a pretext for turning PNAC’s agenda into official policy. The plausibility of this reading was increased, moreover, by a statement made by Brzezinski’s during his warning, in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 1, 2007, that a “head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large” was the likely outcome of the US frustration in Iraq. “A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran,” Brzezinski suggested, involves “a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a ‘defensive’ U.S. military action against Iran.” Adding that a “mythical historical narrative” for an expanded attack on Islamic countries “is already being articulated,” Brzezinski said that “9/11 [is being presented] as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack.”110

Be that as it may, a more specific motivation for the post-9/11 attack on Afghanistan was provided by the “pipeline war” that was going on.111 The Bush-Cheney administration supported--as had the Clinton-Gore administration until 1999--UNOCAL’s plan to build an oil-and-gas pipeline through Afghanistan, which was in competition with plans from oil companies based in other countries. What happened in 1999 was that UNOCAL, having become convinced that Afghanistan under the Taliban would never have the peace and stability needed for the pipeline project, decided to withdraw. Ahmed Rashid, finishing his book on the Taliban in mid-1999, wrote that the Clinton administration had shifted its support to the pipeline route from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey, adding that “by now nobody wanted to touch Afghanistan and the Taliban.”112

When the Bush administration came to power, however, it decided to give the Taliban one last chance. This last chance occurred at a four-day meeting in Berlin in July 2001. Representatives of the Bush-Cheney administration, trying to persuade the Taliban to share power with US-friendly factions in a “unity government,” reportedly gave the Taliban an ultimatum: “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”113 When the Taliban refused, the Americans reportedly said that “military action against Afghanistan would go ahead . . . before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.”114

Given the fact that the attacks on New York and Washington occurred on September 11, the U.S. military had time to get ready, logistically, to begin its war in Afghanistan on October 7. By October 10, the U.S. Department of State had informed the Pakistani Minister of Oil that “in view of recent geopolitical developments,” UNOCAL was ready to go ahead with the pipeline project.115

The contention that at least one of the purposes of the war was to support this project is suggested by the fact that the post-Taliban Prime Minister, Hamid Karzai, had previously been on UNOCAL’s payroll, as had been PNAC member Zalmay Khalilzad, who in 2001 was appointed Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan and then in 2003 became the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. As Chalmers Johnson said in 2004: “The continued collaboration of Khalilzad and Karzai in post-9/11 Afghanistan strongly suggests that the Bush administration was and remains . . . interested in oil.”116 (In March of 2005, Khalilzad would become the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.117)

Still more evidence is provided by the placement of the military bases in Afghanistan. As one Israeli writer put it: “If one looks at the map of the big American bases created, one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean.”118

The concern to enable an American oil company to build this pipeline should not, however, be considered the only or even the primary motivation. The larger concern, suggests Chalmers Johnson, was “to establish an American presence in Central Asia.” Evidence for this view is provided by the fact that the United States, besides establishing long-term bases in Afghanistan, had within a month after 9/11 arranged for long-term bases in Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.119

The new Pearl Harbor that occurred on 9/11, therefore, allowed the United States to support UNOCAL’s pipeline project and, more generally, to fulfill the program, suggested by Brzezinski, of taking control of this region of the world.

The fact that 9/11 provided the necessary condition for the war in Afghanistan was stated by both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. In 2004, Wolfowitz told the 9/11 Commission that if the Department of Defense had asked Congress for permission to invade Afghanistan prior to 9/11, this request would not have been taken seriously. Rumsfeld, telling the Commission that “it can take a tragedy like September 11th to awaken the world to new threats and to the need for action,” said that prior to 9/11 the president could not have convinced Congress that the United States needed to “invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban.”120

Afghanistan and the surrounding region was not, however, the primary target in the sights of the Bush-Cheney administration. That target was Iraq.

5. The Attack on Iraq

Several neocons, including some who became central members of the Bush-Cheney administration, had been wanting to bring about regime change in Iraq ever since Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Leading voices for this policy included Cheney and Wolfowitz, who were then secretary and under-secretary of defense, respectively, and also Richard Perle, who chaired a committee set up by neocons called Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf. But this idea was opposed by President Bush along with General Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Norman Schwarzkopf, the field commander, so it was not carried out.121

In 1992, Albert Wohlstetter, who had inspired Perle and Wolfowitz and other neocons, expressed exasperation that nothing had been done about “a dictatorship sitting on the world’s second largest pool of low-cost oil and ambitious to dominate the Gulf.”122 (Wohlstetter’s statement reflected his conviction, expressed back in 1981, that America needs to establish forces, bases, and infrastructure so as to enjoy unquestioned primacy in the region.123)

In 1996, the “Clean Break” paper, written for Israel by Perle and other neocons, proposed that Israel remove from power all of its enemies in the region, beginning with Saddam Hussein. This 1996 document, in the opinion of Arnaud de Borchgrave, president of United Press International, “provided the strategic underpinnings for Operation Iraqi Freedom seven years later.”124

In 1997, Wolfowitz and Khalilzad published a statement arguing that “Saddam Must Go.”125

In 1998, Kristol and Kagan, in a New York Times op-ed entitled “Bombing Iraq Isn’t Enough,” called for “finishing the job left undone in 1991.”126 Wolfowitz told the House National Security Committee that it had been a mistake in 1991 to leave Saddam in power. Also, writing in the New Republic, he said: “Toppling Saddam is the only outcome that can satisfy the vital U.S. interest in a stable and secure Gulf region.”127 And the afore-mentioned letter to President Clinton from PNAC---signed by Cheney, Kristol, Perle, and Wolfowitz, among others---urged him to “take the necessary steps, including military steps,” to “remov[e] Saddam’s regime from power.” Then, getting no agreement from Clinton, PNAC wrote a similar letter to Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, then the leaders of the House and the Senate, respectively.128

In 2000, PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses, pointing out that “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” added: “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”129

Given the fact that Cheney, Libby, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other neocons were given central positions in the new Bush administration, it is not surprising to learn, from two former members of this administration, that it came into office intent on attacking Iraq. Paul O’Neill, who was secretary of the treasury and hence a member of the National Security Council, has said that within days of the inauguration, the main topic was going after Saddam, with the question being not “Why Saddam?” or “Why Now?” but merely “finding a way to do it.”130 Richard Clarke, who had been the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism, confirmed O’Neill’s charge, saying: “The administration of the second George Bush did begin with Iraq on its agenda.”131

Until the attacks of 9/11, however, no one had found “a way to do it.” As neocon Kenneth Adelman has said: “At the beginning of the administration people were talking about Iraq but it wasn’t doable. . . . That changed with September 11.”132 Bob Woodward makes the same observation in Bush at War, saying: “The terrorist attacks of September 11 gave the U.S. a new window to go after Hussein.”133

However, even 9/11, by itself, was not a sufficient basis for getting the American people’s support for an attack on Iraq. Not for lack of effort by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. On the afternoon of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld said in a note to General Richard Myers—-the acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--that he wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]."134 In the following days, both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz argued that Saddam's Iraq should be, in Woodward’s paraphrase, “a principal target of the first round in the war on terrorism.”135

Colin Powell, however, argued that both the American people and other countries would at that time support an attack on Afghanistan, to do something about al-Qaeda, but not an attack on Iraq, since there was no evidence that it had anything to do with 9/11. He added, however, that after a successful campaign in Afghanistan, a war on Iraq would become more feasible. Bush accepted this argument.136 In doing so, he was not rejecting the proposal to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq, merely postponing its implementation: A plan for going to war in Afghanistan that Bush signed on September 17 also directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.137

Stephen Sniegoski, explaining why the attack on Iraq could not be launched immediately, says: “[A]lthough the 9/11 atrocities psychologically prepared the American people for the war on Iraq, those horrific events were not sufficient by themselves to thrust America immediately into an attack on Iraq.” A “lengthy propaganda offensive” would also be needed.138

This propaganda offensive involved convincing a majority of the American people of the truth of two false claims: that Saddam Hussein had been behind 9/11 and that he possessed, or soon would possess, weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, with which he could attack America. This part of the story is too well known to need much rehearsal. The point to emphasize here is that although this later propaganda was necessary, its success depended on 9/11. Halper and Clarke say that “it was 9/11 that provided the political context in which the thinking of neo-conservatives could be turned into operational policy.”139 Sniegoski, spelling out the point more fully, says:

The 9/11 attacks made the American people angry and fearful. Ordinary Americans wanted to strike back at the terrorist enemy, even though they weren’t exactly sure who that enemy was. . . . Moreover, they were fearful of more attacks and were susceptible to the administration’s propaganda that the United States had to strike Iraq before Iraq somehow struck the United States. . . . It wasn’t that difficult to channel American fear and anger into war against Iraq.140

Much of this channeling was done by the Bush-Cheney administration, especially Bush and Cheney themselves. In August of 2002, for example, Cheney declared that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction . . . [and] is amassing them to use . . . against us.”141 In October, Bush said that, having “experienced the horror of September the 11th, . . . America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof--the smoking gun--that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”142

The administration was greatly aided in this propaganda offensive by neoconservatives outside the government, who “linked their preexisting agenda (an attack on Iraq) to a separate event (9/11).”143 Through their incessant propaganda---most widely spread in Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol’s The War over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission---“Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were morphed into the same enemy” and “the war on terror and war in Iraq were joined at the hip.”144

This propaganda campaign was enormously successful. Shortly before the war on Iraq was launched, the two key ideas in the campaign---that Saddam Hussein had played a direct role in the attacks of 9/11 and that he was a threat because he had weapons of mass destruction---were accepted by 70 percent of the American people.145 As a result, point out Halper and Clarke, the Bush-Cheney administration was “able to build the environment surrounding the terrorist attacks of September 2001 into a wide moral platform from which to launch a preemptive strike.”146

That this propaganda campaign would be successful would have been predictable. As Hermann Göring, one of the top Nazi officials, said: “[I]t is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along. . . . All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked.”147

Accordingly, the fact that there were no Iraqis among the alleged hijackers does not mean that the desire for a pretext to attack Iraq could not have been one of the imperial motives behind the attacks of 9/11. The crucial precondition for the war in Iraq was a psychological state of mind in the American public---one of fear and anxiety combined with a desire for revenge---that would countenance the new doctrine of preemptive-preventive war. This state of mind was abundantly created by 9/11. Then, just as the ensuing propaganda offensive against Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban created almost unanimous acceptance of the war in Afghanistan, the propaganda offensive directed at Saddam Hussein was rather easily able to channel this fear, anxiety, and desire for revenge into a widespread feeling that a war to bring about regime change in Iraq was justified.

Conclusion
The attacks of 9/11 allowed the imperialist agenda of leading neoconservatives to be implemented. Can we infer from this effect that the hope to have this agenda fulfilled was one of the motives for the 9/11 attacks? Of course not. One of the basic principles of criminal investigations, however, is the question: Who benefits? Those who most benefit from the crime are usually the most likely suspects. But an answer to that question cannot by itself be used as proof of the suspects’ guilt. The prosecution must also show that the suspects had the means and the opportunity to commit the crime. It must also present evidence that the suspects actually committed the crime---at least indirect evidence, perhaps by showing that they were the only ones who could have done it.

I have elsewhere presented evidence---what I first called prima facie evidence but now call overwhelming evidence148---that 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated by leading members of the Bush-Cheney administration. This evidence includes many reasons to conclude that the official accounts of the World Trade Center collapses, the attack on the Pentagon, the crash of United Airlines Flight 93, and the failure of the U.S. military to intercept the other flights cannot be true. This evidence also includes many reasons to conclude that The 9/11 Commission Report involved a systematic cover-up of dozens of facts that conflict with the official conspiracy theory about 9/11, according to which the attacks were conceived and carried out entirely by al-Qaeda---evidence that instead points to official complicity. One example of this evidence is the fact that the Commission changed by about 45 minutes the time at which Vice President Cheney went down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House, thereby indicating that he could not have been responsible, as evidence suggests, for allowing the strike on the Pentagon and ordering the downing of UA 93.149

Many people, to be sure, feel that there is no need to examine the evidence that the attacks were arranged by members of the Bush administration because they feel certain, on a priori grounds, that it simply would not have done such a thing. Having addressed most of those grounds elsewhere,150 I have here dealt with only one of them, which is often phrased as a rhetorical question: What motive could they possibly have had for arranging attacks on their own citizens?

Having suggested that the motive was to have a pretext to turn the neocon agenda into national policy, I should add that it is probably only the neocons in office, and even only some of them, who should be suspected of involvement in the planning for 9/11. To say that 9/11 allowed the agenda of the neocons in general to be implemented does not imply that many or even any neocons outside the government were involved in the planning for, or even had advance knowledge of, the attacks of 9/11. About eight months after 9/11, for example, William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote pieces urging the Bush-Cheney administration to undertake an investigation to see if the attacks might have been prevented. Gary Dorrien, reporting that this call “earned a sharp rebuke from Cheney,” adds that “the Bush administration had no intention of allowing an investigation on that subject.”151

No genuine investigation has been carried out to this day. If Congress would authorize such an investigation, the American people, I am convinced, would see that the grounds for impeaching Bush and Cheney are even stronger than those that have been part of the public discussion thus far. They would also see that the reasons for opposing the war in Iraq are even stronger than those publicly discussed thus far, because it was from the start an imperialistic war based on a false-flag operation (as well as additional lies). They would even see that, although many critics of the administration have said that we should pull our troops out of Iraq and put them in Afghanistan, our attack on that country was no more legitimate.152

Author Bio: David Ray Griffin is professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, where he taught for over 30 years (retiring in 2004). He has authored or edited over two dozen books, including "God and Religion in the Postmodern World," "Religion and Scientific Naturalism," and "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11."

Notes
1. Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4. Halper and Clarke, identifying with the Reagan presidency, criticize the ideological agenda of the neocons from what they call a “center-right” perspective (5-7).
2. Stephen J. Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11: The Origins of the U.S. War on Iraq.” In D. L. O’Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe, eds., Neoconned Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq (Vienna, Va.: IHS Press, 2005), 81-109, at 81-82.
3. Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), 16.
4. Dorrien’s examples are “William Bennett, Peter Berger, Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ernest Lefever, James Nuechterlein, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, and James Q. Wilson” (Imperial Designs, 15).
5. Michael Lind, “A Tragedy of Errors,” The Nation, February 23, 2004, online; quoted in Justin Raimondo, “A Real Hijacking: The Neoconservative Fifth Column and the War in Iraq,” in O’Huallachain and Sharpe, eds., Neoconned Again, 112-24, at 123.
6. Norman Podhoretz, “After the Cold War,” Commentary 92 (July 1991), and “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” Commentary 101 (March 1996); both cited in Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 80.
7. Irving Kristol, Wall Street Journal, March 3, 1986; quoted in Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 117.
8. Charles Krauthammer, “Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World,” National Interest, Winter 1989: 47-49.
9. Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs, 1990.
10. Krauthammer, “Bless Our Pax Americana,” Washington Post, March 22, 1991.
11. Department of Defense, “Defense Planning Guidance,” February 18, 1992. Although Libby is usually considered the person who wrote this draft, Gary Dorrien says that it was actually written by Wolfowitz’s aide Zalmay Khalilzad, who had been briefed on what it should say by Wolfowitz and Libby---with additional input from Andrew Marshall, Richard Perle, and Albert Wohlstetter (Imperial Designs, 39).
12. Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 44.
13. Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop: A One Superpower World,” New York Times, March 8, 1992 (http://work.colum.edu/~amiller/wolfowitz1992.htm); Barton Gellman, “Keeping the U.S. First: Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower,” Washington Post, March 11, 1992 (http://www.yale.edu/strattech/92dpg.html).
14. Wall Street Journal, March 16, 1992.
15. Quoted in Barton Gellman, “Aim of Defense Plan Supported by Bush,” Washington Post, March 12, 1992.
16. Quoted in Gellman, “Keeping the U.S. First: Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower.”
17. Bacevich, American Empire, 45.
18. Paul Wolfowitz, “Remembering the Future,” National Interest, Spring 2000 (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_2000_Spring/ai_61299040).
19. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 39.
20. David Armstrong, “Dick Cheney’s Song of America,” Harper’s, October, 2002.
21. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 142.
22. Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World Order: The Bush Administration May Have a Brand-New Doctrine of Power,” New Yorker, April 1, 2002 (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/020401fa_FACT1). Lemann further reported that the first major product of this new thinking was a brief prepared by Wolfowitz to be presented to Cheney on May 21, 1990, at which time Cheney was also supposed to hear Colin Powell’s proposal for revising U.S. foreign policy but did not. Cheney then, on the basis of Wolfowitz’s proposal, briefed President Bush, who delivered a major foreign policy address on August 2 (the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait).
23. Brinkley’s statement is quoted in “Cheney Is Power Hitter in White House Lineup,” USA Today, August 28, 2002, which is quoted in Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 120.
24. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 42.
25. “Defense Strategy of the 1990s,” Department of Defense, 1992.
26. Lemann, “The Next World Order.”
27. “Defense Strategy for the 1990s,” Department of Defense, January, 1993. Lemann, in “The Next World Order,” reported that although this was an unclassified and hence “scrubbed” version of the official document, “it contained the essential ideas of ‘shaping,’ rather than reacting to, the rest of the world, and of preventing the rise of other superpowers.”
28. Zalmay Khalilzad, From Containment to Global Leadership? America and the World after the Cold War (Rand Corporation, 1995).
29. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 81.
30. Robert Kagan, “American Power: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Commentary 101 (April 1996).
31. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Foreign Policy and the Republican Future,” Weekly Standard, October 12, 1998.
32. Robert Kagan, “The Clinton Legacy Abroad,” Weekly Standard, January 15, 2001; quoted in Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 85.
33. Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 110.
34. Ibid., 126.
35. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 68, 130.
36. Project for the New American Century, “Statement of Principles,” June 3, 1997 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm).
37. Project for the New American Century (henceforth PNAC), Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000 (www.newamericancentury.org).
38. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 142-43; Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 911,” 94-95.
39. Krauthammer, “The Bush Doctrine,” Time, March 5, 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/2001/03/05/doctrine.html).
40. Krauthammer’s statements, originally published in Emily Eakin, “All Roads Lead To D.C.,” New York Times, Week In Review, March 31, 2002, are quoted in Jonathan Freedland, “Is America the New Rome?” Guardian, September 18, 2002.
41. Robert Kaplan, “Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World,” Atlantic Monthly, July/August, 2003.
42. See John McMurtry, “9/11 and the 9/11 Wars: Understanding the Supreme Crimes,” in David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2006).
43. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 1987).
44. Paul Kennedy, “The Eagle Has Landed,” Financial Times, February 22, 2002
45. Bacevich, American Empire, 244.
46. This distancing is especially evident in Bacevich’s later book, The New American Militarism.
47. Claes Ryn, “The Ideology of American Empire,” in O’Huallachain and Sharpe, eds., Neoconned Again, 63-79, at 65.
48. Norman Podhoretz, “The Reagan Road to Détente,” Foreign Affairs 63 (1984), 452; “The Neo-Conservative Anguish over Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” New York Times Magazine, May 2, 1982; both quoted in Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 74.
49. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 133.
50. “Joint Vision 2010” (http://www.dtic.mil/jv2010/jvpub.htm).
51. General Howell M. Estes III, USAF, United States Space Command, “Vision for 2020,” February 1997 (http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/usspac/visbook.pdf).
52. “Joint Vision 2020” (http://www.dtic.mil/jointvision/jvpub2.htm).
53. Bacevich, American Empire, 127.
54. PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, 4.
55. Ibid., 38, 54, 30
56. Ibid., iv, 6, 50, 51, 59.
57. Ibid., 62.
58. Ibid., 51.
59. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 45.
60. Ibid., 44-46; Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 152-64, 167-73. Richard Perle, who also became a Wohlstetter disciple at a young age, said of Wolfowitz: “Paul thinks the way Albert thinks” (Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 46).
61. “Andrew Marshall,” Source Watch, Center for Media & Democracy (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Andrew_Marshall).
62. Report of the Commission to Assess U.S. National Security Space Management and Organization (http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/spaceabout.html), 7.
63. Ibid., 15.
64. This according to the Washington Post, January 27, 2002.
65. Robert Kagan, “We Must Fight This War,” Washington Post, September 12, 2001; Henry Kissinger, “Destroy the Network,” Washington Post, September 11, 2001 (http://washingtonpost.com); Lance Morrow, “The Case for Rage and Retribution,” Time, September 11, 2001.
66. “Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the New York Times,” New York Times, October 12, 2001.
67. Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World Order: The Bush Administration May Have a Brand-New Doctrine of Power,” New Yorker, April 1, 2002 (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/020401fa_FACT1). The phrase in the inside quotation marks is a direct quote from Rice; the rest of the statement is Lemann’s paraphrase.
68. “Remarks by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Terrorism and Foreign Policy,” April 29, 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov).
69. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 32.
70. “September 11, 2001: Attack on America: Remarks by the President in Telephone Conversation with New York Mayor Giuliani and New York Governor Pataki 11:00 A.M. EDT; September 13, 2001,” available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/sept_11/president_009.htm; “Bush Vows to ‘Whip Terrorism,’” Reuters, Sept. 14, 2001.
71. Lemann, “The Next World Order.”
72. Department of Defense News Briefing on Pentagon Attack, 6:42 PM, September 11, 2001 (available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/sept_11/dod_brief02.htm). According to the transcript, the question was asked by Secretary Rumsfeld. But the flow of the discussion suggests that it came from a reporter. In either case, the 9/11 attacks were interpreted to mean that greater military spending was needed, “especially for missile defense.”
73. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 173 (the second phrase in quotation marks was taken by Bacevich from Thomas E. Ricks, “For Rumsfeld, Many Roadblocks,” Washington Post, August 7, 2001).
74. Ibid., 173.
75. Perle’s statement is quoted by Bacevich (ibid., 173-74) from Neil Swidey, “The Mind of the Administration,” Boston Globe, May 18, 2003.
76. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, henceforth NSS 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html), 29-30.
77. NSS 2002, 28.
78. In using this hyphenated term, I follow the precedent of Catherine Keller in “Omnipotence and Preemption,” in David Ray Griffin, John B. Cobb, Jr., Richard Falk, and Catherine Keller, The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).
79. Barton Gellman, “Keeping the U.S. First: Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower”; cited in Halper and Clark, America Alone, 141.
80. Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” June 1996 (http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm).
81. PNAC, “Statement of Principles,” 1997 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm)
82. PNAC, Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, May 29, 1998 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm).
83. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 91.
84. “President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point,” June 1, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html).
85. NSS 2002, cover letter.
86. NSS 2002, 6, 15.
87. Ibid., 15.
88. Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 142.
89. Max Boot, “Think Again: Neocons,” Foreign Policy, January/February 2004 (http://www.cfr.org/publication/7592/think_again.html), 18.
90.The fact that Zelikow was “involved in the drafting” of this document was revealed on PBS in Frontline’s “Interview with Barton Gellman” on January 29, 2003, shortly after Zelikow had become executive director of the 9/11 Commission. According to Gellman, a staff writer for the Washington Post, Zelikow had told him this during a telephone conversation the previous day. The fact that Zelikow was the primary drafter of NSS 2002 was revealed in James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 316, 331.
91. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 316.
92. Ibid., 331.
93. Ashton Carter, John Deutch, and Philip Zelikow, “Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 1998, 80-94 (available at http://cryptome.quintessenz.at/mirror/ct-tnd.htm).
94. Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chair and vice chair, respectively, of the 9/11 Commission, say in their preface to The 9/11 Commission Report that they had “sought to be independent, impartial, . . . and nonpartisan” (xv). In their later book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), they reaffirm that they had been determined to be “nonpartisan and independent” (29).
95. According to Kean and Hamilton themselves, Zelikow provided the “overarching vision” for the report and, with the aid of his former coauthor Ernest May, prepared the outline, which he presented to the staff, assigning “different sections and subsections of it to individual staff members” (Without Precedent, 273). Finally, although various members of the Commission’s staff wrote the first drafts of the various chapters, we learn from May, revised drafts were then produced by the “front office,” which was headed by Zelikow (Ernest May, “When Government Writes History: A Memoir of the 9/11 Commission,” New Republic, May 23, 2005).
96. Statement of the Family Steering Committee for The 9/11 Independent Commission, March 20, 2004 (www.911independentcommission.org/mar202004.html).
97. David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2005), chap. 10, “Possible Motives of the Bush Administration.”
98. “President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference,” April 13, 2004 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040413-20.html).
99. “Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation,” September 11, 2001 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html).
100. “Bin Laden Is Wanted: Dead or Alive, Says Bush,” Telegraph, September 18, 2001 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/18/wbush18.xml).
101. “White House Warns Taliban: ‘We Will Defeat You’” (CNN.com, September 21, 2001).
102. Kathy Gannon, Associated Press, “Taliban Willing To Talk, But Wants U.S. Respect” (http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/focus/terrorism/archives/1001/w01taliban.html).
103. For the various kinds of evidence, see David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, chap. 8, or The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, chap. 6.
104. Francis Boyle, “No Proof, No Investigation, No Accountability, No Law” (http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fab051702.html). Boyle points out that a White Paper, entitled “Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States,” was provided by British Prime Minister Tony Blair on October 4, 2001. But it began with the disclaimer that it ”does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Usama Bin Laden in a court of law.”
105. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Most Wanted Terrorists (http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm); the statement, made by Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI, is quoted in Ed Haas, “FBI says, ‘No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11’” Muckraker Report, June 6, 2006 (http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html).
106. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 35-36.
107. Ibid., 36.
108. Ibid., 212.
109. Ibid., 212, 24-25.
110. “Senate Foreign Relations Committee Testimony—-Zbigniew Brzezinski, February 1, 2007,” Information Clearing House (http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/258/52).
111. See Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), chaps. 12 and 13, entitled “Romancing the Taliban: The Battle for Pipelines.”
112. Ibid., 75-79, 175.
113. Julio Godoy, “U.S. Taliban Policy Influenced by Oil,” Inter Press Service, November 16, 2001.
114. This according to Niaz Naik, the highly respected Pakistani representative at the meeting, as reported in George Arney, “U.S. ‘Planned Attack on Taleban,’” BBC News, Sept. 18, 2001. In a story in the Guardian entitled “Threat of U.S. Strikes Passed to Taliban Weeks Before NY Attack” (September 22, 2001), one of the American representatives was quoted as confirming that this discussion of military action did occur.
115. The Frontier Post, October 10, 2001, cited in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked September 11, 2001 (Joshua Tree, Calif.: Tree of Life, 2002), 227.
116. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 178-79.
117. On his career, see “Zalmay Khalilzad,” Source Watch (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Zalmay_Khalilzad).
118. Chicago Tribune, March 18, 2002, quoting from the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv.
119. Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, 182-83.
120. That Wolfowitz made this comment in a statement to the Commission was reported by Commissioner Jamie Gorelick. The statements by Gorelick and Rumsfeld are quoted in “Day One Transcript: 9/11 Commission Hearing,” Washington Post, March 23, 2004 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17798-2004Mar23.html).
121. Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11,” 86-87, citing Arnold Beichman, “How the Divide over Iraq Strategies Began,” Washington Times, November 27, 2002.
122. Albert Wohlstetter, “Help Iraqi Dissidents Oust Saddam,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 1992.
123. Wohlstetter, “Meeting the Threat in the Persian Gulf,” Survey 25 (Spring 1981): 128-88; discussed in Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 191.
124. Arnaud de Borchgrave, “All in the Family,” Washington Times, September 13, 2004, online.
125. Paul D. Wolfowitz and Zalmay M. Khalilzad, “Saddam Must Go,” Weekly Standard, December 1997.
126. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Bombing Iraq Isn’t Enough,” New York Times, January 30, 1998.
127. “Prepared Testimony of Paul D. Wolfowitz,” House National Security Committee, U.S. Congress, September 16, 1998; Wolfowitz, “Iraqi Rebels with a Cause,” New Republic, December 7, 1998.
128. PNAC, Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, January 26, 1998 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm). PNAC, Letter to Gingrich and Lott on Iraq, May 29, 1998 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm).
129. PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, 14.
130. O’Neill is quoted to this effect in Ron Susskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). O’Neill repeated this point in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in January of 2004. Susskind, whose book also draws on interviews with other officials, said that in its first weeks the Bush administration was discussing the occupation of Iraq and the question of how to divide up its oil (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml).
131. Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 264.
132. Quoted in Elizabeth Drew, “The Neocons in Power,” New York Review of Books, 50/10 (June 12, 2003)
133. Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 83.
134. Reported by CBS News, September 4, 2002. This note, written by Rumsfeld’s top aide, Stephen Cambone (who participated in PNAC’s project to produce Rebuilding America’s Defenses), is now available online (http://www.outragedmoderates.org/2006/02/dod-staffers-notes-from-911-obtained.html).
135. Bob Woodward, Bush at War, 48-49.
136. Ibid., 49, 83-85
137. Glenn Kessler, "U.S. Decision on Iraq Has Puzzling Past," Washington Post, January 12, 2003 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43909- 2003Jan11.html).
138. Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11,” 101.
139. Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 230.
140. Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11,” 108-09.
141. “Remarks by the Vice President to the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention,” August 26, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/20020826.html).
142. “Remarks by the President on Iraq,” October 7, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html).
143. Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 203; see also the entirety of their chap. 7, “The False Pretences.”
144. Ibid., 210, 209.
145. Ibid., 201, 214.
146. Ibid., 218.
147. Quoted in Gustave Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Co, 1947), 278. Gilbert was reporting a conversation he had with Hermann Göring on the evening of April 18, 1946, while the Nuremberg trials were going on.
148. I called it prima facie evidence in my first book on the subject, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2004), xxiii. I call the evidence “overwhelming” in Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (Olive Branch, April 2007). This latter book is now my most complete case against the official theory and hence my most complete argument that 9/11 was an inside job.
149. David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2005), 241-44.
150. See the introduction to Debunking 9/11 Debunking.
151. Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 168, citing Kristol and Kagan, “Time for an Investigation,” Weekly Standard, May 27, 2002: 9-10, and Kagan and Kristol, “Still Time for an Investigation,” Weekly Standard, June 10, 2002: 9-10.
152. This essay is a revised version of “Imperial Motives for a ‘New Pearl Harbor,’” chap. 6 of David Ray Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006), the first half of which presents a summary of the most important evidence against the official account of 9/11, with special attention to the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Go on-site to access links, etc. This article has an impressive group of writers and famous men as sources:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17194.htm ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
~~~~~~~
Today as never before in their history Americans are enthralled with military power. The global military supremacy that the United States presently enjoys--and is bent on perpetuating--has become central to our national identity. More than America's matchless material abundance or even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation's arsenal of high-tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for."

Andrew Bacevich
in
The New American Militarism
~~~
"The revulsion against war ... will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome. For that reason, I am convinced that we must begin now to set the machinery in motion for a permanent wartime economy."

Charles E. Wilson
(1886-1972)
President of General Electric
(1940-42, 1945-50)
head of the Office of Defense Mobilization in 1951
US Secretary of Defense (1953-57)
Source: internal memo, 1944
~~~
"American strategic [nuclear] forces do not exist solely for the purpose of deterring a Soviet nuclear threat or attack against the U.S. itself. Instead, they are intended to support U.S. foreign policy."

Colin Gray
U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
Source: "Victory is Possible,"
Foreign Policy, Summer 1980
~~~
"The principal beneficiary of America's foreign assistance programs has always been the United States."

US Agency for International Development
Source:
"Direct Economic Benefits of U.S. Assistance Programs,"
1999
~~~~~ ,

[Saundra Hummer]

./////\\\\\/////\\\\\
Isn't there anyone out there who cares? Seems not, at least not in large enough numbers to make the necessary changes to make sure such abuses aren't allowed to continue, gain strength, as well as overall acceptance. SRH
Families Behind Bars:
Jailing Children of Immigrants
By
Kari Lydersen,
In These Times
Posted on February 22, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/48308/
Named after the co-founder of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the T. Don Hutto Correctional Center in Taylor, Texas, opened as a medium-security prison in 1997. Today, the federal government pays CCA, the nation's largest private prison company, $95 per person per day to house the detainees, who wear jail-type uniforms and live in cells.

But they have not been charged with any crimes. In fact, nearly half of its 400 or so residents are children, including infants and toddlers.

The inmates are immigrants or children of immigrants who are in deportation proceedings. Many of them are in the process of applying for political asylum, refugees from violence-plagued and impoverished countries like Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Somalia and Palestine. (Since there are different procedures for Mexican immigrants, the facility houses no Mexicans.)

In the past, most of them would have been free to work and attend school as their cases moved through immigration courts. "Prior to Hutto, they were releasing people into the community," says Nicole Porter, director of the Prison and Jail Accountability Project for the ACLU of Texas. "These are non-criminals and nonviolent individuals who have not committed any crime against the U.S. There are viable alternatives to requiring them to live in a prison setting and wear uniforms."

But as a result of increasingly stringent immigration enforcement policies, today more than 22,000 undocumented immigrants are being detained, up from 6,785 in 1995, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Normally, men and women are detained separately and minors, if they are detained at all, live in residential facilities with social services and schools. But under the auspices of "keeping families together," children and parents are incarcerated together at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, as it is now called, and at a smaller facility in Berks County, Penn. Attorneys for detainees say the children are only allowed one hour of schooling, in English, and one hour of recreation per day.

"It's just a concentration camp by another name," says John Wheat Gibson, a Dallas attorney representing two Palestinian families in the facility.

In addition, there have been reports of inadequate healthcare and nutrition.

"The kids are getting sick from the food," says Frances Valdez, a fellow at the University of Texas Law School's Immigration Law Clinic. "It could be a psychological thing also. These are little kids, given only one hour of playtime a day, the rest of the time they're in their pods in a contained area. There are only a few people per cell so families are separated at night. There's a woman with two sons and two daughters; one of her sons was getting really sick at night but she couldn't go to him because he's in a different cell. One client was pregnant and we established there was virtually no prenatal care."

When local staff for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) collected toys for the children at Christmas, Hutto administrators would not allow stuffed animals to be given to the children, according to LULAC national president Rosa Rosales.

"That's what these children need -- something warm to hug," she says. "And they won't even allow them that, why, I can't imagine. They say they're doing a favor by keeping families together, but this is ridiculous."

A CCA spokesperson refers media to the San Antonio office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but that office did not return calls for this story.

Immigrants have been housed at the facility since last summer, and public outrage and attention from human rights groups has grown in the past few months as more people have become aware of the situation.

In mid-December, Jay J. Johnson-Castro, a 60-year-old resident of Del Rio, Texas, walked 35 miles from the Capitol to the detention center, joined by activists along the way and ending in a vigil at the center.

"Everyone I have talked to about this is shocked that here on American soil we are treating helpless mothers and innocent children as prisoners," says Johnson-Castro, who had previously walked 205 miles along the border to protest the proposed border wall. "This flies in the face of everything we claim to represent internationally."

A coalition of attorneys, community organizations and immigrants rights groups called Texans United for Families is working to close the facility. The University of Texas Immigration Law Clinic is considering a lawsuit challenging the incarceration of children.

Valdez sees the center as a political statement by the government.

"Our country likes to detain people," says Valdez. "I think it's backlash for the protests that happened in the spring -- like, 'We're going to show you that you're not that powerful.' It's about power."

Kari Lydersen writes for the Washington Post out of the Midwest bureau and just published a book, Out of the Sea and Into the Fire: Latin American-US Immigration in the Global Age.

Kari Lydersen, a regular contributor to AlterNet, also writes for the Washington Post and is an instructor for the Urban Youth International Journalism Program in Chicago.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/48308/

/////\\\\\ .

[Saundra Hummer]

^^^^^^^
False Choices in the Debate on Voting Technology

By
Brad Friedman
AlterNet
Posted on February 28, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/48427/

American democracy cannot afford another questionable presidential election. Anybody disagree? The good news is that over the course of the last few years -- through the exhaustive and tireless work of an extraordinarily dedicated, rag-tag band of citizen patriots I call "The Election Integrity Movement" -- both the public and most of our politicians have finally come to understand that we have a serious problem with our electoral system.

The bad news is that, while they've finally discovered there's a problem -- unreliable, inaccurate, hackable voting machines, which count our public elections with secret software created by private companies -- the politicians, specifically the Democrats, and many of their public advocacy groups, have gotten the solution wrong. The answer is not "paper trails," that will never be counted, attached to touch-screen voting systems. The answer is paper ballots that are actually tabulated, either by optical-scan or hand-count. Seems simple enough, I know. But apparently not.

At The BRAD BLOG, we've been discussing the pros and cons of Rep. Rush Holt's (D-NJ) new Election Reform bill HR 811 since it dropped about two weeks ago in the House. It has a lot of co-sponsors and traction, and there is much good in it. Some of its features include requirements for publicly-disclosed software, greatly increased restrictions on the use of the Internet and other networking, a ban on insane voting machine "sleepovers" at pollworkers' houses prior to elections, mandatory random audits of results, and a requirement for a "durable and archival paper ballot for every vote cast. Trouble is, Holt's bill never requires that the "durable and archival paper ballot" actually be tabulated. And that was no mistake.

I was allowed to give input to Holt's office with each draft of the new legislation -- an update, and a great improvement, to his Election Reform bill from the last session (HR 550) which, thanks to former-Rep. Bob Ney and the Republicans, never even made it to mark-up in committee. With each successive draft of the new bill, I suggested language that would require those "paper ballots" actually be tabulated, and each time, that language was not added.

Why? Because if such a requirement existed, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE/touch-screen) devices would effectively be banned forever from American elections in the bargain.

Sounds good to me. Given the number of legally-registered voters (thousands, if not millions) who were unable to even cast a vote due to DRE break-downs during the 2006 election cycle -- something that doesn't happen with a paper-based optical-scan or hand-counted system, which allows a voter to vote no matter what -- and the number of votes that were either flipped, recorded incorrectly or not at all by such touch-screen systems, it would seem to be a no-brainer that it's time to ban them all together.

Even the new Republican Governor of Florida now wants to replace his state's DRE machines with optical-scan systems. And, every computer scientist and computer expert I've ever spoken with agrees that op-scans are far safer for use in elections than DRE's.

Yet, Holt won't call for a ban on DREs in his legislation, and a number of the largest Democratic-based public-advocacy and civil rights groups don't want to ban them either. They are willing to support the dangerous Holt bill as is. So what the hell is going on here?

Here's what's going on: Supporters of the legislation are using three false dichotomies opportunistically and/or disingenuously and/or naively to help see it passed by Congress.

Democrats who support the bill, along with their closely-allied public advocacy groups -- such as Common Cause, PFAW, MoveOn, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, VoteTrustUSA, and the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition -- are currently unable or unwilling to show the necessary courage to insist upon the banning of disenfranchising, failed DRE/touch-screen voting system technology from all American elections.

And this is happening despite the fact that most of those groups actually agree --- and will admit privately, if not always publicly --- that DRE technology has no place in our electoral system.

Collectively, the following three arguments are being used to shore up support for a bill which offers much good, yet ultimately may prove to be as dangerous as the disastrous Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which set aside $3.8 billion federal tax dollars to "upgrade" America's electoral system with these god-forsaken machines.

We need an Election Reform bill. But we don't need another bad one. If Holt moves forward as written (and here are several well-constructed suggestions for much-needed amendments to it as well as an action or two you can take to get lawmakers attention) the bill risks becoming known as HAVA 2 by 2008. And this time, the Democrats won't have the Republicans or HAVA's main author, Bob Ney (he's in prison), to blame for the fiasco ...

FALSE DICHOTOMY #1: It's Either Holt or Hand-Counted Paper Ballots ...

The first of the three false dichotomies being forwarded by some of the bill's supporters is to suggest that there are only two choices: Pass the Holt bill 'as is,' or continue an unwinnable campaign for all hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB).

The now oft-repeated intimation is the very definition of a strawman, a canard, and a truly disingenuous false dichotomy.

While Hand-Counted Paper Ballots might be swell and offer maximum transparency and citizen oversight --- as well as not being nearly as difficult or unwieldy to accomplish as many under-informed folks may believe --- the majority of Holt detractors, including myself, are not fighting for hand-counted paper ballots at this time.

Banning DREs does not mean ballots must be counted by hand. Most supporters of the Holt Bill know that --- or should, if they don't --- yet seem to be using the false argument when convenient to distract from the real shortcomings and concerns of the Holt legislation.

Optical-scan systems, while also presenting their own security and accuracy concerns, could easily and safely be used with publicly-disclosed source code and a mandatory random hand-audit protocol of a sufficient number of ballots to achieve 99 percent scientific certainty that the reported results of any optically-scanned election are correct.

Suggesting that those who understand the need for a complete ban on failed DRE technology are actually demanding HCPB is a cheap and unsubstantiated political tactic, unworthy of this necessary debate. It serves only to confuse at a time when all well-meaning Election Integrity advocates (and I include Holt in that group) ought to be having a legitimate discussion/debate about these most important matters.

FALSE DICHOTOMY #2: Take Holt or Get Nothing (or Something Even Worse) ...

The next false dichotomy being used either disingenuously or naively by Holt supporters is the notion that "if we don't accept this legislation 'as is' we'll get either nothing or something far worse." Nonsense.

If all of the Democrats and their public-advocacy group supporters stood up today and demanded a ban on all DRE technology in elections, it would be a done deal. The only thing keeping such a provision from being included in a Federal Election Reform bill is the will to do so, as fostered by the trademark fear that Democrats seem to display when it comes to leading the same American People who put them into office in hopes of such leadership.

If Democrats learned to speak up for themselves and set the agenda instead of following the one set by the Republicans and the right-leaning corporate media, they'd easily be able to make their case to the American people and help them understand that a DRE/touch-screen voting machine that fails equates to hundreds or even thousands of lost votes in each precinct where such a failure occurs.

At its heart, the argument instead comes down to the wishes of the Voting Machine Companies and the nation's Elections Officials, many of whom have sold their souls and our democracy to those same companies. Neither of those groups wish to ban DREs. The former because they stand to make far more money from the sale of DREs (dozens of systems per precinct, instead of a single op-scan machine per polling place,) and the latter because replacing their recently-purchased systems would be too expensive, or force them to admit they were in error in the first place, or otherwise make their jobs more difficult on a number of levels. For example, they'd actually have to tabulate the ballots of voters and make sure the tabulation was correct.

FALSE DICHOTOMY #3: We Must Allow for DREs or 'Language Minority' Voters Will Be Disenfranchised ...

This last one is, perhaps, the most disturbing and currently the toughest to overcome, for reasons you'll discover shortly.

Despite the Holt bill's dangerous institutionalization of DRE voting systems, it seems that several advocacy groups, for whatever reason, have conveniently been hypnotized into believing that the continued use of DREs is actually a civil rights issue.

The tortured, backwards logic at work here is remarkable, considering that, even in a worst-case scenario, the Holt bill could easily be amended to allow for a single DRE system in each polling place as an optional voting device for disabled voters who wish to use it. (NOTE: Even that is unnecessary, since there are many alternate options for disabled voters that don't require the use of such failed, inaccurate technology.)

The latest public-advocacy canard then is the notion that "language minority" voters --- those whose first language is not English --- are somehow better served by faulty DRE technology than by paper ballots, printed in their own language, and counted either by optical-scan or by hand. The wholly misguided, unsubstantiated, and, in fact, counter-intuitive pretense is that banning DREs would somehow disenfranchise minorities.

The argument is utter hogwash. I welcome any actual evidence that shows I'm wrong, and will happily retract this editorial in the bargain if anyone can do so.

Even if one accepts the dubious argument that somehow a computerized touch-screen interface is better than a printed paper ballot for language minority voters, there are better alternatives to DREs, such as ballot marking devices like the AutoMARK system. Such devices include the same touch-screen computer interface as a DRE, but simply print out the voter's ballot to be counted by either optical-scan or hand.

I am aware of no legitimate reasons to use DRE technology in American democracy.

Congratulations to at least one Democrat, Maxine Waters, who has figured this out and has announced her intention to withdraw her co-sponsorship of the Holt bill in hopes that it will be amended.

THE DEMONSTRABLE, SUBSTANTIATED TRUTH: DREs Are a Menace to both Democracy and Civil Rights,_and It's Time to be Honest about That ...

DREs disenfranchise Left and Right, Black and White, and everything in between and to either side. Those of us paying very close attention learned that much, week after week, during the 2006 Election Cycle. The result is that many supporters of the previous Holt Legislation (HR 550), as written during the last Congress, have now withheld their support from the 'new and improved' bill since it does not close the door on the failed DRE technology once and for all.

The risks to America are too serious to do otherwise. Even if Holt's overly-optimistic supporters turn out to be correct and everything in his bill works precisely as designed, the fact is that confidence in our election system is as important to its ongoing viability as anything else.

As long as Americans are unable to ensure for themselves -- with their own eyeballs if necessary -- that any given election result is accurate and correctly reflects the will of the voters, the value of democracy in this country will continue to erode. The simple task of any election, at its heart, is a not-at-all-complicated process of adding one plus one plus one. Only full transparency in all stages of that simple task will begin to bring American democracy back from the precipice over which it now dangerously hangs.

There are many fights ahead in the battle for Electoral Integrity, but none, for the moment, is more important than a full ban on DREs in order to begin the process of restoring both transparency and confidence in American elections.

The sooner we can dispense with the unhelpful false dichotomies and phony and/or opportunistic and/or unsubstantiated arguments, the sooner we can reach the goal that I believe most Democrats, and Democratic-leaning public interest groups, are truly aiming for: Electoral Integrity in America.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/48427/ ^^^^^^^^^
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
/////\\\\\/////\\\\\
Women and Older Troops Dying at Record Rates in Iraq;
Twice as Many Children per Casualty Lose a Parent than in Vietnam
By
Created 02/28/2007 - 3:48pm
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

Last week, Marine Captain Jennifer Harris was buried [1] in her hometown of Swampscott, PA. She was killed when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq.

Though the loss of all human life throughout this war - American, Coalition, and Iraqi civilian - is equally tragic, Harris' death is a reminder that our losses have come from across the demographic spectrum.

Harris was the 75th female coalition servicemember [2] to die in Iraq even though women are still technically barred from combat roles; incidentally, another woman died the same day from hostile fire in an unrelated battle. Of the 3419 total coalition casualties, women make up more than 2 percent. Only 8 of the 58,193 American fatalities in Vietnam [3] were female.


While many tend to think of our soldiers as all male, we also often think they are mostly young. Indeed, 28 18-year-olds and 199 19-year-olds died during their deployments. But 23 men and one woman were at least 50 [4] when they were killed [5], a percentage of total casualties nearly four times higher than in Vietnam [6].

Another statistic that is often overlooked is the number of children whose lives are changed forever when their parents are killed in Iraq. These kids never volunteered mom or dad to fight; many were not even born when their parents enlisted and, in some cases, deployed.

Such figures are not officially tracked, but we were able to identify that nearly 900 children had lost a parent in Iraq by December 2004 [7] and 1,508 by March 2005 [8] . Extrapolated to the current casualty total, the figure today is probably somewhere around 2,200 children. This number is already higher than a tenth of the Americans who lost a father in Vietnam, and the amount of children left behind per death is more than twice as high.

One expert explains [9] these results by noting that "the proportion of married soldiers is higher today than in any previous war." That means higher rates of wives and husbands are being left widowed by the war.

The White House would rather ignore these inconvenient truths and pretend that death only happens "on their TV screens." [10] But the truth is that for thousands and thousands of people, death in Iraq is very real.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
Source URL:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/articles/alerts/185
Links:
[1] http://www.townonline.com/homepage/8998920279337992191
[2] http://www.icasualties.org/oif/female.aspx
[3] http://www.militaryfactory.com/vietnam/casualties.asp
[4] http://projects.washingtonpost.com/fallen/ages/50plus/
[5] http://www.eons.com/love/feature/lossgrieving/8980
[6] http://www.militaryfactory.com/vietnam/casualties.asp
[7] http://www.shns.com/shns/warkids/
[8] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7169451/site/newsweek/
[9] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7169451/site/newsweek/page/2/
[10] http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/06/14/bush.newser/ /////\\\\\
.

[Saundra Hummer]

..!.!.!.!.!.!.!.
In Iraq, a head wound isn't always a trip home
Military personnel with brain injuries pressured to return quickly to duty

By
Robert Bazell
Chief science & health correspondent
NBC News - MSNBC.com
Updated: 11:33 a.m. PT Feb 27, 2007

When I arrived in Iraq recently I had a question for the leaders of the medical staff.

Last year when I was reporting on the treatment of brain injuries among troops returning from the war, I learned many experts were concerned about low-level brain injuries among the troops. The rehabilitation experts at Veterans Affairs had been shocked to hear that soldiers and Marines who had been exposed to the concussive force of numerous blasts from roadside bombs, but not obviously injured, were routinely returned to duty.

The VA experts worried that this could lead to an epidemic of mental health issues among veterans in the years to come. I asked at the Pentagon if anyone was concerned about the issue and got no answer.

In Iraq, I found that what the VA experts were hearing is certainly true. Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) remain the signature weapon of this war. These bombs have gotten increasingly powerful.

In the military hospitals in Iraq, most of the U.S. wounded had been injured by IEDs. Most surprising to me, it was not the first IED for most of them. In fact, I met several who had survived as many as five IED blasts. One young soldier had been through five in the past six weeks alone.


The explosions often fracture limbs severely. Even with the best body armor the concussive force can smash internal organs. Troops with obvious injuries receive immediate treatment and a fast trip home for rehabilitation.

What if the soldier just passes out for a few minutes or an hour? That often happens when the brain is shaken against the skull, and stops working temporarily.


Detecting 'subtle' damage
Right now, the procedure calls for the soldier to be checked out for a day at most and returned to duty.

“Most of the pressure comes from the soldiers to go back to duty,” Dr. Phillip Cuenca, an Army anesthesiologist who is interested in the issue, told me. “The commander has to meet the mission, so if that soldier can still walk and carry out orders and is physically able, it is certainly reasonable for him or her to return to duty.”

Col. Alan Bruns, a surgical consultant, told me that the military remains concerned about subtle brain damage from explosions. New practice guidelines were recently issued for doctors in the field to recognize tiny neurological changes in the troops.

“We want safety, not only for our soldiers who have experience with IEDs, but for their peers as well,” Bruns said. “It doesn’t help their peers to have a comrade come back who has been sort of dazed by an IED. We want to make sure they’re taken care of properly.”

Cuenca and many others point out that more research is necessary to find ways to detect these subtle neurological signs that can be difficult to differentiate from fatigue, stress or headache that you or I might feel.

Any long-term effects on tens of thousands of veterans of this war will, of course, take years to discover. Many experts, including those at the VA, worry they could be widespread.

Go on-site for links as well as related articles. There's much to delve into. Just click on the following URL. SRH
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive© 2007 MSNBC Interactive
© 2007 MSNBC.com
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17350373/
.!.!.!.!.!. .

[Saundra Hummer]

. XXXXXXXXX
This should be making a lot of people we've overheard saying: The "Kill em all, and get their oil, we need it" crowd. No kidding we know of a fellow who said this. He and several others think much the same and worse. SRH

THE ROVING EYE
US's Iraq oil grab is a done deal
By
Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com

"By 2010 we will need [a further] 50 million barrels a day. The Middle East, with two-thirds of the oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize lies." - US Vice President Dick Cheney, then Halliburton chief executive officer, London, autumn 1999

US President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney might as well declare the Iraq war over and out. As far as they - and the humongous energy interests they defend - are concerned, only now is the mission really accomplished. More than half a trillion dollars spent and perhaps half a million Iraqis killed have come down to this.

On Monday, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's cabinet in Baghdad approved the draft of the new Iraqi oil law. The government regards it as "a major national project". The key point of the law is that Iraq's immense oil wealth (115 billion barrels of proven reserves, third in the world after Saudi Arabia and Iran) will be under the iron rule of a fuzzy "Federal Oil and Gas Council" boasting "a panel of oil experts from inside and outside Iraq". That is, nothing less than predominantly US Big Oil executives.

The law represents no less than institutionalized raping and pillaging of Iraq's oil wealth. It represents the death knell of nationalized (from 1972 to 1975) Iraqi resources, now replaced by production sharing agreements (PSAs) - which translate into savage privatization and monster profit rates of up to 75% for (basically US) Big Oil. Sixty-five of Iraq's roughly 80 oilfields already known will be offered for Big Oil to exploit. As if this were not enough, the law reduces in practice the role of Baghdad to a minimum. Oil wealth, in theory, will be distributed directly to Kurds in the north, Shi'ites in the south and Sunnis in the center. For all practical purposes, Iraq will be partitioned into three statelets. Most of the country's reserves are in the Shi'ite-dominated south, while the Kurdish north holds the best prospects for future drilling.

The approval of the draft law by the fractious 275-member Iraqi Parliament, in March, will be a mere formality. Hussain al-Shahristani, Iraq's oil minister, is beaming. So is dodgy Barnham Salih: a Kurd, committed cheerleader of the US invasion and occupation, then deputy prime minister, big PSA fan, and head of a committee that was debating the law.

But there was not much to be debated. The law was in essence drafted, behind locked doors, by a US consulting firm hired by the Bush administration and then carefully retouched by Big Oil, the International Monetary Fund, former US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz' World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development. It's virtually a US law (its original language is English, not Arabic).

Scandalously, Iraqi public opinion had absolute no knowledge of it - not to mention the overwhelming majority of Parliament members. Were this to be a truly representative Iraqi government, any change to the legislation concerning the highly sensitive question of oil wealth would have to be approved by a popular referendum.

In real life, Iraq's vital national interests are in the hands of a small bunch of highly impressionable (or downright corrupt) technocrats. Ministries are no more than political party feuds; the national interest is never considered, only private, ethnic and sectarian interests. Corruption and theft are endemic. Big Oil will profit handsomely - and long-term, 30 years minimum, with fabulous rates of return - from a former developing-world stalwart methodically devastated into failed-state status.

Get me a PSA on time
In these past few weeks, US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has been crucial in mollifying the Kurds. In the end, in practice, the pro-US Kurds will have all the power to sign oil contracts with whatever companies they want. Sunnis will be more dependent on the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. And Shi'ites will be more or less midway between total independence in the south and Baghdad's dictum (which they control anyway). But the crucial point remains: nobody will sign anything unless the "advisers" at the US-manipulated Federal Oil and Gas Council say so.

Nobody wants to colonial-style PSAs forced down their throat anymore. According to the International Energy Agency, PSAs apply to only 12% of global oil reserves, in cases where costs are very high and nobody knows what will be found (certainly not the Iraqi case). No big Middle Eastern oil producer works with PSAs. Russia and Venezuela are renegotiating all of them. Bolivia nationalized its gas. Algeria and Indonesia have new rules for future contracts. But Iraq, of course, is not a sovereign country.

Big Oil is obviously ecstatic - not only ExxonMobil, but also ConocoPhillips, Chevron, BP and Shell (which have collected invaluable info on two of Iraq's biggest oilfields), TotalFinaElf, Lukoil from Russia and the Chinese majors. Iraq has as many as 70 undeveloped fields - "small" ones hold a minimum of a billion barrels. As desert western Iraq has not even been exploited, reserves may reach 300 billion barrels - way more than Saudi Arabia. Gargantuan profits under the PSA arrangement are in a class by themselves. Iraqi oil costs only US$1 a barrel to extract. With a barrel worth $60 and up, happy days are here again.

What revenue the regions do get will be distributed to all 18 provinces based on population size - an apparent concession to the Sunnis, whose central areas have relatively few proven reserves.

The Sunni Arab muqawama (resistance) certainly has other ideas - as in future rolling thunder against pipelines, refineries and Western personnel. Iraq's oil independence will not go down quietly - at least among Sunnis. On the same day the oil law was being approved, a powerful bomb at the Ministry of Municipalities killed at least 12 people and injured 42, including Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi. Mahdi has always been a feverish supporter of the oil law. He's a top official of the Shi'ite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq (SCIRI).

A whole case can be made of SCIRI delivering Iraq's Holy Grail to Bush/Cheney and Big Oil - in exchange for not being chased out of power by the Pentagon. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the SCIRI's leader, is much more of a Bush ally than Maliki, who is from the Da'wa Party. No wonder SCIRI's Badr Organization and their death squads were never the target of Washington's wrath - unlike Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army (Muqtada is fiercely against the oil law). The SCIRI certainly listened to the White House, which has always made it very clear: any more funds to the Iraqi government are tied up with passing the oil law.

Bush and Cheney got their oily cake - and they will eat it, too (or be drenched in its glory). Mission accomplished: permanent, sprawling military bases on the eastern flank of the Arab nation and control of some of largest, untapped oil wealth on the planet - a key geostrategic goal of the New American Century. Now it's time to move east, bomb Iran, force regime change and - what else? - force PSAs down their Persian throats.

(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

Surging toward the holy oil grail
(Jan 12, '07)

Go on-site for any links or photo's, etc. Just click on the following URLs:

URL: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IB28Ak01.html

URL: http://www.buzzflash.com
XXXXX .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
~~~~~~~

"We [the U.S.] must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order . . . we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. "

U.S. Department of Defense Planning Guide for 1994-1999
Source: Washington Post,
March 11, 1992;
New York Times, March 8, 1999.

~~~

"There are contingency plans in the NATO doctrine to fire a nuclear weapon for demonstrative purposes, to demonstrate to the other side that they are exceeding the limits of toleration in the conventional area."

Alexander Haig
Secretary of State for President Ronald Reagan
Source:
Testimony, Congressional Hearings on NATO, 1983.
Cited in Dugger, On Reagan, p. 403

~~~

"Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers."

Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963) Author -
Source: Forward to 'Brave New World'. 1932

~~~~~ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.^^^^^^^^^
Iran's Very Bad N-Word
By
Ray McGovern

02/28/07 "ICH" -- -- Iran: how far from the bomb? That was one of the key questions asked of newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell yesterday at a Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing. McConnell had avoided this front-burner issue in his prepared remarks. But when asked, he repeated the hazy forecast given by his predecessor, John Negroponte [and in the process demonstrated that he has mastered the stilted jargon introduced into national intelligence estimates (NIEs) in recent years]. McConnell had these two sentences committed to memory:

We assess that Iran seeks to develop a nuclear weapon. The information is incomplete, but we assess that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon early-to-mid-next decade.

At that point McConnell received gratuitous reinforcement from Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. With something of a flourish, Maples emphasized that it was “with high confidence” that DIA “assesses that Iran remains determined to develop nuclear weapons.”

After the judgments in the Oct. 1, 2002 estimate assessing weapons-of-mass-destruction in Iraq—judgments stated with “high confidence”—turned out to be wrong, the National Intelligence Council saw a need to define what is meant by “assess.” The council included a glossary in its recent NIE on Iraq:

When we use words such as 'we assess,' we are trying to convey an analytical assessment or judgment. These assessments, which are based on incomplete or at times fragmentary information are not a fact, proof, or knowledge. Some analytical judgments are based directly on collected information; others rest on previous judgments, which serve as building blocks. In either type of judgment, we do not have ‘evidence’ that shows something to be a fact.

So caveat emptor. Beware the verisimilitude conveyed by “we assess.” It can have a lemming effect, as evidenced yesterday by the automatic head bobbing that greeted Sen. Lindsay Graham’s, R-S.C., clever courtroom-style summary argument at the hearing, “We all agree, then, that the Iranians are trying to get nuclear weapons.”

Quick, someone, please give Sen. Graham the National Intelligence Council’s definition of “we assess.”

Shoddy Record on Iran
Iran is a difficult intelligence target. Understood. Even so, U.S. intelligence performance “assessing” Iran’s progress toward a nuclear capability does not inspire confidence. The only virtue readily observable is the foolish consistency described by Emerson as “the hobgoblin of little minds.” In 1995, U.S. intelligence started consistently “assessing” that Iran was “within five years” of reaching a nuclear weapons capability. In 2005, however, when the most recent NIE was issued (and then leaked to the Washington Post), the timeline was extended and given still more margin for error. Basically, the timeline was moved 10 years out to 2015, but a fit of caution yielded the words “early-to-mid next decade.”

Small wonder that the commission picked by President George W. Bush to investigate the intelligence community’s performance on weapons of mass destruction complained that U.S. intelligence knows “disturbingly little” about Iran. Shortly after the most recent estimate was completed in June 2005, Robert G. Joseph, the neoconservative who succeeded John Bolton as undersecretary of state for arms control, was asked whether Iran had a nuclear effort under way. He replied:

I don’t know quite how to answer that because we don’t have perfect information or perfect understanding. But the Iranian record, plus what the Iranian leaders have said...lead us to conclude that we have to be highly skeptical.

A fresh national intelligence estimate on Iran has been in preparation for several months—far too leisurely a pace in the circumstances, in my opinion. One would have thought that President Bush would await those intelligence findings before sending two aircraft carrier strike groups to the Persian Gulf area and dispatching Vice President Dick Cheney to throw a scare into folks in Asia. But it is not at all uncommon in this administration for the intelligence to lag critical decisions. After all, the decision to attack Iraq was made many months before “intelligence” was ginned up to support it. And the decision to send 21,500 additional troops into Iraq predated the latest NIE on Iraq by two months.

And so, yesterday’s Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing and all the puzzling over intelligence on Iran almost seemed divorced from the reality—from the “new history” that Bush’s neocon advisers may be preparing to create. Yet, the hearing was extremely well conducted and homed in on some key issues, should any policymakers wish to listen.

The Good News: There’s Time
If anything leaps out of all this, it is that there is time to address, in a sensible way, whatever concerns may be driving Iran to seek nuclear weapons—Cheney’s claim of a “fairly robust new nuclear program” in Iran, his blustering, and his itchy trigger finger notwithstanding. A year and a half after the 2005 estimate that Iran was five to 10 years away from building a nuclear weapon, NPR’s Robert Siegel did the math and asked former national intelligence director Negroponte, “Sometime between four and 10 years from now you would assume they could achieve a nuclear weapon?”

"Five to 10 years from now,” Negroponte answered. He then gingerly raised the possibility—avoided like the plague by neocons in good standing—that diplomacy might help. A former diplomat, he may have thought he would be forgiven, but he was relieved and sent back to the State Department a few months later. This is what he dared to say: :I think that the pace of Iran’s program gives us time, and international diplomacy can work."

Asked by Siegel to explain why the Israelis have suggested a much shorter timeline for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, Negroponte stated the obvious with bluntness uncommon for a diplomat. “I think that sometimes what the Israelis will do give you the worst-case assessment.” At yesterday’s hearing, Sen. Graham asked McConnell the same question; did he know why the Israelis had a different view? McConnell appeared puzzled, noting that U.S. intelligence discusses these things with the Israelis.

Why Would Tehran Want Nukes?
In his introductory remarks Armed Forces Committee Chair, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., expressed a desire to “assess the circumstances in which Iran might give up its nuclear [weapons] plans.” Assuming Iran has such plans, or at least intends to leave that option open for later decision when it has mastered the enrichment process, it makes sense to try to figure out what drives Tehran to that course.

McConnell yesterday chose to adopt Negroponte’s refreshingly candid approach and reject the cry-wolf rhetoric of Cheney and the neocons that Iran’s ultimate aim must be to destroy Israel. McConnell noted that Iran would like to dominate the Gulf region and deter potential adversaries. An integral part of Iran’s strategy is to deter and, if necessary, retaliate against forces in the region—including U.S. forces. Similarly, he indicated that Tehran considers its ability to conduct terrorist operations abroad as a key element of its determination to protect Iran by deterring U.S. or Israeli attacks. These sentiments dovetail with those offered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates at his confirmation hearing in December. Gates put it this way:

While they [the Iranians] are certainly pressing, in my opinion, for a nuclear capability, I think they would see it in the first instance as a deterrent. They are surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons—Pakistan to their east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west, and us in the Persian Gulf.

Deterrence? Both Sen. Levin and ranking member John Warner, R-Va., picked up on this, to the dismay of Sen. Graham, who sounded as if he had just come from a briefing by the Israeli extreme right who, with Cheney, are pushing hard for a U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Graham said he thought economic sanctions could work and that they were “the only thing left short of military action.” For Graham it was very simple. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has denied the Holocaust and, if Iran got nuclear weapons, it could use them against Israel. The clear implication was that we should bomb the Iranians if sanctions don’t bring them to heel.

Seldom have I heard an American senator so openly press the U.S. to mount an attack on a major country simply because it could be perceived as a threat to Israel. There was no mention of Israel’s own arsenal of some 200 to 300 nuclear weapons and multiple delivery systems. Nor did anyone allude to French President Jacques Chirac’s recent comment that, with one or two nuclear weapons Iran would pose no big danger, because launching a nuclear weapon against Israel would inevitably lay waste Tehran.

John Warner objected strongly to the notion that, if sanctions against Iran failed, the next step had to be military action. With support from Levin, Warner alluded time and again to the effectiveness of mutual deterrence after WWII, stressing that deterrence is a far better course than to let slip the dogs of war. He referred to his own role in ensuring that the Soviet Union was deterred. It seemed as though he was about to cry out from exasperation, "Why don’t we talk to the Iranians! ... like I talked to the Russians," but then he thought better of it and decided to hew to the party line and not even think of negotiating with “bad guys.”

Better To Jaw-Jaw Than War-War
Did you notice? While Cheney was abroad, others persuaded the president to send representatives next month to a conference in Baghdad, in which representatives of Syria and Iran also are expected to participate to discuss the situation in Iraq. In addition, foreign ministers of the same countries plan to meet in early April.

If Cheney does not sabotage such talks when he gets home, they could lead to direct negotiations with Iran on the nuclear question. It makes no sense at all to refuse to talk with Iran, which has as many historical grievances against the U.S. as vice versa. (Someone please tell the president.) With Cheney playing the heavy, it has not been possible to penetrate the praetorian guard for candid discussions with the president. The sooner that can be done the better. Hurry! Before Cheney gets home.

The ultimate aim, in my view, should be a Middle East free of nuclear weapons. That, I am confident, would stop whatever plans the Iranians have to develop nuclear weapons. And please do not tell me that, because Israel would not agree, we cannot move in this direction. The U.S. and others can provide the necessary guarantees of the security of Israel. And Israeli intransigence on this issue is not a viable middle- or long-term strategy that serves Israel’s interest or the interest of justice and peace.

[I]Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing ministry of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

This article was first published at TomPaine.com


URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17215.htm
^^^^^^^ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
:: :: :: :: :: :: ::
Americans Have Lost Their Country

By
Paul Craig Roberts

03/01/07 "ICH" -- -- The Bush-Cheney regime is America’s first neoconservative regime. In a few short years, the regime has destroyed the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, the Geneva Conventions, and the remains of America’s moral reputation along with the infrastructures of two Muslim countries and countless thousands of Islamic civilians. Plans have been prepared, and forces moved into place, for an attack on a third Islamic country, Iran, and perhaps Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon as well.

This extraordinary aggressiveness toward the US Constitution, international law, and the Islamic world is the work, not of a vast movement, but of a handful of ideologues--principally Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney General Gonzales. These are the main operatives who have controlled policy. They have been supported by their media shills at the Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by “scholars” in assorted think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.

The entirety of their success in miring the United States in what could become permanent conflict in the Middle East is based on the power of propaganda and the big lie.

Initially, the 9/11 attack was blamed on Osama bin Laden, but after an American puppet was installed in Afghanistan, the blame for 9/11 was shifted to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who was said to have weapons of mass destruction that would be used against America. The regime sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to tell the lie to the UN that the Bush-Cheney regime had conclusive proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Having conned the UN, Congress, and the American people, the regime invaded Iraq under totally false pretenses and with totally false expectations. The regime’s occupation of Iraq has failed in a military sense, but the neoconservatives are turning their failure into a strategic advantage. At the beginning of this year President Bush began blaming Iran for America’s embarrassing defeat by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents in Iraq.

Bush accuses Iran of arming the Iraqi insurgents, a charge that experts regard as improbable. The Iraqi insurgents are Sunni. They inflict casualties on our troops, but spend most of their energy killing Iraqi Shi’ites, who are closely allied with Iran, which is Shi’ite. Bush’s accusation requires us to believe that Iran is arming the enemies of its allies.

On the basis of this absurd accusation--a pure invention--Bush has ordered a heavy concentration of aircraft carrier attack forces off Iran’s coast, and he has moved US attack planes to Turkish bases and other US bases in countries contingent to Iran.

In testimony before Congress on February 1 of this year, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said that he expected the regime to orchestrate a “head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large.” He said a plausible scenario was “a terrorist act blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran.” He said that the neoconservative propaganda machine was already articulating a “mythical historical narrative” for widening their war against Islam.

Why is the US spending one trillion dollars on wars, the reasons for which are patently false. What is going on?

There are several parts to the answer. Like their forebears among the Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of the communist revolution, and the National Socialists of Hitler’s revolution, neoconservatives believe that they have a monopoly on virtue and the right to impose hegemony on the rest of the world. Neoconservative conquests began in the Middle East because oil and Israel, with which neocons are closely allied, are both in the MIddle East.

The American oil giant, UNOCAL, had plans for an oil and gas pipeline through Afghanistan, but the Taliban were not sufficiently cooperative. The US invasion of Afghanistan was used to install Hamid Karzai, who had been on UNOCAL’s payroll, as puppet prime minister. US neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad, who also had been on UNOCAL’s payroll, was installed as US ambassador to Afghanistan.

Two years later Khalilzad was appointed US ambassador to Iraq. American oil companies have been given control over the exploitation of Iraq’s oil resources.

The Israeli relationship is perhaps even more important. In 1996 Richard Perle and the usual collection of neocons proposed that all of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East be overthrown. “Israel’s enemies” consist of the Muslim countries not in the hands of US puppets or allies. For decades Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians such that today there is not enough of Palestine left to comprise an independent country. The US and Israeli governments blame Iran, Iraq, and Syria for aiding and abetting Palestinian resistance to Israel’s theft of Palestine.

The Bush-Cheney regime came to power with the plans drawn to attack the remaining independent countries in the Middle East and with neoconservatives in office to implement the plans. However, an excuse was required. Neoconservatives had called for “a new Pearl Harbor,” and 9/11 provided the propaganda event needed in order to stampede the public and Congress into war. Neoconservative Philip Zelikow was put in charge of the 9/11 Commission Report to make certain no uncomfortable facts emerged.

The neoconservatives have had enormous help from the corporate media, from Christian evangelicals, particularly from the “Rapture Evangelicals,” from flag-waving superpatriots, and from the military- industrial complex whose profits have prospered. But the fact remains that the dozen men named in the second paragraph above were able to overthrow the US Constitution and launch military aggression under the guise of a preventive/preemptive “war against terrorism.”

When the American people caught on that the “war on terror” was a cloak for wars of aggression, they put Democrats in control of Congress in order to apply a brake to the regime’s warmongering. However, the Democrats have proven to be impotent to stop the neoconservative drive to wider war and, perhaps, world conflagration.

We are witnessing the triumph of a dozen evil men over American democracy and a free press.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
Click on the following URL to gain access to this article and more:

URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17216.htm :: :: :: .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
////\\\\////\\\\
Kucinich introduces bill to immediately end Iraq occupation ...
By
Joshua Holland
Posted on February 28, 2007, Printed on March 1, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/48622/
This is from a press release:

Kucinich Introduces HR 1234 To Immediately End the U.S. Occupation of Iraq

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Feb. 28) - Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced HR 1234, a bill to immediately end the United States occupation of Iraq, in the House of Representatives today.

"This is the plan that will get our troops home the fastest. It is workable and achieves the goals of ending the war and enabling our troops to come home," Kucinich said.

HR 1234 is a plan for the United States to use existing money to bring the troops and necessary equipment home and transition to an international security and peacekeeping force.

"I drafted this with expert advice from those involved in international peacekeeping missions, the United Nations and the U.S. military," Kucinich said.

Kucinich first introduced a withdrawal plan from Iraq three years ago when he proposed that the United States hand the United Nations control of Iraq, including its oil resources and contracts for rebuilding.

"I have given more than 140 speeches on the floor of the House of Representatives, speaking out against this war. I have been one of the most active and vocal Members of Congress on this issue," Kucinich said.

Kucinich led the effort to challenge the Administration's war in Iraq in 2002. In advance of the Iraq war resolution in Congress, he organized 126 Democrats, two-thirds of the House Democratic Caucus, to vote against the resolution. He has constantly challenged the Administration's war against Iraq.

Kucinich has been circulating the plan with Members of Congress for two months and recently had it put in legislative form. He will be speaking to Members of Congress to gain support for the bill in the coming weeks and months.

Joshua here ...

Obviously, this will go nowhere fast. But isn't there something almost surreal about living in an ostensible democracy in which a piece of legislation favored by the majority of Americans is considered to be on the "fringe."

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/48622/ ////\\\\////\\\\ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
XXXXXXXXX
Bolton Says U.S. Should Seek `Regime Change' in Iran
(Update1)

By
Janine Zacharia and Bill Varner

March 1 (Bloomberg) -- John Bolton, the former American envoy to the United Nations, said the U.S. should pursue ``regime change'' in Iran because European governments refuse to back sanctions tough enough to halt the suspected Iranian nuclear-bomb program.

``I believe that either regime change in Iran or, as a last resort, military action is the only thing that will stop the Iranians from getting nuclear weapons,'' Bolton said in an interview today in Washington.

Bolton, a 58-year-old former arms-control official, said the Bush administration had allowed Britain, France and Germany to ``screw around'' in nuclear talks. The diplomacy has gone on for ``three and a half years, and that allowed the Iranians to make enormous progress on their nuclear-weapons program,'' he said.

President George W. Bush, who labeled Iran and North Korea part of an ``axis of evil'' in 2002, has said their nuclear programs could pose a direct threat to the U.S., and that either nation might hand over atomic weapons to terrorists. The U.S. has pursued negotiated settlements with both countries while crafting UN sanctions aimed at cutting off nuclear trade with them.

Bolton left the UN in December after failing to win congressional support to extend his tenure. He has emerged as a gadfly, criticizing the administration for its strategy on nuclear proliferation. He assailed Bush and his diplomats on Iran and for a deal with North Korea to trade energy aid for the closing of nuclear-arms-related facilities. Bolton said that accord is doomed to fail because of North Korea's record of cheating on similar arrangements.

`Fruitless' Effort

Broadly, Bolton said any negotiation with either North Korea or Iran to persuade them to abandon their nuclear ambitions won't work. ``Unless you're prepared to believe that the Iranians are voluntarily going to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons, the idea of pursuing negotiations is ultimately going to be fruitless,'' Bolton said.

Those criticisms were brushed aside by a spokesman for Bush's National Security Council. ``He is a private citizen, welcome to his own views,'' said the NSC's Gordon Johndroe. ``We're pursuing diplomacy.''

Iranian officials have countered that diplomatic pressure by insisting the nuclear push is for commercial power generation, not weapons.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, pronounced ah-ma- deen-ah-ZHAD, on Feb. 25 compared Iran's nuclear development to an unstoppable train and said there would be no turning back. Iran ``threw away a while ago the reverse gear and brakes of this train,'' he said, in remarks carried by the state-run Iranian Students News Agency.

Intelligence Gap

Bolton, now with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said one drawback of any military strike on Iran is that the Iranians may have a secret uranium-enrichment facility that weapons inspectors will never find.

``The downside of the military option is that you would incur all of the costs of having undertaken military action but potentially not gotten the benefits of decisively breaking the nuclear fuel cycle at one or more points,'' he said. ``What that says is we need better intelligence about what the Iranians are actually up to beyond what is already in the public domain.''

Because of all of this, the U.S. needs to tap the ``substantial Iranian diaspora,'' which the U.S. is ``not using as effectively as we might,'' and ``exploit'' the dissatisfaction inside Iran to topple the cleric-led government that has ruled the country since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Bolton said.

UN Punishments

The United Nations Security Council voted 15 to 0 on Dec. 23 to impose sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program for the first time, including a ban on acquisition of materials and technology that might be used to build an atomic bomb.

The U.S. was forced to agree to a watered-down version of what it sought in negotiations in the Security Council.

In Washington today, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack defended the UN resolution, saying it was ``just one example of the careful multilateral diplomacy that this administration has engaged in over a period of time.'' He said the measure put the U.S. ``in the position to try to move forward toward some of our objectives.''

Since the resolution's passage, Iran expanded its capacity to enrich uranium, defying a Security Council demand to halt its atomic work, and plans to install 3,000 centrifuges designed to produce nuclear fuel at its underground facility in Natanz by May, according to a Feb. 22 International Atomic Energy Agency report.

Further Measures

The Security Council's five permanent members plus Germany met in London on Feb. 26 to discuss a draft resolution that would impose further penalties on Iran for refusing to halt uranium enrichment.

Germany's envoy to the UN said Feb. 23 there should be only ``modest'' expansion of UN sanctions. Bolton said European reticence reflects a core problem: that those governments are ``overcome by their economic interests'' in the Iranian market.

Countries and companies from Spain to Malaysia are pursuing long-term oil and gas agreements with Iran, rebuffing Bush's campaign to turn Iran into an economic pariah.

Bolton, who blasted the agreement the U.S., China, South Korea, Japan and Russia reached with North Korea that requires the country to scrap its plutonium-based nuclear weapons program in return for energy aid, criticized scheduled talks next week.

Nuclear Negotiator

Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill's meeting with North Korea in New York, aimed at normalizing relations, won't lead Kim Jong Il's dictatorship to abandon nuclear weapons, Bolton said. Eventually the failure of diplomacy to disarm North Korea will force the U.S. to consider a military strike, he said.

Hill is set to meet March 5 and 6 with North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan.

``This is all a part of re-legitimizing them,'' Bolton said of the North Korean dictatorship.

Hill, who negotiated the North Korea deal for the U.S., said Feb. 22, ``We ultimately decided that, even though North Korea does need to make a strategic decision to get out of this nuclear weapons business, to realize that decision is going to require a step-by-step process.''

Bolton expressed concern that the new deal doesn't address North Korea's chemical weapons arsenal. He said the U.S. government estimates North Korea has up to 12,000 artillery tubes along the demilitarized zone with South Korea and that an initial attack on South Korea would be with chemical weapons.

To contact the reporter on this story: Janine Zacharia in Washington at jzacharia@bloomberg.net ; Bill Varner in United Nations at wvarner@bloomberg.net .

Last Updated: March 1, 2007 15:47 EST
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=au1Np7xxFZq8&refer=politics
XXXXXXX .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::
Lieberman: We can face Iran alone

THE JERUSALEM POST
Feb. 28, 2007
Sheera Claire Frenkel,

Israel can deal with the Iranian nuclear threat alone if necessary, Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman Minister told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Wednesday.

In his first appearance before the panel, Lieberman said the government "was doing more than any other country to confront the Iranian nuclear threat."


Analysis: Kicking around Khartoum

US inviting Iran, Syria for Iraq talks
"We can face the country even if we're left to face them one-on-one," he said. "I think it would be much better for the world if the international community were to step in."

Lieberman, who returned on Tuesday night from a visit to Russia, said he was heartened by the Russian will to help stop a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

"Everyone realizes that a nuclear arms race would be devastating for this region and they want to prevent it," he said. "I don't want to think about the implications of an arms race, because the situation would be out of control."

Lieberman said it was the responsibility of the international community to stop the Iranian nuclear program, but that neither Israel nor its friends should become "hysterical."

In Moscow, Russia's foreign minister strongly warned Washington not to use force against Iran and criticized what he described as a unilateral US approach to global crises, according to an interview published on Wednesday.

Sergey Lavrov said Russia was worried by recent comments by US Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reaffirmed that "all options are on the table" to prevent Teheran from becoming a nuclear power.

"We are concerned about the possibility of a military scenario," Lavrov was quoted as saying in government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta. "We are observing a US military buildup in the Persian Gulf. Such a buildup of forces always threatens to trigger a military conflict, even by accident."

Russia has repeatedly spoken out against resorting to force to resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear program, and has warned that overly harsh sanctions would be counterproductive.

In December, Russia supported a UN Security Council resolution imposing limited sanctions against Iran over its refusal to stop uranium enrichment, but the support came only after an initial proposal that would have imposed curbs on the nuclear power plant Russia is building in Iran was dropped.

Talks on the Iranian nuclear issue were deadlocked because of uncompromising stances taken by the United States and Iran, Lavrov said, according to the report.

"It would be unforgivable to miss a chance to use every opportunity to start such talks because of a false notion of prestige, because of the unyielding stance taken by both parties," he said.

"When they [the US] offer us a unilateral strategy and urge us to express solidarity in combating one or another evil... that's not the behavior of a partner," he said, adding that President Vladimir Putin's harsh criticism of US policy last month expressed an opinion many nations shared but were afraid to express publicly.

Putin told a security conference in Munich the United States "has overstepped its national borders in every way" and accused it of triggering a global arms race.

"Someone had to say it... to show the need for candid talk about how to deal with global affairs," Lavrov said of Putin's speech.

"There are those who cannot say 'No' to the United States. But we can allow ourselves to tell the truth, and not just reject unilateral calls for support but offer concrete constructive alternatives," he said.

AP contributed to this report.
This article can also be read at Information Clearing House, just click on the following URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info

OR:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1171894540003&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
:: :: :: .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
~~~~~~~
"If for decency, progress, order and liberty in the community and nation we cannot rely upon the character, sentiments, allegiances, and moral habits of the people, upon what, in heaven's name, can we rely?"

Charles Beard 1874-1948

~~~

". . .government is instituted for the protection, safety, and happiness of the people, and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any man, family, or class of men. . .the origin of all power is in the people, and they have an incontestable right to check the creatures of their own creation, vested with certain powers to guard the life, liberty and property of the community. . ."

Mercy Otis Warren
1728-1814
Poet, historian, patriot,
& advocate of the Bill of Rights

~~~

"I would be better to trust the many than the few, who are infected with the plague of self-interest and selfishness."

Tom Paine
1737-1809
From
"The Rights of Man".

~~~~~] .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
...............
The Words None Dare Say: Nuclear War
By
George Lakoff

"The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran's nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete."-Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, April 17, 2006
"The second concern is that if an underground laboratory is deeply buried, that can also confound conventional weapons. But the depth of the Natanz facility - reports place the ceiling roughly 30 feet underground - is not prohibitive. The American GBU-28 weapon - the so-called bunker buster - can pierce about 23 feet of concrete and 100 feet of soil. Unless the cover over the Natanz lab is almost entirely rock, bunker busters should be able to reach it. That said, some chance remains that a single strike would fail." -Michael Levi, New York Times, April 18, 2006


03/01/07 "ich" -- - A familiar means of denying a reality is to refuse to use the words that describe that reality. A common form of propaganda is to keep reality from being described.

In such circumstances, silence and euphemism are forms of complicity both in propaganda and in the denial of reality. And the media, as well as the major presidential candidates, are now complicit.

The stories in the major media suggest that an attack against Iran is a real possibility and that the Natanz nuclear development site is the number one target. As the above quotes from two of our best sources note, military experts say that conventional "bunker-busters" such as the GBU-28 might be able to destroy the Natanz facility, especially with repeated bombings. On the other hand, they also say such iterated use of conventional weapons might not work, e.g., if the rock and earth above the facility becomes liquefied. On that supposition, a "low yield" "tactical" nuclear weapon, say, the B61-11, might be needed.

If the Bush administration, for example, were to insist on a sure "success," then the "attack" would constitute nuclear war. The words in boldface are nuclear war, that's right, nuclear war - a first strike nuclear war.

We don't know what exactly is being planned - conventional GBU-28s or nuclear B61-11s. And that is the point. Discussion needs to be open. Nuclear war is not a minor matter.

The Euphemism

As early as August 13, 2005, Bush, in Jerusalem, was asked what would happen if diplomacy failed to persuade Iran to halt its nuclear program. Bush replied, "All options are on the table." On April 18, the day after the appearance of Seymour Hersh's New Yorker report on the administration's preparations for a nuclear war against Iran, President Bush held a news conference. He was asked,

"Sir, when you talk about Iran, and you talk about how you have diplomatic efforts, you also say all options are on the table. Does that include the possibility of a nuclear strike? Is that something that your administration will plan for?"

He replied,

"All options are on the table."

The President never actually said the forbidden words "nuclear war," but he appeared to tacitly acknowledge the preparations - without further discussion.

Vice-President Dick Cheney, speaking in Australia last week, backed up the President.

"We worked with the European community and the United Nations to put together a set of policies to persuade the Iranians to give up their aspirations and resolve the matter peacefully, and that is still our preference. But I've also made the point, and the president has made the point, that all options are on the table."

Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain, on FOX News, August 14, 2005, said the same.

"For us to say that the Iranians can do whatever they want to do and we won't under any circumstances exercise a military option would be for them to have a license to do whatever they want to do ... So I think the president's comment that we won't take anything off the table was entirely appropriate."

But it's not just Republicans. Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards, in a speech in Herzliyah, Israel, echoed Bush.

"To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep ALL options on the table. Let me reiterate - ALL options must remain on the table."

Although, Edwards has said, when asked about this statement, that he prefers peaceful solutions and direct negotiations with Iran, he has nonetheless repeated the "all options on the table" position - making clear that he would consider starting a preventive nuclear war, but without using the fateful words.

Hillary Clinton, at an AIPAC dinner in New York, said,

"We cannot, we should not, we must not, permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons, and in dealing with this threat, as I have said for a very long time, no option can be taken off the table."

Translation: Nuclear weapons can be used to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

Barack Obama, asked on 60 Minutes about using military force to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, began a discussion of his preference for diplomacy by responding, "I think we should keep all options on the table."

Bush, Cheney, McCain, Edwards, Clinton, and Obama all say indirectly that they seriously consider starting a preventive nuclear war, but will not engage in a public discussion of what that would mean. That contributes to a general denial, and the press is going along with it by a corresponding refusal to use the words.

If the consequences of nuclear war are not discussed openly, the war may happen without an appreciation of the consequences and without the public having a chance to stop it. Our job is to open that discussion.

Of course, there is a rationale for the euphemism: To scare our adversaries by making them think that we are crazy enough to do what we hint at, while not raising a public outcry. That is what happened in the lead up to the Iraq War, and the disaster of that war tells us why we must have such a discussion about Iran. Presidential candidates go along, not wanting to be thought of as interfering in on-going indirect diplomacy. That may be the conventional wisdom for candidates, but an informed, concerned public must say what candidates are advised not to say.

More Euphemisms

The euphemisms used include "tactical," "small," "mini-," and "low yield" nuclear weapons. "Tactical" contrasts with "strategic"; it refers to tactics, relatively low-level choices made in carrying out an overall strategy, but which don't affect the grand strategy. But the use of any nuclear weapons would be anything but "tactical." It would be a major world event - in Vladimir Putin's words, "lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons," making the use of more powerful nuclear weapons more likely and setting off a new arms race. The use of the word "tactical" operates to lessen their importance, to distract from the fact that their very use would constitute a nuclear war.

What is "low yield"? Perhaps the "smallest" tactical nuclear weapon we have is the B61-11, which has a dial-a-yield feature: it can yield "only" 0.3 kilotons, but can be set to yield up to 170 kilotons. The power of the Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons. That is, a "small" bomb can yield more than 10 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb. The B61-11 dropped from 40,000 feet would dig a hole 20 feet deep and then explode, send shock waves downward, leave a huge crater, and spread radiation widely. The idea that it would explode underground and be harmless to those above ground is false - and, anyway, an underground release of radiation would threaten ground water and aquifers for a long time and over a wide distance.

To use words such as "low yield" or "small" or "mini-" nuclear weapon is like speaking of being a little bit pregnant. Nuclear war is nuclear war! It crosses the moral line.

Any discussion of roadside canister bombs made in Iran justifying an attack on Iran should be put in perspective: Little canister bombs (EFPs - explosively formed projectiles) that shoot a small hot metal ball at a humvee or tank versus nuclear war.

Incidentally, the administration may be focusing on the canister bombs because it seeks to claim that the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 permits the use of military force against Iran based on its interference in Iraq. In that case, no further authorization by Congress would be needed for an attack on Iran.

The journalistic point is clear. Journalists and political leaders should not talk about an "attack." They should use the words that describe what is really at stake: nuclear war - in boldface.

Then there is the scale of the proposed attack. Military reports leaking out suggest a huge (mostly or entirely non-nuclear) airstrike on as many as 10,000 targets - a "shock and awe" attack that would destroy Iran's infrastructure the way the U.S. bombing destroyed Iraq's infrastructure. The targets would not just be "military targets." As Dan Plesch reports in the New Statesman, February 19, 2007, such an attack would wipe out Iran's military, business, and political infrastructure. Not just nuclear installations, missile launching sites, tanks, and ammunition dumps, but also airports, rail lines, highways, bridges, ports, communications centers, power grids, industrial centers, hospitals, public buildings, and even the homes of political leaders. That is what was attacked in Iraq: the "critical infrastructure." It is not just military in the traditional sense. It leaves a nation in rubble, and leads to death, maiming, disease, joblessness, impoverishment, starvation, mass refugees, lawlessness, rape, and incalculable pain and suffering. That is what the options appear to be "on the table." Is nation destruction what the American people have in mind when they acquiesce without discussion to an "attack"? Is nuclear war what the American people have in mind? An informed public must ask and the media must ask. The words must be used.

Even if the attack were limited to nuclear installations, starting a nuclear war with Iran would have terrible consequences - and not just for Iranians. First, it would strengthen the hand of the Islamic fundamentalists - exactly the opposite of the effect U.S. planners would want. It would be viewed as yet another major attack on Islam. Fundamentalist Islam is a revenge culture. If you want to recruit fundamentalist Islamists all over the world to become violent jihadists, this is the best way to do it. America would become a world pariah. Any idea of the U.S. as a peaceful nation would be destroyed. Moreover, you don't work against the spread of nuclear weapons by using those weapons. That will just make countries all over the world want nuclear weaponry all the more. Trying to stop nuclear proliferation through nuclear war is self-defeating.

As Einstein said, "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war."

Why would the Bush administration do it? Here is what conservative strategist William Kristol wrote last summer during Israel's war with Hezbollah.

"For while Syria and Iran are enemies of Israel, they are also enemies of the United States. We have done a poor job of standing up to them and weakening them. They are now testing us more boldly than one would have thought possible a few years ago. Weakness is provocative. We have been too weak, and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak.

The right response is renewed strength -- in supporting the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, in standing with Israel, and in pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran. For that matter, we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions -- and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement."

-Willam Kristol, Weekly Standard 7/24/06

"Renewed strength" is just the Bush strategy in Iraq. At a time when the Iraqi people want us to leave, when our national elections show that most Americans want our troops out, when 60% of Iraqis think it all right to kill Americans, Bush wants to escalate. Why? Because he is weak in America. Because he needs to show more "strength." Because if he knocks out the Iranian nuclear facilities, he can claim at least one "victory." Starting a nuclear war with Iran would really put us in a worldwide war with fundamentalist Islam. It would make real the terrorist threat he has been claiming since 9/11. It would create more fear - real fear - in America. And he believes, with much reason, that fear tends to make Americans vote for saber-rattling conservatives.

Kristol's neoconservative view that "weakness is provocative" is echoed in Iran, but by the other side. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted in The New York Times of February 24, 2007 as having "vowed anew to continue enriching uranium, saying, 'If we show weakness in front of the enemies, they will increase their expectations.'" If both sides refuse to back off for fear of showing weakness, then prospects for conflict are real, despite the repeated analyses, like that of The Economist that the use of nuclear weapons against Iran would be politically and morally impossible. As one unnamed administration official has said (The New York Times, February 24, 2007), "No one has defined where the red line is that we cannot let the Iranians step over."

What we are seeing now is the conservative message machine preparing the country to accept the ideas of a nuclear war and nation destruction against Iran. The technique used is the "slippery slope." It is done by degrees. Like the proverbial frog in the pot of water - if the heat is turned up slowly the frog gets used to the heat and eventually boils to death - the American public is getting gradually acclimated to the idea of war with Iran.

* First, describe Iran as evil - part of the axis of evil. An inherently evil person will inevitably do evil things and can't be negotiated with. An entire evil nation is a threat to other nations.
* Second, describe Iran's leader as a "Hitler" who is inherently "evil" and cannot be reasoned with. Refuse to negotiate with him.
* Then repeat the lie that Iran is on the verge of having nuclear weapons - weapons of mass destruction. IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei says they are at best many years away.
* Call nuclear development "an existential threat" - a threat to our very existence.
* Then suggest a single "surgical" "attack" on Natanz and make it seem acceptable.
* Then find a reason to call the attack "self-defense" - or better protection for our troops from the EFPs, or single-shot canister bombs.
* Claim, without proof and without anyone even taking responsibility for the claim, that the Iranian government at its highest level is supplying deadly weapons to Shiite militias attacking our troops, while not mentioning the fact that Saudi Arabia is helping Sunni insurgents attacking our troops.
* Give "protecting our troops" as a reason for attacking Iran without getting new authorization from Congress. Claim that the old authorization for attacking Iraq implied doing "whatever is necessary to protect our troops" from Iranian intervention in Iraq.
* Argue that de-escalation in Iraq would "bleed" our troops, "weaken" America, and lead to defeat. This sets up escalation as a winning policy, if not in Iraq then in Iran.
* Get the press to go along with each step.
* Never mention the words "preventive nuclear war" or "national destruction." When asked, say, "All options are on the table." Keep the issue of nuclear war and its consequences from being seriously discussed by the national media.
* Intimidate Democratic presidential candidates into agreeing, without using the words, that nuclear war should be "on the table." This makes nuclear war and nation destruction bipartisan and even more acceptable.

Progressives managed to blunt the "surge" idea by telling the truth about "escalation." Nuclear war against Iran and nation destruction constitute the ultimate escalation.

The time has come to stop the attempt to make a nuclear war against Iran palatable to the American public. We do not believe that most Americans want to start a nuclear war or to impose nation destruction on the people of Iran. They might, though, be willing to support a tit-for-tat "surgical" "attack" on Natanz in retaliation for small canister bombs and to end Iran's early nuclear capacity.

It is time for America's journalists and political leaders to put two and two together, and ask the fateful question: Is the Bush administration seriously preparing for nuclear war and nation destruction? If the conventional GBU-28s will do the job, then why not take nuclear war off the table in the name of controlling the spread of nuclear weapons? If GBU-28s won't do the job, then it is all the more important to have that discussion.

This should not be a distraction from Iraq. The general issue is escalation as a policy, both in Iraq and in Iran. They are linked issues, not separate issues. We have learned from Iraq what lack of public scrutiny does.

George Lakoff is a Senior Fellow at the Rockridge Institute. Lakoff is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Go on-site for the numerous links within this article and to view other articles. Just click on the following URL:

URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17220.htm
................. .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
^^^^^^^^^^^
Leaders Don't Kill People...
By
Michael Boldin

03/20/07 "ICH" -- -- -If I have my facts straight, George W. Bush has never killed a single person in his life. All the torture and death that people attribute to him has been carried out by people who were "only following orders."

Psychologically, I find this quite interesting. As a person, it doesn't appear that Bush would or could hurt anyone, especially not innocent people. But, as "commander-in-chief," he can order and oversee actions that result in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents without even batting an eye. A friend and critic of mine believes that leaders such as Bush assume full responsibility for the actions of a nation's military. I strongly disagree.

We've all heard the excuses over and over again. The soldiers aren't responsible because they're following orders. The military isn't responsible because they have to obey the civilian leadership. The President isn't responsible because he was given bad intelligence. The intelligence agencies aren't responsible because they had bad informants, and made the best call they could under the circumstances. And, of course, Congress isn't responsible either. Why not? I don't really know. Maybe it's because they're utterly incompetent.

Seriously, though, we have a major problem here.


RESPONSIBILITY
So, who is responsible for the death and destruction in Iraq?

Who? The pilots who dropped the bombs? The commanding officers? The secretary of defense? The President? Or, as the war hawks would like us to believe, is it the people defending their homeland from invasion? If they'd just stop resisting.our peace-loving, democracy-spreading military wouldn't have to defend themselves and kill these people, right?

Who is responsible might not even matter, because the truth is no one will be held accountable, and there will be no trials or prosecutions for the countless innocents that have been killed in America's foreign wars. The result is that the politicians are further emboldened to wage even more wars in the future.


STANDING ARMIES ARE DANGEROUS TO YOU
Historically, governments have misused standing armies in two main ways, both of which inevitably result in tyranny for the People. The first is to engage in foreign wars, which invariably result in massive spending, which enables the government to place a bigger and bigger tax burden on the people. This was well-stated by James Madison, the "father of the Constitution":

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

Governments generally call for increased patriotism at home while these foreign wars are being waged. The politicians demand greater powers and reduced liberties for the people; claiming that these moves will help bring peace. Explaining this second way standing armies are misused, Madison continued:

In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.... [There is also an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and ... degeneracy of manners and of morals.... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

The concept here is simple. Governments use their armies to stir up, or even produce, enemies by meddling in the affairs of people in different countries. Then, they attempt to scare their own people with cries that the "enemy" is ready to invade, and that war is absolutely necessary to stop these evil killers. Once war breaks out, the government then demands additional power over the people to supposedly "protect" them in time of war.

Sound familiar?


WHERE THE REAL DANGER LIES
American history is filled with politicians who used foreign adventures to boost their political standing at home. The war in Iraq, now lasting over 15 years and Presidents from both political parties, demonstrates why the Founding Fathers so vehemently opposed standing armies.

The use of our military to invade nations or do "police actions" in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Serbia, Vietnam, and elsewhere, is both unconstitutional and immoral. The death toll resulting from this aggressive foreign policy has become massive.

Ask yourself this. Is the Iraqi insurgent fighting in Baghdad more threatening to you than warrantless spying or massive war spending? Is al Qaeda more menacing than the suspension of Habeas Corpus? Is the "terrorist" in Iraq a greater danger to your freedom than all those politicians who signed the Patriot Act without even reading it? Just exactly who or what is the greatest threat your rights?

To those not blinded by interest, the answer is clear. It's not individuals like Clinton or Bush. It's not the military. It's not the NSA, the Supreme Court, or Congress. The greatest threat to your liberty is your own government; it's the system which has allowed all this to happen! And, sadly, it's been this way for many years.

But, the politicians couldn't get away with much if we didn't give them the tools. The government couldn't grow in power without the billions of dollars they take from us each year. The politicians wouldn't be able to wage war without the massive military machine which has become synonymous with American foreign policy.

I say to you, look at who your leaders are, and ask yourself if these people can be trusted with such power. Presidents such as Truman, Bush, Johnson, and Clinton have used the military in ways which have resulted in the deaths of millions. They used the same standing army that people like George Washington and Patrick Henry warned us against. Don't tell me that this country needs such a military force. A national militia would never have done such things.


SOLUTIONS
In contrast to this bloody mess, the founders envisioned a society that would be protected by militias on the state level. A national defense would only be put together when the nation itself was directly threatened by invasion.

What's my suggestion? Well, I'm sure many of you won't like it, but that's the way things go. I say let's get rid of the whole damn military. Stop spending countless billions and billions to maintain a global presence. Bring all the troops home once and for all!

Just think, if the military was disbanded then there would be no more overseas bases. There would be no more bombings of faraway nations. There would be no more terrorists created by a meddling foreign policy. There would be no more regime changes. There would be no more foreign wars. There would be no more war funding bills to debate. There would be no more use of weapons like agent orange and depleted uranium. There would be no more enemy combatants. There would be no more military prisons. There would be no more collateral damage. And, most importantly, the root of the problem would finally be smashed into pieces; the treacherous policy of American interventionism.

Thus, there is only one solution to this grave danger to our freedom and prosperity. We the People must act on the warnings of the Founding Fathers against standing armies and foreign entanglements. We must shut down the American military empire, close every single overseas base, and bring all the troops home. The troops would then be released into the private sector, where they would be quite effective in leading local militias to defend the nation in the highly unlikely event of a foreign invasion.


REAL NATIONAL DEFENSE
Do I want a defenseless country? Absolutely not - I want a defenseless government! I want a government that doesn't have the power or the tools to wage anymore foreign wars, and thus, one that doesn't have the excuse to take away your liberty to "protect" you.

There is an alternative that one would call a real national defense. This is one where the people themselves are responsible for the defense of their country. The individual American was considered to be so effective and important to the defense of America that the Constitution specifically mentioned it in the 2nd Amendment.

Those in power, and their followers, of course, would never want this to become reality, though. They'll try to scare you away from such a strong system of defense. They'll warn you of all the great dangers that will "surely" come. But, don't believe such things, for they are the lies of tyrants!

Here's one I've heard time and time again. "If we didn't have the military, you'd be speaking German or Japanese right now!" Don't make me laugh! The Japanese were able to pull off one surprise attack by air, and the Germans weren't even able to cross the English Channel, much less the Atlantic Ocean!

So what would happen if another country ever began preparing masses of ships and planes, and millions of soldiers to invade the United States? The Founding Fathers gave us the answer. Such an invading force would be met by the power of tens of millions of free, well-armed American citizens who would quickly rise to resist and defeat any such invasion.

Think it can't work? Think again. Invading and successfully occupying nations with an armed population is a feat rarely accomplished. The people of Afghanistan were able to drive out the mighty Soviets, and just a small percentage of the Iraqi people are currently making occupation untenable for the mightiest military in the history of the world.


A NEW DIRECTION
What would we do about murderous foreign dictators? Yes, you got it. The Founding Fathers gave us an answer to that as well. First of all, the government would no longer force you to give them any money. And more importantly, the government would no longer have the ability to go around looking for tyrants to destroy, and populations to "save" through war. Instead of endless foreign entanglements, we'd build the freest and most prosperous nation in history.

Of course, those Americans who would want to leave their families and jobs to support revolutionary movements in other parts of the world would always have the freedom to do so.

Thus, in determining our future, we have a clear choice. Should we continue down the path we are on today? Should we continue on this path of empire, with massive standing armies, hundreds of overseas bases, foreign wars and sanctions? Should we continue our foreign policy which creates hatred in millions and millions of people; thus making you a target of their retaliation? Should we continue down the path of ever-growing taxes and regulations, as well as the endless loss of liberty that always comes with empire?

Or, should we change direction? Should we take our nation down the path that the Founder Fathers envisioned? Should we create a society where government is strictly limited and forbidden from invading foreign nations? Should we build a society where freedom and prosperity reigns; a nation that would serve as a model for the rest of the world? If we choose this path, every person on earth would always know that there would be at least one refuge for the oppressed, the United States of America.

We can have something different, and I, for one, choose the path of liberty.

by Michael Boldin, who is an outspoken critic of the American political system. He is a senior editor and contributing writer for http://www.populistamerica.com. Michael welcomes your feedback at mboldin@populistamerica.com

Go on-site to gain access to the numerous links, and comments within and added to this article by clicking on the following URL:

URL:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17227.htm
^^^^^^^^^ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
~~~~~~~

“I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country—when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.’”

Schurz, “The Policy of Imperialism,”
Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers
of
Carl Schurz, vol. 6, pp. 119–20 (1913).

~~~


"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. " : Ayn Rand in "The Nature of Government"

~~~


"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."

Thomas Jefferson

~~~


"There is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with 'a money touch,' but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers".

Theodore Roosevelt

~~~~~ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
*************
March on the Pentagon, March 17th

Get the word out!

Go on-site by clicking on the following URL:

URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17222.htm
*******
.
.

[Saundra Hummer]

/////\\\\\
The President's Private Army
A Review of Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis

By
Stephen Lendman

03/02/07 "ICH" -- -- Chalmers Johnson is professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego where he taught for 30 years as well as at UC, Berkeley (where he was educated). At Berkeley, he was chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies and its Department of Political Studies. He's currently president of the Japan Policy Research Institute (JPRI), a not-for-profit research and public affairs organization involved in public education relating to Japan and international relations in the Pacific region. Johnson is also a prolific writer and author of 17 books, numerous articles and various other publications.

From 1967 through 1973, he served as well as a consultant to the Office of National Estimates (ONE) within the CIA, and during the Cold War years was, by his own characterization, a former "spear-carrier for the empire." At least since the age of George Bush, however, Johnson radically transformed himself into one of the nation's sharpest and most important intellectual critics of the current administration having now completed the third and last volume of his "inadvertent trilogy" in his newest book Nemesis that's the subject of this review.

The previous two he refers to are Blowback based on 1953 CIA terminology in the aftermath of the spy agency's first ever engineered overthrow of a foreign leader - democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq ushering in the 26 year tryannical rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi who was himself forcibly ousted in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Volume two was The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. Volume three is Nemesis - The Last Days of the American Republic and subject of this review that hopefully will encourage readers to get the book and read the others in Johnson's trilogy to get the full picture of his powerfully vital message.

Combined, the three volumes show how imperial hubris and overreach have undermined the republic. Johnson characterizes it as dealing "with the way arrogant and misguided American policies have headed us for a series of catastrophes comparable to our disgrace and defeat in Vietnam or even to the sort of extinction that befell....the Soviet Union (that he believes is) now unavoidable." In his view, the present state of the nation is dire, and it's "too late for mere scattered reforms of our government or bloated military to make much difference."

Our democracy and way of life are now threatened because of our single-minded pursuit of empire with a well-entrenched militarism driving it that's become so powerful and pervasive it's now an uncontrollable state within the state. History is clear on this teaching we can choose as could all empires before us. We can keep ours and lose our democracy, but we can't have both. Rome made the wrong choice and perished. Britain chose more wisely and survived. We must now choose, and so far the signs are ominous. Our current behavior under all administrations post-WW II requires resources and commitments abroad that in the end, Johnson believes, "will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and....produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent." We're perilously close already because a hyper-reactionary statist administration hijacked the government and is driving the nation to tyranny and ruin.

The evidence post-9/11 shows it:
-- A nation facing no outside threats permanently at war.
-- Secret torture-prisons around the world with no accountability to which anyone, anywhere for any reason can be sent never to return or receive justice.
-- The most secretive, intrusive and repressive government in our history and a president who's a congenital, serial liar.
-- Social decay at home.
-- An unprecedented wealth disparity and extent of corporate power. Former US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned years ago: "We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- A de facto one party state with two wings and a president claiming "unitary executive" powers ignoring the rule of law and doing as he pleases in the name of national security on his say alone.
-- The absence of checks and balances and separation of powers with no restraint on a reckless "boy-emperor" Executive on a "messianic mission."
-- A secret intelligence establishment with near-limitless funding operating without oversight.
-- A dominant corporate-controlled media serving as a national thought-control police and collective quasi-state ministry of information and propaganda glorifying imperial wars to "spread democracy" without letting on they're for conquest, domination and repression.
-- An omnipotent military-industrial complex Dwight Eisenhower couldn't have imagined when he warned us nor could George Washington, to no avail. In his Farewell Address in September, 1796, Washington said: "Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." He meant large standing armies leading to an imperial presidency. They destroy our system of checks and balances and separation of powers and in the end our freedom.
-- A weak, servile Congress acceding to a dominant president under a system of authoritarian rule keeping a restive population in line it fears one day no longer will tolerate being denied essential services so the nation's wealth can go for imperial wars and handouts to the rich.
-- A cesspool of corruption stemming from incestuous ties between government and business mocking any notions of government of, for or by the people.

Johnson points out America is plagued with the same dynamic that doomed other past empires unwilling to change - "isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy" combined with authoritarian rule and loss of personal freedom. Hence, the title of the book - Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance and punisher of hubris and arrogance in Greek mythology. She's already here among us, unseen and patiently stalking our way of life as a free nation awaiting the moment she chooses to make her presence known that won't be pleasant when she does. Johnson compares her to Wagner's Brunnhilde in his opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Unlike Nemesis, she collects heros, not fools and hypocrites. But she and Nemesis both announce themselves the same way - "Only the doomed see me," even though we'll all feel her presence and suffer her sting.

Our present crisis isn't just from our military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's from growing international anger and revulsion that America is no longer trusted with a president showing contempt for the law including our treaty obligations Article 6 of the Constitution says are the "supreme Law of the Land." They include the Third Geneva Convention (GCIII) of 1949 covering the treatment of prisoners in time of war and Fourth Geneva Convention (GCIV) the same year on protection of civilians in wartime in enemy hands or under occupation by a foreign power.

No authority gives presidents, governments or militaries the right to ignore them, but this president and government flaunt them openly, almost gleefully They practically boast about it, enraging people everywhere including allies and the entire Muslim world this country collectively demonizes as terrorists, militants and Islamofascists in its concocted "war on terror" the Pentagon now calls the "Long War" that won't end in our lifetime.

In early 2003, Johnson warned us about "the sorrows already invading our lives....to be our fate for years to come: perpetual war, a collapse of constitutional government, endemic official lying and disinformation, and finally bankruptcy." Then and now, he still hopes Americans will see the threat and act before it's too late, but time, he believes, is short, and overall, he's not hopeful. His newest book explains how we got here, and what we must do to avoid our appointment with Nemesis who's very patient, but even hers has limits and we're approaching it.

This review covers the essence and flavor of Johnson's case he makes in seven powerful chapters. They're not recommended at bedtime.


Militarism and Breakdown of Constitutional Government

Johnson begins by noting other 20th century empires that rose and fell with parallels to our situation today. He cites among others the Brits, Soviets, Nazis, Japanese, and Ottomans to press his case that we like them, and ancient Rome earlier, "are approaching the edge of a huge waterfall and are about to plunge over it." He quotes historian Kevin Baker's fear we're perilously close to the day when our Congress, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, will use its power for the last time before turning it over to a military dictator. Based on the past six years, it's arguable it's already with a civilian one.

The Bush-Cheney administration brought us to this point, but the crisis didn't start with them. It began at the beginning when Benjamin Franklin warned us we have a Republic if we can keep it. It advanced gradually but accelerated post-WW II when we emerged as the only dominant nation left standing and planned to keep it that way causing the "sorrows" we now face - an imperial presidency, erosion of checks and balances and separation of powers, and a culture of militarism that's a power unto itself that today who would dare challenge.

The Founders tried preventing the kind of tyranny colonists endured under King George III. They invented a system of constitutionally mandated republican government with a federal authority sharing power with the states and three separate branches in Washington able to check and balance each other with the single most important power put in the hands of Congress so presidents would never have it - the ability to declare war. James Madison, Father of the Constitution, said it's because: "Of all the enemies to liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.... (Delegating) such powers (to the president) would have struck, not only at the fabric of the Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments."

The last times Congress used its sole power were on December 8, 1941 after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and on December 11 after Germany and Italy declared war on America because their Axis Power obligations required them to do it and Hitler's and "Il Duce's" imperial eyes were bigger than their realpolitik stomachs.

Today more than two centuries later, Benjamin Franklin's warning hits home harder than ever as the Founders' constitutional framework has nearly disintegrated. The president is more powerful than a monarch. Along with the military, he has his own private army in the form of a clandestine CIA plus control of all 15 extraconstitutional intelligence organizations. They and the military answer to no one including the Congress because they operate secretly with undisclosed budgets (even the Pentagon has in part), and the law of the land is just an artifact, powerless to constrain them.

In Nemesis, Johnson concentrates on the power of the military and a single intelligence agency, the CIA. He says upfront he believes "we will never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation, unless we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence collecting to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon." Even if we do it, he now believes it's too late as the nation once called a model democracy "may have been damaged beyond repair (and) it will take a generation or more (at best) to overcome the image of 'America as torturer'"and rogue state showing contempt for international law, human rights, and ordinary people everywhere. It's not what the Founders conceived nor how things should have been in a democratic state Lincoln said at Gettysburg was "of the people, by the people, for the people...." Today it's only for the privileged.

It turned out badly because power corrupts those getting too much of it, and since 1941 that power grew as the nation prepared for wars it never stopped mobilizing for since. It comes with a price - the end of democracy and loss of freedoms that can't coexist with imperialism on the march for conquest and dominance that turned America the beautiful into a nation to be feared and hated. We emerged from WW II haughty and confident as the world's unchallengeable economic, political and military superpower almost like we planned it that way which we did. We weren't about to give it up and intended taking full advantage to rule the world, tolerate no outliers, and demand fealty and deference from all nations with hell to pay to ones that balk.

The mislabeled "good war" launched our global imperium now on the march for "full-spectrum dominance" meaning absolute unchallengeable control of all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems - no small aim indeed for rulers with larger than possible ambitions and no intention backing off, so help us all.

It makes the cost painfully high with more military spending than the rest of the world combined, but never enough for a voracious military-industrial establishment and complicit government going along meaning finding justification for it. September 11, 2001, dubbed the "New Pearl Harbor," served it up like room service ushering in an intense and contrived climate of fear allowing the country to go on a rampage to solidify control through aggressive wars against enemies always easy to invent to assure we won't run out of them. Heading the list are resource-rich countries or ones like Afghanistan because they're strategically located near energy-rich areas like the Caspian Basin. But any leader forgetting "who's boss" gets in the target queue for regime change, even model democrats like Hugo Chavez needing reminders our sovereignty comes ahead of theirs.

And who'll dare challenge the notion that might makes right so international laws, norms and "supreme Law of the Land" treaties can be dismissed to get on with the business at hand. It doesn't matter to a rogue empire on the march and a president believing the law is what he says it is, the national security is just rhetoric for I'll do as I please, and the Constitution is "just a goddamned piece of paper." What he and those around him lack in subtleness, they make up for big time in brazenness, but that kind of attitude paves the road to hell we're on for our appointment with Nemesis.

Johnson reviews our campaign against Iraq since the Gulf war in 1991. That conflict, killer-sanctions for the next dozen years, and the Iraq war since 2003 all violate international laws and are clear instances of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but what power will hold the world's only superpower to account. The toll on Iraq and its people for the past 16 years has been devastating. The US campaign destroyed a once prosperous nation and its priceless heritage leaving in its wake a surreal lawless armed camp wasteland with few or no essential services including electricity, clean water and sanitation facilities, medical care, fuel and most everything else needed for sustenance, public safety and survival.

Johnson quotes experts saying the looting of the National Museum of Baghdad and burning of the National Library and Archives and Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Endowments amounted to "the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years (and some say since the) Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258 to find looting on this scale." Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon went to great pains protecting the Oil Ministry, but were indifferent, almost gleeful seeing priceless treasures looted and burned. It detroyed a "whole universe of antiquity" Iraqis and civilized people everywhere won't ever forgive us for.

In all, the Gulf war and US-imposed sanctions caused 1.5 million or more Iraqi deaths up to March, 2003 plus another 3.5 million or more refugees to the present outside Iraq or internally displaced. In addition, the shocking 2006 Lancet published study estimated the joint US-British invasion caused another 655,000 violent deaths since then through mid-2006, although they readily admitted the true figure might be as high as 900,000 because they were unable to survey the most violent parts of the country or interview thousands of families all of whose members were killed.

Already the US-inflicted devastation on Iraq and its people since 1991 amounts to one of the great war/sanctions/and occupation related crimes in human history. Their effects keep mounting exponentially with no way to know how great the toll will be when it's over. One day it will be because Iraqis won't stop fighting for their freedom till it is, but none of this gets reported in US media and precious little anywhere in the West. So far, war continues because America's on the march, and Johnson notes US soldiers in Iraq are only accountable to their superiors in the field or the Pentagon, and an estimated 100,000 civilian contractors are only accountable to themselves.

The darkest side of our adventurism is our global network of military prisons (authorized by the Secretary of Defense and Pentagon) where physical and mental torture are practiced even though it's known no useful information comes from it. Instead it's used for social control, vengeance and a policy of degrading people regarded as sub-human because they happen to be less-than-white Arab or Afghan Muslims. It's also a symbolic act of superpower defiance daring the world community to challenge us. International Geneva Convention laws and the 1984 UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment no longer matter for the lord and master of the universe. The US is accountable under them, but clever lawyers and a lawless Attorney General rewrite the rules of engagement claiming justification even when they don't have a leg to stand on.


Imperial Pathologies
-
Comparing America to Rome and Britain

Johnson makes his case citing ancient Rome to show how imperialism and militarism destroyed the Republic. He notes after its worst defeat at the hands of Carthaginian general Hannibal in 216 BC, Romans vowed never again to tolerate the rise of a Mediterranean power capable of threatening their survival and felt justified waging preemptive war against any opponent it thought might try.

That was Paul Wolfowitz's notion as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the GHW Bush administration in
1992 that he began implementing as Deputy Secretary of Defense in 2001 and made part of the National Security Strategy in 2002. It was an ancient Roman megalomanic vision called Pax Romana that post-WW II became Pax Americana with illusions of wanting unchallengeable dominance to deter any potential rival, and, like ancient Rome, wage preemptive or preventive war to assure it.

A culture of corruption and militarism eroded the Roman Republic that effectively ended in 49 BC when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River in Northern Italy plunging the country in civil war that left Caesar victorious when all his leading opponents were dead. The Republic died with them as Caesar became the state exercising dictatorship over it from 48 to 44 BC when his reign ended on the Ides of March that year after his fateful meeting in the Roman Senate with Brutus, Cassius and six other conspirators whose long knives did what enemy legions on battlefields couldn't. It led to the rise of Caesar's grandnephew Octavian. In 27 BC, the Roman Senate gave him his new title, Augustus Caesar, making him Rome's first emperor after earlier ceding most of its powers to him. He then emasculated Rome's system of republican rule turning the Senate into an aristocratic family club performing ceremonial duties only.

It was much the same in Nazi Germany only much faster. The German Reichstag made Adolph Hitler Reichschallcellor on January 30, 1933 ceding its power to him March 23 by enacting the Enabling Act or Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Empire establishing a Nazi dictatorship and allowing the Weimar Republic to pass quietly into history. With a whimper, not a bang, it gave Hitler absolute power and the right to enact laws and constitutional changes on his own with little more than rubber-stamping approval from an impotent Reichstag that anointed him Reichsfuhrer a year later allowing him supreme power to destroy the state he only got to rule for 12 years.

Like Nazi Germany and other empires, Johnson explains the "Roman Republic failed to adjust to the unintended consequences of its imperialism (and militaristic part of it) leading to drastic alterations in its form of government" that was transformed into dictatorship. It's constitution became undermined along with genuine political and human rights its citizens once had but lost under imperial rule. Rome's military success made made it very rich and its leaders arrogant leading to what Johnson calls "the first case of what today we call imperial overstretch." It didn't help that a citizen army of conscripts got transformed into professional military warriors. It grew large and unwieldy becoming a state within a state like our Pentagon today. It created a culture of militarism that turned into a culture of moral decay leading to the empire's decline and fall.

The US Republic has yet to collapse, but an imperial presidency now places great strain on it with a dominant Pentagon and culture of militarism undermining Congress, the courts and our civil liberties. Ancient Rome proved republican checks and balances aren't compatible with imperial dreams and a powerful military on the march for them. The US may have crossed its own Rubicon on September 18, 2001 with the passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) by joint House-Senate resolution authorizing "the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States (and) giving the President....authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States...."

By this act alone, George Bush got congressional authority to seize near dictatorial power in the name of national security, ignore constitutional and international law, be able to wage aggressive war to protect the nation, and get repressive laws passed threatening citizens and others alike with loss of our freedoms. Then in October, 2002, Congress voted the president unrestricted power to preemptively strike Iraq whenever he believed it "appropriate" meaning he was free to wage aggressive war against Iraq or any other nation he henceforth called a threat using tactical nuclear weapons if he chooses.

This kind of unrestricted power isn't just dictatorial authority. It's insanity courtesy of the Congress and supportive right wing courts. It's taking us the same way as ancient Rome assuring our fate will be no different unless it's stopped and reversed. It's the inevitable price of imperial arrogance making leaders feel invulnerable till they no longer are, and it's too late.

We may still have a choice, and Johnson cites the one Britain took to explain. They sacrificed empire to preserve democracy knowing they couldn't have both. They earlier took up the "White Man's Burden" in a spirit of imperial "goodness" we now call "spreading democracy" believing Anglo-Saxons deserved to rule other nations, especially ones of color they thought inferior. Johnson explains "successful imperialism requires that a domestic republic change into a tyranny." It happened to Rome, and he sees it happening here under an imperial presidency with militarism taking ever greater root in society. Britain was spared by a democratic resurgence followed WW II. People finally freed from the scourge of Nazism said never again and chose democracy to assure it.

We must now choose whether to return to our founding roots or stay on our present path heading to imperial tyranny. For Johnson, Rome and Britain are the "archtypes" defining where we stand and what we face. Rome chose empire, lost its Republic and then everything. Britain went the other way choosing democracy despite the Blair government's disgraceful post-9/11 imperial indiscretions acting as Washington's pawn in service to our adventurism. Now late in the game, we must choose one way or the other. We can either have our democratic "cake" or "eat it" and suffer the consequences. We can't have it both ways.


The CIA - The President's Private Army

Imperial Rome had its elite praetorian guard to protect and serve its emperors. The CIA here works the same way as a private army for the president that in the end will go his way as it did producing phony intelligence the Bush administration used to justify war with Iraq. It proved its loyalty by its willingness to lie, but it does lots more than that - the kinds of extrajudicial things it gets away with because everything about "the company" is secret, including its budget. It puts CIA beyond the law making it unaccountable to the public and Congress that have every right to know in a "democracy" but none under imperial rule. Johnson stresses that US presidents have "untrammeled control of the CIA (and it's) probably (their) single most extraordinary power" as it puts them beyond the check and balancing powers of Congress and courts constitutionally required in republican systems of government. Not in our "Republic," at least since 1947 when the National Security Act created the CIA under Harry Truman to succeed the wartime OSS dissolved in 1945.

Johnson explains CIA originally had five missions. Four dealt with collection, coordination and dissemination of intelligence. The fifth one was vague allowing the agency to "perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council
(overseeing it) may....direct." This mandate caused the problem turning "CIA into the personal, secret, unaccountable army of the president" and making secret covert, often mischievous illegal, operations its main function. Their duties include overthrowing democratically elected governments, assassinating foreign heads of state and key officials, propping up friendly dictators, and snatching targeted individuals for "extraordinary rendition" on privately-leased aircraft to secret torture-prisons for not too gracious treatment on arrival that may include "destroying" the evidence after completing interrogation.

We claimed justification for it during the Cold War even though extrajudicial activities are never permissible under republican constitutional government. Today under George Bush, things are further complicated as CIA is one of 15 intelligence agencies under a director of National Intelligence (DNI). But even with this realignment, CIA remains the president's private praetorian guard army accountable only to him with tens of billions of secret budget power to do plenty of damage.

It now lets CIA be more active than ever as under Bush it's got double the number of covert operatives making Johnson believe the spy agency's original purpose is history with DNI now handling most intelligence gathering functions. CIA is now a mostly global hit squad Mafia with Bush its resident Godfather sending it off to do "assassinations, dirty tricks, renditions, and engineering foreign coups. In the intelligence field it will be restricted to informing our presidents and generals about current affairs." In all it does, the agency's secrecy shields the chief executive from responsibility giving him plausible deniability if anything leaks out. Johnson explains "CIA's bag of dirty tricks....is a defining characteristic of the imperial presidency. It is a source of unchecked power that can gravely threaten the nation....(Its) so-called reforms....in 2006 have probably further shortened the life of the American republic." "The company" is a menace to democratic rule. Either it goes or our freedoms do.


US Military Bases Around the World
People in US cities would be outraged if another country garrisoned its troops close by with all the resulting fallout: unacceptable noise, pollution, environmental destruction, appropriation of valued public real estate along with drunken soldiers on the loose violating laws, causing damage and raping local women. Not the kinds of neighbors we choose, especially when they're mostly unaccountable for their actions.

We don't generally give other nations basing rights here. But the Pentagon practically demands other countries allow us the right to put our troops on choice parts of their real estate around the world. That's real heavy-handed imperial arrogance mindful of an earlier time when imperialism could be measured by an empire's colony count. Military outposts are our version set up to operate by our own rules when we show up. Locals have no say and neither does the host country once a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) is finalized that gives the US "guest" freedom from host country laws and restraints governing civilian life and exemption from any inconvenient environmental cleanup obligations. That subject is covered in the next section.

Only one superpower remained after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and the Russians never posed a serious challenge before it did. All along we greatly outclassed and outgunned them, and Moscow only wanted a standoff if it came to that. During the Cold War, we had many military outposts around the world supposedly aimed at them, but how do we justify them now. They're not for defense. They're for offense in contrast to home-based ones to defend the nation.

Johnson reviews the known number of US bases in other countries by size and branch of service. According to the Department of Defense's Base Structure Report through 2005, the official total of all sizes is 737, but so many were built in recent years, Johnson believes the actual number exceeds 1000 and is rising. Unlisted ones includes dozens in Iraq, 106 garrisons in Afghanistan, the gigantic Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo built after the Yugoslav war in 1999, and others in Eastern Europe, Israel, Qatar and other Gulf states plus ongoing negotiations all the time to build new bases in new locations in new and currently "occupied" countries.

It takes a lot of resources maintaining an operation this sized. Just the facilities and staff alone make the cost truly staggering. Included are the number of military, civil service and locally hired personnel, facilities, acreage, weaponry and munitions (including thousands of nuclear weapons) and everything else needed to keep a worldwide operation this size functioning. And this only covers what's open to the public and Congress excluding what the Pentagon and host countries keep secret. There's plenty of that including information about bases the US uses to eavesdrop on global communications or our nuclear deployments violating treaty obligations. The Pentagon keeps much of this hidden deploring any oversight as part of its culture of secrecy concealing from Congress and our NATO allies the true extent of our strength, breath and intentions.

Once Donald Rumsfeld got to the Pentagon he fit right in and served there once before under Gerald Ford. He didn't hide how he wanted to restructure the military to make it lighter, more agile and high tech but no less secret. The result was Department of Defense's Global Posture Review first mentioned by George Bush in November, 2003. It divides military installations into three types:

-- (1) Main Operating Bases (MOBs) having permanently stationed combat forces, extensive infrastructure, command and control headquarters and extensive accommodations for families including hospitals, schools and recreational facilities. The Pentagon calls these bases "little Americas."

-- (2) Forward Operation Sites (FOSs) that are major installations smaller than MOBs and over which the Pentagon tries maintaining a low profile. They exclude families, and troop rotations in and out are for six months, not three years as at MOBs.

-- (3) Cooperative Security Locations (CSLs) - they're the smallest, most austere and are called "lily pads" to cover the entire planet's "arc of instability" that could include countries earmarked for future military action. Preparation here includes prepositioned weapons and munitions.

The new global repositioning plan comes with a huge price tag. The Overseas Basing Commission estimates it at $20 billion and would be much higher but for the Pentagon's standard practice getting host countries to pay their share of the tab allowing us basing rights on their territory. It's called "burden sharing" or our notion of a country we occupy helping pay the cost of deterring potential common enemies. At a time when only US militarism poses a threat to world peace, one day countries like Germany, Japan, South Korea, Spain and others no longer will tolerate our garrisoning troops on their soil. Ecuador under its new president, Raphael Correa, already served notice his country won't renew the US base lease in Manta when it expires in 2009 unless Washington allows his country comparable basing rights in Miami that's impossible. Other countries may follow suit just like the East Europeans kicked out the Soviets after their nations broke away in 1991.

Today the Middle East commands center stage with the Pentagon building major military installations in Iraq similar to the permanent kind in Germany and Japan. Iraq is key to US imperial plans because of its vast and easily accessible oil reserves but for a covert reason as well. Johnson believes it's part of our "empire building" - to shift major Saudi bases to the country making it a "permanent Pentagon outpost" to control the area's "arc of instability" and region's oil reserves that comprise 60% or more of the world's proven total.

Add together all Muslim nations everywhere and their combined known oil reserves are between two-thirds to three-quarters of total world supply. If we control it all, it gives Washington enormous veto power over all nations wanting accessing to the vital juice economies run on. And if we keep demonizing Muslims as enemies and people believe it, it's easy justifying our state-sponsored terror wars on them for all the wrong reasons we say are the right ones.

Headquarters for what's planned in the Middle East are now on four or more permanent Iraq "super-bases" with possible others to come. Many billions of dollars went into them, and they're anchor fixtures in the country along with 100 or more others ranging from mega to micro showing the extent of our digging in for the long haul in a country and region we're not planning to leave in a hurry.

It also shows in the kind of embassy we're building inside the four square mile Green Zone in central Baghdad. Critics call it "Fortress Baghdad" because it's to be the largest US embassy in the world by far, encircled by 15-foot thick concrete walls and rings of concertina wire along with protective surface-to-air missiles. Large numbers of private-sector bodyguards and US military guard its vast facilities, there's modern infrastructure comparable to any large US city with all the comforts and luxuries of home, Saddam's private swimming pool is for GIs and others to frolic in, hometown comfort food abounds, and staff and officials are planned to number around 1000. It's larger than Vatican City, six times the size of the UN New York compound, and has become a hated symbol of imperial occupation, death and destruction it caused, and the oppressive dominance Iraqis are committed to end.

Iraqi history shows an intolerance to occupation, and Iraqis are convinced they'll maintain tradition proving again that notions of permanency are in the eyes of the beholder and their end may come sooner than planned. Our super-facilities may end up just like their mega-predecessors in Danang, Cam Rahn Bay and the Saigon embassy housing the last remnants of US presence helicoptered off its rooftop in defeat and humiliation. We left them and much more behind when the Vietmanese kicked us out, even though we never go anywhere planning to leave in a hurry if ever.

US Imperialism at Work
-
Status of Force Agreements (SOFAs) and How They Work

SOFAs are formal contractual arrangements the US negotiates with other countries implementing basic agreements we first agree to with host nations allowing us the right to garrison troops and civilian personnel there either on a new base we build or an existing one. They follow once the Pentagon arranges a contractual "alliance" with a host country usually based on "common objectives" and "international threats to peace." In final form, they're intended to put US personnel as far outside domestic law as possible and spell out host nation obligations to us. Except for our reciprocal NATO agreements with member countries, they also give our military and civilian personnel special privileges unavailable to ordinary citizens of the host nation. It doesn't work that way with western European states. They have collective clout and won't tolerate the types of one-way deals we impose on smaller, weaker nations that can't stand up to our kind of bullying.

For host nations, SOFAs come with problems along with perceived benefits. They result in unacceptable noise, pollution, environmental damage with no remediation obligation, and they use valuable real estate unavailable to the host or their people who can't avoid the kinds of fallout problems showing up after we do. They include foreigners on their soil accountable to US military rules and justice but not to theirs even when crimes are committed against innocent civilians like local women being abused and raped by drunken unruly troops believing away from home they can do as they please and get away with it. They nearly always can.

Johnson cites between 1998 and 2004 in Japan, US military personnel were involved in 2,024 reported crimes or accidents on duty. Only one led to a court-martial, 318 to "administrative discipline, and the remainder were apparently absolved even though at least some of these crimes involved robberies, rapes, reckless homicide, assaults and other kinds of abuses no one would get away with at home. The result abroad is growing public anger and discontent Johnson illustrates with a prominent example.

It's on the island of Okinawa, Japan's southern-most and poorest prefecture and a place Johnson knows well from his time in the Navy and as an expert on the country and region that includes a book he co-wrote and edited called Okinawa: Cold War Island. The US has its way with Japan having defeated its empire in
1945, wrote its constitution in the aftermath, and has occupied the country ever since. It's well dug in for the long haul with 88 bases on the Japanese islands, a country smaller than California. Thirty-seven of those bases are on Okinawa, a tiny sliver of land about the size of a large US city. It's easy understanding why Okinawans are justifiably angry. They've been practically pushed into the Pacific to make way for US occupation of their island taking over most of its valued real estate and not treating it too well or the people.

Okinawans' greatest outrage, however, is over SOFA-related article 17 covering criminal justice. It states "The custody of an accused member of the United States armed forces or the civilian component (shall) remain with the United States until he is charged." It means when US personnel commit crimes, Japanese investigative authorities have no exclusive access to suspects until they're indicted in court. That hamstrings investigations enough to make prosecutors often reluctant to press charges because they can't get enough evidence to go to trial.

Johnson cites a particularly grievous example he calls the "most serious incident to influence Japanese-American relations since the Security Treaty was signed in 1960." It happened in September, 1995 when two marines abducted a 12-year old girl, beat and raped her, then left her on a beach going back to their base in a rented car. In October, 85,000 Okinawans protested in a park demanding Japanese and American authorities address their grievances after the US military refused to hand over the suspects to Japanese police. This may be a notable example, but it illustrates what Okinawans have endured for over 60 years. The US military runs their territory without accountability to Japanese law. As a result, US personnel get away with rapes, drunken brawling, muggings, drug violations, arson and criminal homicide - because they're superior white-skinned Americans, not yellow-skinned Japanese judged inferior.

Things likely can't get much worse for Okinawans, but if the US gets its way they probably will for all Japanese. It relates to Washington's growing concern over China's explosive growth and increasing dominance in the Pacific region. That makes the Chinese a major US regional rival and potential superpower challenger some day. Bush officials won't tolerate it and are pressuring Japan to revise article 9 of its constitution renouncing force except for self-defense. The US wants Japan to be our "Britain of the Far East" or "cop on the beat" to use the country as a front line regional proxy against China, North Korea or any other East Asian state forgetting "who's boss."


But that notion doesn't set well with Japanese people resulting in mass protests throughout the country in opposition. They know how destructive WW II was and want no reoccurrences of it even though already Japan again is a military power. It has the most powerful navy in the world after the US, a total force size of nearly one-quarter million in uniform, 452 combat aircraft and a military budget equalling China's.

After long and difficult negotiations, the Japanese cabinet finally agreed to approve a planned US realignment of forces in their country that won't please its neighbors or its own people. Former prime minister Koizumi and his right-wing supporters yearn to make their country a formidable power again and thus agreed to various unpalatable US basing decisions despite popular opposition to them. It shows Japanese and US officials' insensitivity to deep-seated feelings on the ground that will only lead to further heightened tensions in the region with China and North Korea facing off against their US and Japanese rivals.

The Ultimate Imperial Project in Space

The notion of "full spectrum dominance" spelled it out. The US considers outer space part of its territory, claims sole right to dominate it, and won't tolerate a challenger interfering with our plans to militarize the heavens reigning supreme over planet earth from them. The whole idea is chilling having grown out of Ronald Reagan's March 23,1983 speech calling for greater defense spending during the Cold War. He wanted a huge R & D program for what became known as "Star Wars" - an impermeable anti-missile shield in space called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). It hardly mattered that the whole idea was fantasy, but a glorious one for defense contractors who've profited hugely on it since. From inception, the program's funding ebbed and flowed with a tsunami now going into it for an administration addicted to all things military and a friendly Federal Reserve acting as "pusher" printing up all the ready cash to do it.

The Clinton administration only gave it modest support, but that all changed once George Bush became president and Donald Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon for his second tour as Secretary of Defense with fewer restraints than the first time. He wanted the US prepared for space warfare as insane as the idea is. What's not insane is how hugely defense contractors profit from an open-ended boondoggle padding their bottom lines as long as no future president and Congress halt the madness. Rumsfeld had his own ideas about committing the country to building and deploying space-based weapons to destroy nuclear-armed missile launches even though it can't be done now or ever.

MIT's Theodore Postal is a leading authority on ballistic missile defenses. He's spent years debunking notions that any useful defensive shield will ever work. He flatly states: "the National Missile Defense System has no credible scientific chance of working (and) is a serious abuse of our security system." Nonetheless, the program is ongoing and running strong under Robert Gates' new management at the Pentagon as he's not known as one to buck his White House bosses that's one reason he got the job.

Johnson says all the "rhetoric about a future space war is ideological posturing" similar to the "missile gap" nonsense beginning in the Kennedy years. The notion of wars from or in space are self-defeating because the adverse consequences from them affect us as well as any adversary. Waging one would be like firing a gun exploding in our face harming us as much as anyone hit by it. Dangerous orbiting space debris, already a growing problem, is just one of many serious consequences space wars would produce. Enough of it would threaten military and commercial spacecraft that, in turn, would threaten activities in space. Johnson notes the Air Force currently tracks 13,400 man-made space objects, only a few hundred of which are orbiting satellites. We also know of more than
100,000 smaller pieces of untrackable junk, each the size of a marble and millions more even smaller fragments.

The problem isn't their size. It's the speed they travel at - up to 17,500 miles per hour (same as the space shuttle), meaning when they strike an object they pack a wallop that can be lethal if large enough debris hits an orbiting spacecraft or satellite. Johnson quotes UC Santa Cruz professor of physics Joel Primack saying: "Weaponizing of space would make the debris problem much worse, and even one war in space could encase the entire planet in a shell of whizzing debris that would thereafter make space near the Earth highly hazardous for peaceful as well as military purposes....(and) will jeopardize the possibility of space exploration."

Johnson concurs on how ill-conceived our missile defense schemes and notions of real star wars are that need to come off the table but won't under warrior leadership. He says: "The conclusion is unavoidable: Washington has given us the best illusion of protection against nuclear attack without reducing the odds of such an attack." He goes on adding the whole program is fraught with insurmountable problems from space debris to the inability to distinguish between a hostile missile launch and a decoy plus a record of endless test failures proving they'll only continue as long as the charade does. He then speculates about what's likely true. The whole business of missile defense is just a PR ploy plus another scheme to enrich defense contractors who return the favor with big campaign contributions and plush job offers whenever politicians retire to move on to "greener" pastures.

The amount of money spent since the 1980s has been enormous without a single success to show for it - between $92 and $130 billion with an estimated cost by a theoretical completion date of 2015 of $1.2 trillion. One analyst called it "Pork Barrel in the Sky," but it boils down to one of the most extreme cases of corruption in Washington adding to the vast cesspool of it there. It played heavy on voters' minds in mid-term elections with public outrage a major factor in them demanding change that always ends up getting none. Voters never learn new faces don't mean new policies, at least not in Washington where the criminal class is bipartisan and one back gets scratched to assure others do.

It adds up to further trouble ahead and the greatest danger we now face - our imperial adventurism heading from one conflict to another in an endless cycle harming us as much as any adversary. The longer it continues, the worse things get making only one solution obvious. On responsibly using space Johnson puts it this way, but it applies to all our actions if we plan on surviving: "....we must relearn how to cooperate with our fellow inhabitants of the planet and take the lead in crafting international agreements on the rules of the road in space....We should outlaw all weapons that are designed to destroy other nations' (space assets). If one side blinds the other," it will conclude the worst and retaliate, and one way would be to detonate a nuclear weapon in space that would have an electromagnetic pulse instantly "fry(ing) the electronics in all orbiting satellites."

That would produce a level global playing field the hard way meaning - no more "smart bombs," electronic battlefields, global positioning systems, secure communications from field to commanders or any satellite communications. Instead of crafting multilateral agreements to prevent this, the US instead continues acting hostilely by pushing full steam ahead on space-based antisatellite weapons and driving the nation to bankruptcy doing it. Johnson notes space is another "arena for American hubris and one more piece of evidence that Nemesis is much closer than most of us would care to contemplate."


The Crisis of the American Republic
George Bush wasn't our first president to abuse his power. Other far more notable predecessors also did it like Lincoln suspending habeas rights during the Civil War and FDR's home front war against the Japanese - the ones who were honorable, decent Americans whose only "crimes" were their ancestry and skin color. It made them less human and denied them justice. Instead, it got them incarcerated for the remainder of the war they had nothing to do with or wanted, even though the ones allowed to fight against the Nazis did it courageously and honorably.

The difference between then and now was checks and balances were in place and the separation of powers worked restraining presidents from abusing their authority. That ended the day five arrogant Supreme Court justices annulled the popular vote letting George Bush steal the office Al Gore won at the polls including in Florida. It's been straight downhill since the way it was for Rome when it passed from Republic to repressive empire. The freedoms we've long take for granted have eroded and democracy in America is an endangered species hovering somewhere between life support and the crematorium unless a way is found to resurrect it.

As things now stand, Bush and Cheney rule a rogue state working cooperatively in a corrupted two-party alliance assuring the skids are greased and fix is in. The US Congress is no different than the kind of social club for aristocrats the Roman Senate became when it gave its power to the Caesar it hailed. It lets the administration conduct affairs of state according to what it calls the "unitary executive theory of the presidency" that's a simple "ball-faced assertion of presidential supremacy....dressed up in legal mumbo jumbo" written by clever lawyers easily finding lots of ways getting around pesky laws in the name of national security for a nation at war against enemies invented to justify schemes now playing out around the world.

It boils down to despotic rule or a national security police state all repressive regimes become in the end including the fascist kinds we're now on the tipping edge of. Unless it's stopped, things won't be pretty when the final mask comes off and jackboots are in the streets along with tanks when needed. And when the public resists, as it surely will, expect South Chicago to look like Baghdad today and its North side too.

Johnson notes it's possible the US military one day will usurp authority and declare a military dictatorship the way it happened in Rome, but he thinks it's unlikely. If dictatorship comes, he expects the civilian kind with military power backing it up. Most likely, Johnson thinks things will muddle along and continue drifting under an illusion of constitutional cover until fiscal insolvency unravels it all. But that won't end the nation state any more than it did to Germany in 1923 or Argentina in 2001-02. It might even herald a new beginning even though transitioning to it would mean lots of turbulence, a lower standard of living and a much different relationship between this country and others including ones supplanting us as most dominant.

Johnson concludes his narrative returning to where it all began starting with volume one of his unintended trilogy. He says in "Blowback" he tried explaining why people around the world hate us. It's not just our government's actions against others but refers to retaliation for the kinds of acts we commit like ousting outlier regimes not willing to play by our imperial management rules meaning we're "boss," and what we say goes. It's a simple law of physics that there's no action without reaction. If we slap them enough, they start slapping back. Volume two was "The Sorrows of Empire" written while America prepared the public for wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. It covered the country's militarization since WW II best symbolized by our sprawl of bases across the planet assuring hegemony over it but guaranteeing more blowback from our "indiscretions" any time we decide reminders are needed who's "boss" and those reminded get cranky.

Volume three is Nemesis and the subject of this review. In it, Johnson "tried to present historical, political, economic, and philosophical evidence of where our current behavior is likely to lead." He believes our present course is a road to perdition in the form of fiscal insolvency and a military or civilian dictatorship. Our Founders knew the risk and tried preventing it with our constitutional republican government now in jeopardy. It's come from our commitment to large standing armies, constant war, reckless stimulative military Keynesianism spending causing an erosion of democracy and growth of an imperial presidency. Once a nation goes this way, its fate is the same as all others that tried - "isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy." It's symbol is that patient Greek goddess now visiting our shores awaiting the tribute she'll demand - "our end as a free nation."

It's now our choice. We can continue the same way as imperial Rome and lose our democracy or chose the British model keeping it at the expense of sacrificing empire. Johnson ends his book citing Japanese scholar and journalist Hotsumi Ozaki as a role model example. Ozaki understood his country's occupation of China would fail and lead to the kind of blowback caused by the Chinese Communist revolution. He tried warning his government, but was hanged as a traitor for his efforts late in WW II. Johnson hopes he won't meet a similar fate but is as certain as Ozaki "that my country is launched on a dangerous path that it must abandon or else face the consequences." We should hope we never see them, but wishing alone won't make it so.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at: sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on The Micro Effect.com each Saturday at noon US central time
lllllllllllll .

[Saundra Hummer]

.X X X X X X X
Bayoneting a Scarecrow
The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a coward’s cult.

By George Monbiot
03/02/07 "Guardian" -- -- “You did this hit piece because your corporate masters instructed you to. You are a controlled asset of the New World Order … bought and paid for.”(1) “Everyone has some skeleton in the cupboard. How else would MI5 and the Special Branch recruit agents?”(2) “Shill, traitor, sleeper”, “leftwing gatekeeper”, “accessory after the fact”, “political whore of the biggest conspiracy of them all.”

These are a few of the measured responses to my article, a fortnight ago, about the film Loose Change, which maintains that the US government destroyed the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Having spent years building up my left-wing credibility on behalf of my paymasters in MI5, I’ve blown it. I overplayed my hand, and have been exposed, like Bush and Cheney, by a bunch of kids with laptops. My handlers are furious.

I believe that George Bush is surrounded by some of the most scheming, devious, ruthless men to have found their way into government since the days of the Borgias. I believe that they were criminally negligent in failing to respond to intelligence about a potential attack by Al Qaeda, and that they have sought to disguise their incompetence by classifying crucial documents. I believe, too, that the Bush government seized the opportunity provided by the attacks to pursue a long-standing plan to invade Iraq and reshape the Middle East, knowing full well that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush deliberately misled the American people about the links between 9/11 and Iraq and about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. He is responsible for the murder of many tens of thousands of Iraqis.

But none of this is sufficient. To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile, while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the Twin Towers with explosives without attracting attention, and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly-timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes, and induce them all to kept their mouths shut, for ever.

In other words, you must believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their pals are all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful, despite the fact that they were incapable of faking either weapons of mass destruction or any evidence at Ground Zero that Saddam Hussein was responsible. You must believe that the impression of cackhandedness and incompetence they have managed to project since taking office is a front. Otherwise you are a traitor and a spy.

Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements which some of us have spent a long time trying to build. Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues – climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality – are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress; that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy; that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish.

The obvious corollorary to the belief that the Bush administration is all-powerful is that the rest of us are completely powerless. In fact it seems to me that the purpose of the “9/11 truth movement” is to be powerless. The omnipotence of the Bush regime is the coward’s fantasy, an excuse for inaction used by those who don’t have the stomach to engage in real political fights.

Let me give you an example. The column I wrote about Loose Change two weeks ago The column I wrote about Loose Change two weeks ago generated 777 posts on Comment is Free, which is almost a record. Most of them were furious.. The response from a producer of the film, published last week, attracted 467(2). On the same day I published an article about a genuine, demonstrable conspiracy: a spy network feeding confidential information from an arms control campaign to Britain’s biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE. It drew 60 responses(3). The members of the 9/11 cult weren’t interested. If they were, they might have had to do something. The great virtue of a fake conspiracy is that it calls on you to do nothing.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a displacement activity. A displacement activity is something you do because you feel incapable of doing what you ought to do. A squirrel sees a larger squirrel stealing its hoard of nuts. Instead of attacking its rival, it sinks its teeth into a tree and starts ripping it to pieces. Faced with the mountainous challenge of the real issues we must confront, the chickens in the “truth” movement focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don’t exist, they can’t fight back. They demonstrate their courage by repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow.

Many of those who posted responses on Comment is Free contend that Loose Change (which was neatly demolished in the BBC’s film The Conspiracy Files on Sunday night) is a poor representation of the conspiracists’ case. They urge us instead to visit websites like 911truth.org, physics911.net and 911scholars.org, and to read articles by the theology professor David Ray Griffin and the physicist Steven E. Jones. Concerned that I might have missed something, I have now done all those things, and have come across exactly the same concatenation of ill-attested nonsense as I saw in Loose Change. In all these cases you will find wild supposition raised to the status of incontrovertible fact; rumour and confusion transformed into evidence; selective editing; the citation of fake experts; the dismissal of real ones. Doubtless I will now be told that these are not the true believers: I will need to dive into another vat of tripe to get to the heart of the conspiracy.

The 9/11 truthers remind me of nothing so much as the climate-change deniers, cherry-picking their evidence, seizing any excuse for ignoring the arguments of their opponents. Witness the respondents to my Loose Change column who maintain that the magazine Popular Mechanics, which has ripped the demolition theories apart, is a government front. They know this because one of its editors, Benjamin Chertoff, is the brother/nephew/first cousin of the US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. (They are, as far as Benjamin can discover, unrelated, but what does he know?(4)).

Like the millenarian fantasies which helped to destroy the Levellers as a political force in the mid-17th century, this crazy distraction presents a mortal danger to popular oppositional movements. If I were Bush or Blair, nothing would please me more than to see my opponents making idiots of themselves, while devoting their lives to chasing a phantom. But as a controlled asset of the New World Order, I would say that, wouldn’t I? It’s all part of the plot.

www.monbiot.comReferences:

1. Gary Allen, 911truthnc.org, 6th February 2007. Email.

2. “sirarthurchichester”, 8th February 2007. On Comment is Free.

3. George Monbiot, 13th February 2007. The parallel universe of BAE: covert, dangerous and beyond the rule of law. The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2011751,00.html

4. Quoted by Will Sullivan, 3rd September 2006. Viewing 9/11 From a Grassy Knoll., US News and World Report. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060903/11conspiracy.htm

Go on-site to access article and comments & to add your own, by clicking on the following URL:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17223.htm X X X X X .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
~~~~~~~~~
"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."

Mark Twain

~~~

"Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies."

Voltaire
(1694-1778)
On his deathbed in response to a priest,
asking that he renounce Satan.
(1835-1910)

~~~

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."

Tom Clancy

~~~

"Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity."

Irving Kristol

~~~

"If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?"

Will Rogers
(1879-1935)

~~~

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Edmund Burke
(1729-1797)

~~~

"Always do right- this will gratify some and astonish the rest."

Mark Twain
(1835-1910)

~~~~~
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
/////\\\\\/////\\\\\
Archaeologists Discuss Blackbeard's Ship
By
STEVE HARTSOE
03.02.07, 9:10 PM ET
Associated Press

A shipwreck off the North Carolina coast believed to be that of notorious pirate Blackbeard could be fully excavated in three years, officials working on the project said Friday.

"That's really our target," Steve Claggett, the state archaeologist, said while discussing 10 years of research that has been conducted since the shipwreck was found just off Atlantic Beach.

The ship ran aground in 1718, and some researchers believe it was the French slave ship Blackbeard captured in 1717 and renamed Queen Anne's Revenge.

Several officials said historical data and coral-covered artifacts recovered from the site - including 25 cannons, which experts said was a large number for the area in the early 18th century - remove any doubt the wreckage belonged to Blackbeard.

Three university professors, including two from East Carolina University, have challenged the findings. But officials Friday said the more they find, the stronger their case becomes.

"Historians have really looked at it thoroughly and don't feel that there's any possibility anything else is in there that was not recorded," said Mark Wilde-Ramsing, director of the Queen Anne's Revenge Project. "And the artifacts continue to support it."

Wilde-Ramsing said a coin weight recovered last fall bearing a likeness of Britain's Queen Anne and a King George cup, both dated before the shipwreck, further bolster their position.

So far, about 15 percent of the shipwreck has been recovered including jewelry, dishes and thousands of other artifacts. The items are being preserved and studied at a lab at East Carolina University, and eventually more will become available for the public to view, Claggett said.

Nearly 2 million people have viewed shipwreck artifacts since 1998, including at a permanent exhibit at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort and at a maritime museum in Paris, project officials said.

Researchers shared some of their findings Friday at the North Carolina Museum of History. They said studying the artifacts will provide insight into the era's naval technology, slave trade and pirate life.

Blackbeard, whose real name was widely believed to be Edward Teach or Thatch, settled in Bath and received a governor's pardon. Some experts believe he grew bored with land life and returned to piracy.

He was killed by volunteers from the Royal Navy in November 1718 - five months after the ship thought to be Queen Anne's Revenge sank.
Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Go on-site to see: More On This Topic
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/03/02/ap3481270.html?partner=alerts /////\\\\\ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
:: :: :: :: :: :: ::
Kerry Getting Some Payback for Swift Boat Campaign of ’04

By
THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 2, 2007

WASHINGTON, March 1 — After having his name sullied during the 2004 presidential campaign by the opposition group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, got the chance on Tuesday to sharply question Sam Fox, a major Republican donor who was recently nominated to be ambassador to Belgium, about his $50,000 contribution to the group.

In addition, some of Mr. Kerry’s Democratic colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee now say they will consider voting against Mr. Fox’s nomination.

“Do I think that it’s going to affect his nomination?” Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, said about the donations. “I suspect that other than Senator Kerry, there will be some senators that will not look too kindly for his support of that vicious kind of personal attack.”

Mr. Kerry declined on Thursday to say how he would vote. On Tuesday, however, he bore in on Mr. Fox with the zeal of the former prosecutor that he is. He began with a long series of benign questions but then moved in for the kill.

Mr. Kerry asked Mr. Fox to explain why he had donated $50,000 to the Swift boat group and pressed him to identify who had asked him to give to the group. Mr. Fox said he could not remember, explaining that he gave large sums to many groups.

Mr. Kerry continued to hammer him, as Mr. Fox squirmed.

Finally the senator asked, “Do you think this should matter to me?”

“Yes, I do. I do,” Mr. Fox said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/02/us/politics/02kerry.html?ei=5059&en=08e502887d388638&ex=1173502800&partner=AOL&pagewanted=print :: :: :: .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
~~~~~~~

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

Charles Darwin
(1809-1882) 1871

~~~

"He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust."

Aquinas

~~~

"I don't know a more irreligious attitude, one more utterly bankrupt of any human content, than one which permits children to be destroyed."

Daniel Berrigan

~~~

"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have: three meals a day for their bodies, - education and culture for their minds - and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits"

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

~~~~~
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
:: :: :: :: :: :: ::
Who Will Stop The Next War?

By
Patrick J. Buchanan

03/03/07 "American Conservative" -- - If Americans sickened by the carnage of Iraq wish to stop an even more disastrous war on Iran, they had best get cracking.
For the “On-to-Baghdad!” boys are back, warning us that the only way to prevent an atom bomb from being detonated in an American city is to attack and destroy Iran’s nuclear sites. And the forces needed to execute an attack are moving into place. Army Gen. John Abizaid has been replaced as CENTCOM commander by Adm. “Fox” Fallon, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, who knows little about counterinsurgency but a lot about co-ordinating air strikes.

The carrier group Stennis is headed for the Gulf to join the Eisenhower. Minesweepers are headed for the Strait of Hormuz. American fighter-bombers have returned to Incirlik. Iranian officials have been seized in Iraq. Patriot missiles are being moved into Kuwait and Qatar. Why all this firepower—to secure Anbar province and Sadr City?

Bush’s anti-Iran rhetoric has been ratcheted up. Announcing his surge, Bush interjected that Tehran “is providing material support for attacks on American troops. … [W]e will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.” This threat was followed by shoot-to-kill orders to U.S. troops encountering Iranians aiding the insurgency.

And Democrats are not going to let Bush get to their right. At the Herzliya Conference, John Edwards said that keeping Iran from nuclear weapons “is the greatest challenge of our generation.” “To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep all options on the table. Let me reiterate—all options.”

At AIPAC, Hillary echoed Edwards: “In dealing with this threat … no option can be taken off the table. … We need to use every tool about our disposal including … the threat and use of military force.”

To Mitt Romney, this was wimpish. For Hillary had said she favors “engagement” with Iran. Roared Romney to Hill Republicans, “[W]e don’t need a listening tour about Iran. … Someone who wants to engage Iran displays a troubling timidity toward a terrible threat of a nuclear Iran.” Anybody think that Giuliani and McCain will let Edwards, Hillary, or Mitt be more menacing toward Tehran than they?

Consider the correlation of forces behind a new war.

If Bush goes home with Iran’s nuclear program not shut down, his legacy will be Iraq and a failed presidency. The Bush Doctrine—no nukes in rogue states—will have been defied by Pyongyang and Tehran.

Israel wants Iran attacked yesterday. The neocons need a new war to make America forget the disaster that they wrought in Iraq. Democratic candidates must be seen as hawkish as Giuliani and McCain. And the deadline for Iran to comply with UN Security Council directives to halt its enrichment of uranium is Feb. 23. What then is holding us back from war?

It is the realization, even on the part of the noisiest hawks, that war on Iran could precipitate a disaster worse than defeat in Iraq. A Shia uprising against U.S. troops could turn the Green Zone into Dien Bien Phu. Attacks on tankers and pipelines could send oil to $200 a barrel. America would have no international support and would receive virtually universal condemnation.

And like the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, bombing Iran could unite Iranians behind their rulers. Shia insurgencies could be ignited against Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Hezbollah could bring down the Lebanese government and attack Americans in the Middle East and perhaps here in the United States.

And what would an attack accomplish besides setting back an Iranian nuclear-enrichment program that by most reports is a bust?

What is the threat? Iran has no missiles that can reach us, no atom bombs. Though the Mullahs have been in power 27 years, they have yet to launch their first war. The war they fought was in self-defense. They can no more want a Sunni-Shia regional war than we, for they would be in the isolated minority. They want the Taliban kept out of Kabul and Iraq to remain united under a Shia majority, as do we.

It is said that we cannot negotiate with men responsible for the Khobar Towers. But Bush negotiated with Muammar al-Gaddafi, who was responsible for Pan Am 103, and Gaddafi agreed to forego nuclear weapons. Sanctions were lifted and relations restored.

If FDR can talk to Stalin, and Nixon to Mao, and Bush to the North Vietnamese (who tortured John McCain), why can’t we talk to Mullahs who held 52 Americans hostage for a year?

Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) has introduced a resolution declaring that in the absence of an imminent threat or an attack upon us from Iran, President Bush has no authority to attack Iran.

Next step: get Chuck Hagel and Jim Webb to sign on

URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17229.htm :: :: :: :: :: :: :: .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
^^^^^^^^^
America on its Knees Before Tyranny
By
Richard Mynick

03/02/07 "ICH" -- -- "The Star-Spangled Banner" painted the United States in 1814 as "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave." These words, though still mumbled by apathetic consumers at sporting events, amount to a cruel satire of the American people in 2007.

The 4th sentence of the Declaration of Independence reads "...That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends (ie, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness) it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government..." It would be hard to find a more apt description of the US government in 2007, or a more appropriate remedy for this oppressive regime, increasingly loathed and feared by the citizenry.

We have a Constitution which defines a separation of powers. It also defines procedures for impeaching officials who violate its bedrock principles -- in particular, its Bill of Rights, its separation of powers, and its foundational notion that power derives from the consent of the governed. We make elected officials swear an oath to "protect and defend" this Constitution. Why bother with all this, if, when the day of tyranny finally arrives, the Constitution's own provisions are not used to defend the document's principles against the would-be tyrants who have so egregiously violated them?

In November, US voters told Washington that the public does not support the war; sees with increasing clarity that it is immoral and was launched on false pretexts; and wants it terminated. In response, Vice-Emperor Cheney snarled in a TV interview with an obsequious Bush toady that regardless of what the public or Congress might say about it, the White House intends not only to continue the war, but to escalate it.

Let's examine this extraordinary position. Here is a top official of a "democracy" -- in a war marketed as an effort to "spread democracy" -- stating publicly & with imperial scorn that he and his co-conspirators have the right to order the US war machine to bombard and occupy any nation they wish to target, even if their war is launched under demonstrably false pretexts. They claim the right to compel the public to furnish lives and bodies to be killed and maimed in the war, and to bear the moral and financial burdens of the war, in an action which not incidentally lets administration allies in the "defense" and oil industries profit handsomely from the ensuing mayhem. Needless to say, from Cheney's viewpoint, it's also of no moment that the war violates the Nuremberg Principles and UN Charter forbidding aggressive war, and that the conduct of the war violates international accords to which the US is a signatory.

If that position does not constitute tyranny and abuse of power, what would? The "long train of abuses and usurpations" cited against King George in the Declaration of Independence was no worse an abuse of power than this. And nothing Britain ever did to its American colonies came anywhere near the monstrous outrages perpetrated by the US on modern-day Iraq.

The war in Iraq is not merely "the most serious foreign policy blunder in American history," as even members of the political establishment have conceded. It represents, rather, a crisis derived from the decaying framework of the US political system, posing the most fundamental question about the relationship between the rulers and ruled in this country. Though the Bush regime led the way, the war is the joint product of both parties and the corporate media -- that is, of the entire political establishment -- with each part playing its own supporting role.

It's not a question of "Well, if only Gore had won in 2000, we wouldn't be in this mess." The mess springs from the very structure of US society -- the unequal distribution of power among its social classes, its economic and political relations with the rest of the world, its ruling ideology. As errors go, there's an immense qualitative difference between a system malfunctioning because its framework is rotting, & the more limited type of error due to a component glitch within an otherwise healthy framework. The war in Iraq is the first type of malfunction: systemic.

The official forms of discourse in US society have degenerated to the point that they no longer permit acknowledgement -- or even mention -- of the main issues confronting us. The problems run too deep. The issues which must be discussed, because they're so important, cannot be discussed, because they're too threatening to the powers controlling the system.

The crises facing our society are like those an individual must confront, when events force upon him a choice of either internally acknowledging a dark & terrible truth about himself, or continuing in denial. The truth seems too terrible to bear -- so the denial continues, & the pressure of the crisis intensifies.

What would a genuine discussion of the issues look like?

If we were to attempt a genuine discussion of the Bush regime, one might formulate the main issues as these:

.Is the regime legitimate? After all, it took office by what millions recognize was a stolen election enabled by a corrupt Supreme Court and the president's brother's political machine in Florida.

.Is the regime guilty of massive war crimes? After all, they invaded a country that posed no threat to the US, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, and have permanently destroyed Iraqi society in their rush to plunder its oil. (This, while not permitting the slightest acknowledgement that oil has anything to do with it.)

.Is the regime guilty of high crimes against the Constitution? They have eavesdropped on millions of citizens. They torture detainees, many of whom are probably guilty of little more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have repealed such basic democratic rights as habeas corpus, smeared political opponents, pandered to rightwing theocrats, stacked the judiciary & federal agencies with political cronies, and quietly sneaked into legislation passages making easier the declaration of martial law.

.Is the regime a de facto dictatorship? After all, not only do they insist that the president can label anyone an "enemy combatant" and then disappear them; not only do they openly assert their belief in the "unitary executive;" they have also created an artificial state of permanent war, then claimed that a "nation at war" must grant its executive unlimited powers. They have openly claimed the right to wage war on anyone, even on false pretexts, using our bodies & tax dollars to feed a war machine owned by their cronies -- and added with sneering condescension that we have no say in any of this. Anyone who objects is a traitor! All this, in the name of "protecting Americans, freedom and democracy!"

The mainstream media are unwilling to even recognize the existence of such questions. Their comfort zones and expertise are better suited to "reporting" on the astronaut/love-triangle/diaper story, or the intriguing battles raging over Anna Nicole's corpse. There's a story in today's news that Iraq's cabinet has approved a draft of a new "oil law," which would largely turn control of Iraq's oil over to Western oil companies. But we know by now that Anna Nicole's corpse will get far more press in the days ahead, and that no media "analyst" will perceive any noteworthy connection between the new oil law and the Iraq War, originally launched because of imaginary WMD's. (That little boo-boo is regularly ascribed by the media to "flawed intelligence," an interesting phrase deserving further examination, if, against rising odds, we survive the next several months without a world-altering conflagration.)

What does it mean to "Support the Troops?"

In the giddy prosperity following WWII, it became commonplace in American culture to sneer contemptuously about the German soldiers who defended their wartime actions by claiming they were "just following orders." Underlying these sneers was the principle set forth at Nuremberg -- that a soldier has a moral responsibility to refuse to obey orders which their conscience tells them violate a higher ethical code.

In today's United States, however, courageous and principled soldiers like Lt. Ehren Watada, who try to do exactly what Americans sneered at German soldiers for not doing, are jailed, court-martialed, and summarily dismissed by the press as "insubordinate."

"Supporting the Troops" should mean supporting soldiers like Watada, and removing the troops from situations where they must kill or be killed in an unjust war. It should mean prosecuting the venal figures in Washington who have sent the troops on this criminal mission, and lied to the world about the reasons for it. Yet these same venal politicians, who won't even adequately fund medical facilities for maimed soldiers, shamelessly use the phrase "supporting the troops" as an argument for forcing them to continue fighting a war for oil and defense company profits.

The Treacherous Role of the Democrats

The Democrats gained control of Congress only by virtue of the fact that they are not Republicans, under conditions where the electorate instructed them to oppose Bush's deranged warmongering. Though "victorious," they immediately surrendered to the Republicans, taking "off the table" the only two measures which could possibly stop the US war drive: impeachment and cutting off funding for the war. They then wasted two months fussing ineffectually with non-binding resolutions of feeble disapproval (of the "surge," not the war itself), bleating pitifully to their Republican colleagues for "bipartisanship." Almost comically, the toothless Senate resolution didn't even make it to the floor for a vote. It should be clear from this performance that the Democrats, like the media, are terminally corrupt, and are in effect collaborating with the Bush regime against the voters who put them in office.

We have before us the spectacle of the Bush administration committing crimes which, if attempted by any foreign power, would rightly be met by torrential denunciation from Congress and the US media. But when the Bush administration commits these crimes, the media is basically supportive, while the Democrats make cynical pretenses of opposition. The Democrats' "criticism" usually amounts to complaining that Bush's crimes were clumsily executed or not entirely successful; and that had they been at the helm they could have pulled off the capers with more finesse.

Corruption is present to some degree in all governments, but the critical test of whether a government is beyond all salvation is whether it has the capacity to acknowledge great crimes committed by the leadership, and to rectify them. In today's Washington, however, the Democrats function as a buffer between the Bush regime and the increasingly angry population. On the one hand, the Democrats posture dishonestly as administration "critics"; on the other hand, they ensure that no serious effort is made to rein the criminals in -- not to mention bringing them to justice.

Rectifying the corruption should include restoration of the staggering wealth that in effect has been stolen from the American people, when Bush and Cheney ladled it out to their friends at Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton, the oil companies, and the other defense industries. The $400 million CEO severance packages, the billions in non-bid government contracts to defense companies and mercenaries, Cheney's own Halliburton stock options -- all this and more should be confiscated, and returned to the rightful possessors of that wealth. It should be clear that the Democrats would scarcely be able to comprehend what is being spoken of, here, let alone act as honorable advocates of its implementation.

Today's America is no democracy -- it's a degenerating tyranny, disfigured by its military-industrial-governmental cancer. Our people are increasingly ashamed and terrified of their government, and rightly so, because we have no control over it, and it's become a deceitful monstrous danger to us and to the health of the planet. We're not "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave." To the contrary: We, the people, are on our knees, cringing and whimpering in dismay and confusion, prostrate before the forces that have betrayed us.

Richard Mynick is a Berkeley-based writer focusing on the intersection of media and politics. His essays have appeared on Online Journal, and he can be reached at richjm9@yahoo.com http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17231.htm ^^^^^^^ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
^^^^^^^^^
Bio-artists bridge art-science divide
BY
JESSICA M. PASKO
Associated Press Writer
Sat Mar 3, 3:01 PM ET

Adam Zaretsky once spent 48 hours playing Engelbert Humperdincks's "Greatest Hits" to a dish of E.coli bacteria to determine whether vibrations or sounds influenced bacterial growth. Watching the bacteria's antibiotic production increase, Zaretsky decided that perhaps even cells were annoyed by constant subjection to "loud, really awful lounge music."

This sense of humor is a huge component of Zaretsky's work in the growing field of bio-art, a broad term for the blend of art, technology and science that is attracting artists, scientists and controversy. Having recently taught at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Zaretsky has become a prominent figure in the realm of bio-art and RPI is becoming a Petri dish for the cultivation of new works.

Bio-artists use live tissues, bacteria, living organisms and life processes to create works of art that blur the traditional distinctions between science and art. Most of these works tend toward social reflection, conveying political and societal criticism through the combination of artistic and scientific processes.

An exhibit of bio-art works by Kevin H. Jones went on view Feb. 16 at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Mass. Jones' work explores how biotechnology and other sciences are changing and being redefined. Almost every piece in it is alive, and the media used includes bioluminescent bacteria and rotting fruit. According to Montserrat College Assistant Curator Shana Dumont, the exhibit seeks to make the achievements and implications of biotechnology more accessible, a goal shared by most bio-artists working today.

Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac, an Art Institute of Chicago professor and a leader in bio-arts, once had a microchip implanted in his body to make people contemplate the relationship humans have with technology.

"(Bio-art) is a way of looking where we interface with ourselves, human culture and the rest of the living world," said Zaretsky.

At RPI, bio-arts is a growing curriculum through its iEAR program (Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer).

"Through iEAR, it's helping us make alliances and build connections as we develop the bio-art program," said Kathy High, an RPI professor and chair of the program. "We're fortunate here because there's so much going on (around us) with nanotechnology and bioengineering."

High said she originally became involved in bio-art through her interest in women's issues and much of her previous work focused on the birthing process and reproductive technologies.

Zaretsky taught his course, "VivoArts: Art and Biology Studio," at RPI in the fall 2006 semester. The course guides a mix of artists, scientists and medical students in the exploration of life sciences through projects that examine the human connection to living systems.

The VivoArts courses are meant to expose artists to laboratories, which he says are often the most "intimidating and foreign sites." In one assignment, a student might "paint" with genetically modified bacteria; in another, a student incorporates his or her self into a work of living art.

Much of the art involves tissue-culturing and transgenics, a catchall term for a variety of genetic engineering processes through which genetic material from one organism is altered by the addition of synthesized or transplanted genetic material from another organism.

One of the original examples of this type of transgenic art was Alba, a living phosphorescent rabbit created by Kac in 2000. By inserting the fluorescent protein gene from a jellyfish into a fertilized rabbit egg cell, Kac eventually produced a rabbit that glows bright green under blue lights.

RPI alum Julia Reodica incorporated her own body as well as animal cells in her 2004 project, "hymeNextTM." Using rat tissue samples and her own vaginal cells, Reodica combined new media and sculpture methods with tissue-cultivating to produce a series of artificial hymens. Reodica's pieces aim to confront modern sexuality, and provoke thought on the female body and the emphasis placed on virginity in our culture.

Reodica, who was originally a medical student, turned to commercial art before later looking for a way to explore science through art while also illustrating social messages and issues.

An exhibit last October at RPI, called "Prototype," detailed the processes that have gone into the development of "hymeNextTM" and her other works, including an enormous replica of muscle cells that allows the viewer to walk around and through the faux tissue. Other projects on which she is working include a series she calls "Living Sculptures," creating a collection of synthetic embryos of mythical creatures.

Not everyone is cheering this blend of art and science.

Kac and many others have faced opposition from animal rights groups accusing them of unfairly manipulating living creatures for selfish purposes, and from conservative groups who question the morality of transgenics and tissue-culturing.

"Transgenic manipulation of animals is just a continuum of using animals for human end," regardless of whether it is done to make some sort of sociopolitical critique, said Alka Chandna, a senior researcher with PETA in Norfolk, Va. "The suffering and exacerbation of stress on the animals is very problematic."

Chandna also warned that scientists can't always predict what other health problems the animals will suffer from their alterations. "We're all in support of creativity but we're opposed to all suffering."

For other bio-artists, their work has led to national legal scrutiny.

Steven Kurtz, a professor at SUNY Buffalo, was arrested on federal terrorism charges nearly three years ago after police discovered certain types of bacteria and other biological materials in his home. Kurtz maintains that the specimens were for his bio-arts pieces and that he has been unfairly targeted for his choice of artistic expression. Kurtz's trial is still pending in the federal court system, nearly three years later.

Part of the problem with bio-art, explained RPI faculty member and Kurtz's colleague Rich Pell, is that much of it seems shrouded in secrecy because of the laboratory setting. Pell and Reodica are working to combat this through the creation of the Center for Bio-Media, a gallery, lab and educational facility that will be open to the public.

"With bio-art, rather than just freaking out about it, you can then go into a lab where things are actually happening and then have an 'educated freak-out,'" Pell said.
~~~~~~~
On the Net:

http://www.embracinganimal.com

http://www.vivolabs.org

http://www.emutagen.com

http://www.critical-art.net)

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2007 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
^^^^^^^ .

[Saundra Hummer]

. :: :: :: :: :: :: ::
Tomgram:
Michael Klare, Talking Points for the Next War

At 10:16 PM on March 19, 2003, after copious military preparations in the Persian Gulf region and beyond, after months of diplomatic maneuvers at the United Nations, after a drumbeat of leaked intelligence warnings and hair-raising statements by top U.S. officials and the President about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and how close Saddam Hussein might be to developing a nuclear weapon, after declaring Saddam's regime a major threat to Americans, after countless insinuations that it was somehow connected to the 9/11 attacks on our country, after endless denials that war with Iraq was necessarily on the administration's agenda, President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office. "My fellow citizens," he began, "at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger…"

Almost four years later, all the above elements are again in place, this time in relation to Iran -- with Iranian responsibility for the deaths of Americans in Iraq replacing Iraqi responsibility for the deaths of Americans in New York and Washington. On a careful reading of our President's latest speeches and statements, Michael Klare has noted that an actual list of charges against Iran, a case for war, has already essentially been drawn up, making it easy enough to imagine that at 10:16 PM on some night not so very distant from this one, from that same desk in the Oval Office, the President of the United States might again begin, "My fellow citizens, at this hour…" But read on for yourself. Tom

Bush's Future Iran War Speech
Three Charges in the Case for War

By
Michael T. Klare

Sometime this spring or summer, barring an unexpected turnaround by Tehran, President Bush is likely to go on national television and announce that he has ordered American ships and aircraft to strike at military targets inside Iran. We must still sit through several months of soap opera at the United Nations in New York and assorted foreign capitals before this comes to pass, and it is always possible that a diplomatic breakthrough will occur -- let it be so! -- but I am convinced that Bush has already decided an attack is his only option and the rest is a charade he must go through to satisfy his European allies. The proof of this, I believe, lies half-hidden in recent public statements of his, which, if pieced together, provide a casus belli, or formal list of justifications, for going to war.

Three of his statements, in particular, contained the essence of this justification: his January 10 televised speech on his plan for a troop "surge" in Iraq, his State of the Union Address of January 23, and his first televised press conference of the year on February 14. None of these was primarily focused on Iran, but the President used each of them to warn of the extraordinary dangers that country poses to the United States and to hint at severe U.S. reprisals if the Iranians did not desist from "harming U.S. troops." In each, moreover, he laid out various parts of the overall argument he will certainly use to justify an attack on Iran. String these together in one place and you can almost anticipate what Bush's speechwriters will concoct before he addresses the American people from the Oval Office sometime later this year. Think of them as talking points for the next war.

The first of these revealing statements was Bush's January 10th televised address on Iraq. This speech was supposedly intended to rally public and Congressional support behind his plan to send 21,500 additional U.S. troops into the Iraqi capital and al-Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency. But his presentation that night was so uninspired, so lacking in conviction, that -- according to media commentary and polling data -- few, if any, Americans were persuaded by his arguments. Only once that evening did Bush visibly come alive: When he spoke about the threat to Iraq supposedly posed by Iran.

"Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges," he declared, which meant, he assured his audience, addressing the problem of Iran. That country, he asserted, "is providing material support for attacks on American troops." (This support was later identified as advanced improvised explosive devices -- IEDs or roadside bombs -- given to anti-American Shiite militias.) Then followed an unambiguous warning: "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces... And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

Go on-site for the numerous links and other articles by clicking on the following URL:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/
:: :: :: .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
/////\\\\\/////\\\\\
This is about much more than the leak. This article goes into more than the administration of Cheney and Bush would want talked about or known. And we thought a lot of us suffered from delusions? From paranoia? While, all the while, more was happening than we dreamed possible.

These men and women in this administration bade their time and we have suffered enormously due to their having once again gained power. It is time they, and their disasterous plans of Empire go, and not a day too soon, as Cheney and Bush shouldn't have been in power in the first place. It is just so obvious to those who have done their homework and haven't allowed ourselves to be led by the hand down their treacherous path. Elected members of their own party are even seeing them for what they are - a danger to all we hold dear! SRH

Tomgram:
De la Vega,
The Whole Truth about Libby and the Leak

The U.S. government and military has undergone a series of jolting expansions in the Bush years. We got, for instance, a second Defense Department called the Department of Homeland Security. We got a military command for North America called United States Northern Command. More than anything else, however, while we already had an "imperial presidency," we also got an add-on -- an imperial vice-presidency, a new form of shadow government in the United States, a startlingly unbound, constitutionally unmandated new institutional power.

On taking office, Dick Cheney promptly began to set up a vice-presidential office that essentially mimicked, and then to some extent replaced, the National Security Council (NSC). Just as promptly, his office plunged itself into utter, blinding secrecy -- as journalist Robert Dreyfuss discovered when he simply tried to chart out who was working in this new center of power. No information, it turned out, could be revealed to a curious reporter, not even the names and positions of those who worked for the Vice President, those who, theoretically, were working for us. Cheney's office would not even publicly acknowledge its own employees, no less let them be interviewed.

From that office (and allied posts elsewhere in the executive branch and the federal bureaucracy), the Vice President and his various right-hand men like I Lewis "Scooter" Libby and present Chief of Staff David Addington, both fierce believers in the so-called unitary executive theory of government (in which a "wartime" commander-in-chief president is said to have unfettered power to command just about anything), elbowed the State Department, the NSC, and the Intelligence Community. With the President's ear, and in league with Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon (among others), they spearheaded a series of mis- and disinformation operations that led to Iraq and beyond. (Reporter Jim Lobe wrote about this at Tomdispatch in August 2005, "Dating Cheney's Nuclear Drumbeat.")

Now shorn of Rumsfeld, Cheney and his men, increasingly beleaguered, are nonetheless pushing on as the Vice President secretively travels the world, warning and scheming. Only this week, in "The Redirection," a New Yorker piece as chilling as any you might ever want to read, our premier journalist of this era (as well as the Vietnam one), Seymour Hersh reports that, two years ago, old hands from the Iran-Contra fiasco of the Reagan era, well-seeded into the Bush administration, had an informal meeting led by Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. Their conclusions: "As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: ‘One, you can't trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can't trust the uniformed military, and four, it's got to be run out of the Vice-President's office."

That's what passes for learning from experience in the Bush/Cheney White House. Indeed, the same folks are now evidently running an updated version of Iran-Contra (without the CIA) out of the Vice President's office. At the same time, according to Hersh, Cheney, in his urge to roll back Iranian regional power as well as undermine Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia in Iraq, and the Syrians, has set the Saudis loose to fund Sunni jihadis -- just as they did in Afghanistan at American behest in the 1980s. The result then was, among other things, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. So imagine: Cheney's office is now working hard to combine the worst of the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal with the worst of the Afghan disaster. I wonder what the results could possibly be?

The history of this sudden explosion of ultra-secretive vice-presidential power remains to be written, based on documents that have not yet seen the light of day. The Libby trial has recently offered us a glimpse into the most secretive and powerful office in the land and its interplay with the White House, State Department, and CIA. As former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega points out below, that glimpse should be enough to trigger a Congressional investigation into the Plame case. It's time, she tells us, for Congress to investigate all the President's and Vice President's men and women.

De la Vega has written a remarkable, must-read book about how we were defrauded into war in Iraq, United States v. George W. Bush et al. Every day since it first appeared, our country has come to look ever more like a United States v. Bush/Cheney world. De la Vega is a woman who should be heeded. Tom Go on-site to gain access to links and other articles by clicking on the following URL:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/
/////\\\\\
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
X X X X X X X
GOP Candidates Criticize Coulter for Slur

By
ADAM NAGOURNEY
The New York Times
Updated:2007-03-04 08:28:18

WASHINGTON (March 4) -- Three of the leading Republican presidential candidates on Saturday denounced one of their party's best-known conservative commentators for using an antigay epithet when discussing a Democratic presidential contender at a gathering of conservatives here.

Coulter's Controversies
At the conference, Ann Coulter said she was likely to support Mitt Romney for president in 2008.

News Bloggers: 'David Duke-like' The Stump: Remark Is 'Win-Win' Queersighted: Gays Respond

Talk About It: Post Thoughts

Watch: Ann Coulter uses a slur to describe John Edwards. Go on-site to gain access to video: http://news.aol.com/elections/president/story/_a/gop-candidates-criticize-coulter-for/20070303175009990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001


The remarks by Ann Coulter, an author who regularly speaks at conservative events, were sharply denounced by the candidates, Senator John McCain of Arizona, Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. Their statements came after Democrats, gay rights groups and bloggers raised a storm of protest over the remarks.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference before an overflow crowd on Friday, Ms. Coulter said, "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I -- so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards."

Mr. Edwards's aides responded with an e-mail message that attacked Ms. Coulter and urged supporters to donate to Mr. Edwards's campaign. "John was singled out for a personal attack because the Republican establishment knows he poses the greatest threat to their power," said his campaign manager, David E. Bonior. "Since they have nothing real to use against him, Coulter's resorting to the classic right-wing strategy of riling up hate to smear a progressive champion."

Ms. Coulter, asked for a reaction to the Republican criticism, said in an e-mail message: "C'mon, it was a joke. I would never insult gays by suggesting that they are like John Edwards. That would be mean."

At the conference, she said she was likely to support Mr. Romney.

PLUS:
The Republican Field: Who's In, Who's Out
Blogging 2008: Latest Buzz on the Contenders

The criticisms by the Republican candidates put them in a difficult position because the Conservative Political Action Conference has been gathering for conservative and Republican leaders for over 25 years.

The speakers this year included Vice President Dick Cheney and most of the presidential candidates, whose presence suggested the political influence the group holds in the party’s nominating process. Mr. Cheney was not at the event on Friday.

Of the major Republican candidates, only Mr. McCain did not attend, but he denounced her remarks on Saturday morning. "The comments were wildly inappropriate," said his spokesman, Brian Jones.

PLUS:
More From the Times
In Wartime, Who Has the Power?Doubts Rise as States Detain Sex Offenders After PrisonReturning, Safe, After a Year’s Service in AfghanistanIsraeli Band’s Antiwar Song Pushes Pop Contest’s ButtonsBooks on Atheism Are Raising Hackles in Unlikely PlacesMr. Giuliani said, "The comments were completely inappropriate and there should be no place for such name-calling in political debate."

Kevin Madden, a spokesman for Mr. Romney, said: "It was an offensive remark. Governor Romney believes all people should be treated with dignity and respect."

Mr. Romney preceded Ms. Coulter at the event and mentioned that she was speaking later -- he jokingly referred to her as a "moderate." But he was not in the room when she spoke, Mr. Madden said.

The Democratic Field: Who's In, Who's Out.

Go on-site to access
Copyright © 2007 The New York Times Company
2007-03-03 17:55:56
X X X X X .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Military Faces Growing Ranks of Bereaved
By
DAVID CRARY
AP
Updated:2007-03-03 12:51:09

FORT HOOD, Texas (March 3) - One of the first sights greeting visitors to Fort Hood is a day-care center's playground, brightly colored evidence of the Army's commitment to be family friendly.

A few blocks away is a more poignant symbol: an office building recently converted into a first-of-its-kind support center for women and children whose husbands and fathers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan . From Fort Hood alone, the toll has passed 365.

"It's our sanctuary," said Ursula Pirtle, whose daughter frequents a playroom at the center. Three-year-old Katie never met her father, Heath. He was killed in Iraq in 2003.

Over the past 15 years, America's armed forces have taken huge strides to retain married service members - improving schools, health programs and child care. But now, as never before in this family-embracing era, the military is struggling with the toughest home-front problem of all: Doing right by the often outspoken and ever-growing ranks of the bereaved.

Of the 3,350 Americans who died in Iraq and Afghanistan through early January, 1,586 of them - 47.3 percent - were married. Those fallen warriors left behind 1,954 children, according to the Pentagon's Manpower Data Center. More recent deaths have pushed that figure past 2,000.

Compared to the heavily draftee combat troops of the Vietnam war, today's volunteer fighting force is older, more reliant on National Guard and Reserve citizen-soldiers, and more likely to be married.

And more so than their Vietnam counterparts, the new generation of bereaved spouses has been vocal - on their bases, at congressional hearings - in pressing for more compassionate, effective support.

It's a constituency that politicians and generals do not want to alienate. The result has been numerous policy changes, ranging from improved benefits to better training for the officers who break the grim news of war-zone deaths. Even the Fort Hood support center materialized due to pressure from widows and their allies.

But the learning process is ongoing and the results are mixed.

"The war on terror has presented us with new challenges we haven't seen before, in terms of number of casualties," said an Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Kevin Arata. "We know we're not perfect - there are things families have said we can do better, and we've listened to that."

Interviews with a dozen widows at Fort Hood and across the country reveal varied experiences, but also some common bonds.

Across the board, the widows are proud of their husbands - even if they disagree on the wisdom of the Iraq war. Each woman is still grieving, and those with children have extra worries - financial and psychological - that extend far into the future.

Some are deeply grateful for the support provided by the military after their husbands' deaths; others are critical. Among the common complaints - that notification and assistance officers were sometimes ill-informed or aloof, and that they were bounced through different parts of the military bureaucracy when seeking help.

"We have to have someone who knows what they're talking about," Pirtle said. "The blind-leading-the-blind system isn't working out."

Pirtle's daughter, Katie - born 26 days after her father's death in October 2003 - seems to be thriving. But many of the now-fatherless older children struggle emotionally - to the point where school can be anguishing and therapy is needed. The military pays for some such counseling, but there are limits, and families say the logistics can be difficult.

In Evans, Ga., Irene Prather is looking for a small Christian school for her 11-year-old son, Aaron, who has floundered at public school since his father, Army Chief Warrant Officer Clint Prather, was killed in Afghanistan two years ago.

"It seems like every day is a struggle for him," Prather said. "When we talk to the counselors, nobody understands what's really going on. They weren't prepared to deal with people who've lost somebody in the war."

Clint Prather served 11 years in the Army. His widow, who valued the tight-knit community on base, has found the shift to the civilian world difficult.

"It's kind of like you're pushed to the side," she said. "You're not part of that military family any more."

Other widows still feel those bonds, and reunite - often with children in tow - at "grief camps" or expenses-paid holidays arranged by charities.

Some stay in touch with buddies of their late husbands. A Palmer, Mass., widow, Melissa Storey, was still getting calls from soldiers in Iraq eight months after her husband, Staff Sgt. Clint Storey, was killed there.

"We're just as much a part of the Army as before he died," she said.

Storey, 29, has a 4-year-old daughter, Adela, who's had therapy sessions since her father's death. During the couple's final days together, she also became with pregnant with a son, to be named Clint. She considers her benefits package generous and praised the Army's outreach to families.

"But part of being a good military spouse is accepting that you don't come first - the mission comes first," she added. "It's a hard life. I don't want to sugarcoat it. You suck it up and deal with it."

While many widows have kept a low public profile, some have testified before Congress to urge better benefits or have gained prominence by speaking out elsewhere.

Laura Youngblood of South Hempstead, N.Y., wife of a Navy corpsman killed in Iraq, made national TV appearances assailing anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son also died in Iraq. Hildi Halley of Falmouth, Maine, met with President Bush last year and blamed his policies for the death of her husband, National Guard Capt. Patrick Damon, from an apparent heart attack in Afghanistan.

"To have him die in a war you didn't agree with is that much worse," she said.

The resentment has been deepened by her experience with the military after her husband's death. She still fumes that his personal belongings reeked of insecticide when they belatedly arrived, and that she spent weeks wrestling with Army bureaucracy before finally reclaiming her own love letters to him that had been confiscated.

Her husband had urged her to seek support among other spouses, but Halley - a mother of two adolescents - feels estranged from other military wives who support the war.

"I couldn't have them as my support group," she said. "They're going through enough pain, and if they want to believe their fairy tale, who am I to wake them up?"

Even at Fort Hood, the Army's largest armored base with 43,900 military personnel and 17,800 family members, anti-war sentiment sometimes surfaces.

"I don't support this war," said Ursula Pirtle. "What did my husband die for? I don't believe what we're doing over there helps our country."

Yet she views her fallen husband as a hero. "When he was killed, I would love to have been there holding him," Pirtle said.

The campaign to establish Fort Hood's Gold Star Family Support Center was led by Debbie Busch, whose own Army husband is alive and well, but who grew dismayed by the lack of organized backing for widows she knew. Initially, there were weekly support meetings at a chapel; last September her group got its own building, complete with lounge, kitchenette and playrooms.

Calls have come from other bases, seeking advice on launching similar programs, and Busch's efforts have been noticed by senior Army officials.

"The fact that these families spoke out and said it could be done better, it gave the Army the opportunity to change things," Busch said.

A recent report by the Government Accountability Office examined some of the issues troubling bereaved families. It said support services were inconsistent and advised the Defense Department to improve its oversight.

"Most survivors don't know what they're entitled to, and that's a big deal," said the GAO's Derek Stewart. "There should be one place that survivors could go and, in one sitting, have an individual spell out all the services and entitlements coming your way."

Addressing some of the concerns, the Defense Department updated its guide to survivors' benefits, which have increased substantially since the Iraq war began. The so-called "death gratuity" for next of kin has climbed from $6,000 to $100,000; military life insurance payments have risen from $250,000 to $400,000.

Brad Snyder, a benefits expert with the Armed Forces Services Corp., said the package compares well to private-sector plans and can exceed $60,000 a year for a sergeant's widow with three children.

Children of fallen service members now get military medical coverage until adulthood, rather than losing it three years after the death. A bereaved family can now stay in military housing for a year, not six months.

Among the Fort Hood families benefiting from such changes are the widow and four children of Maj. William F. Hecker III, who was killed in January 2006 just six weeks after reaching Iraq. His prior duties included teaching a course on comparative war poetry at the U.S. Military Academy.

Richelle Hecker, his widow, said the children - the youngest 3, the oldest 11 - were helped by grief counseling.

"The counselors play games with them, let them talk about all those things that after a while other people don't want to hear anymore," Hecker said.

She also noted the stream of casualties has prompted many military families to think more seriously about future risks and attend financial-planning sessions that once seemed morbid or unnecessary.

"It's making or breaking people," Hecker said. "I see some marriages growing stronger and others that aren't."

The Army, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the Iraq and Afghanistan deaths, has been striving to address the most prevalent complaints from widows.

In January, it completed an overhaul of the training for casualty notification and assistance officers - the ones who deal directly with grieving families. The goal is for these officers to exhibit "professional compassion."

Col. Patrick Gawkins, director of the Army's Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Center, said the new curriculum includes video footage with actors portraying officers and family members.

The Army also launched a 'round-the-clock call center to assist survivor families with questions about benefits.

"The benefits issue comes across as very bureaucratic and hard to understand," Gawkins said. "We want to clarify and simplify the instruction to the greatest extent possible, given it's in a time of great emotional stress."

Joanne Steen, whose Navy aviator husband died in a helicopter crash in 1992, felt she was filling a gaping void last year by co-authoring "Military Widow: A Survival Guide" - offering advice about coping with the loss of a military husband.

"As a young widow, you may feel like a sideshow in a circus," she wrote. "Because you aren't supposed to be a widow at such a young age, you don't fit in anywhere."

Some widows, though, are well into middle age. Nancy Kelly, of Richmond, Maine, is 52 and has three grandchildren as well as three grown children.

She and her husband, Staff Sgt. Dale James Kelly Jr., had been married 25 years when he was killed in Iraq last May while deployed with the Maine Army National Guard. One tough task was explaining the absence of "Grandpa Kelly" to his grandchildren.

Herself an Air National Guard veteran, Kelly said her husband and his Guard colleagues were well-trained and aware of dangers they faced. But she suggested part of the problem for the Guard-dependent military is that troops' families are less steeled for the traumas of war than active-duty families.

"From a family standpoint, no, we're not prepared for this," Kelly said. "The men go off once a month and two weeks a year (for training), and for many of us wives, it's, 'Oh, that's the time we have dinner with the girls while they're off playing soldier."'

She paused, reflecting on her husband.

"He was and is my soul mate," Kelly said. "My life as I knew it will never be the same."

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.

Go on-site to access this article, as well as it's links.
~~~~~~~ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
///\\\///\\\///\\\
Cherokees Pull Memberships of Freed Slaves
By MURRAY EVANS
AP
Updated:2007-03-04 09:51:39

OKLAHOMA CITY (March 4) - Cherokee Nation members voted Saturday to revoke the tribal citizenship of an estimated 2,800 descendants of the people the Cherokee once owned as slaves.

With all 32 precincts reporting, 76.6 percent had voted in favor of an amendment to the tribal constitution that would limit citizenship to descendants of "by blood" tribe members as listed on the federal Dawes Commission's rolls from more than 100 years ago.

The commission, set up by a Congress bent on breaking up Indians' collective lands and parceling them out to tribal citizens, drew up two rolls, one listing Cherokees by blood and the other listing freedmen, a roll of blacks regardless of whether they had Indian blood.

Some opponents of the ballot question argued that attempts to remove freedmen from the tribe were motivated by racism.

"I'm very disappointed that people bought into a lot of rhetoric and falsehoods by tribal leaders," said Marilyn Vann, president of the Oklahoma City-based Descendants of Freedmen of Five Civilized Tribes.

Tribal officials said the vote was a matter of self-determination.

"The Cherokee people exercised the most basic democratic right, the right to vote," tribal Principal Chief Chad Smith said. "Their voice is clear as to who should be citizens of the Cherokee Nation. No one else has the right to make that determination.'

Smith said turnout — more than 8,700 — was higher than turnout for the tribal vote on the Cherokee Nation constitution four years ago.

"On lots of issues, when they go to identity, they become things that people pay attention to," Smith said.

The petition drive for the ballot measure followed a March 2006 ruling by the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court that said an 1866 treaty assured freedmen descendants of tribal citizenship. Since then, more than 2,000 freedmen descendants have enrolled as citizens of the tribe.

Court challenges by freedmen descendants seeking to stop the election were denied, but a federal judge left open the possibility that the case could be refiled if Cherokees voted to lift their membership rights.

Tribal spokesman Mike Miller said the period to protest the election lasts until March 12 and Cherokee courts are the proper venue for a challenge.

Vann promised a protest within the next week. "We don't accept this fraudulent election," Vann said.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press

Go on-site to access this article, any links, as well as related articles, by clicking on the following link:
http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/cherokees-pull-memberships-of-freed/n20070304095009990004?ncid=NWS00010000000001 ///\\\///\\\ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
^^^^^^^^^
Ethical Man's top ten tips for ethical living

Justin Rowlatt and his family were told to "go green" for an entire year to see by how much they could cut their carbon footprint.

You can find out how they got on by watching BBC One's Panorama at 2030 GMT on Monday.

In the meantime, here are Justin Rowlatt's top 10 tips for ethical living (in no particular order):

1. GIVE UP YOUR CAR
Experiment with giving up your car, you may find it easier than you think. Our cars produce 11% of the country's carbon emissions so there are big savings to be made here. We never thought that we would be able to give up the family car permanently but that's what we've done. Of course adjusting to a life without our motor took a bit of time - and a few stressful moments - but shank's pony and public transport have seen us right. Don't be too hard on yourself.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Remember cars cost a lot of money - I reckon we're saving £2,000 a year - so don't worry about treating yourself by jumping in the odd taxi when you can't face the bus. Why not join the local car club so you've got wheels on hand when you really need them and, if you want a weekend away and taking the train isn't practical, just hire a car.

2. INSULATE YOUR HOME
Our homes produce a quarter of the UK's carbon emissions. You should consider insulating your home but, as I discovered, that can be expensive. So why not try draught-proofing your windows and just turn down the thermostat by a degree or two and put on a jumper. If you can afford it you could line your curtains - that'll stop draughts and save almost as much heat as double glazing your windows. Consider buying a rug or carpeting your floors, that also helps keep rooms warm. We did all these things and cut our gas usage by 15%. That has saved us real money - I reckon over £50 in one year.

3. MOVE THE ELECTRICITY METER FROM UNDER THE STAIRS

I've bought a little gadget on the internet that has certainly cut our electricity use - proving that gadgets can help save the world. It's a little device that takes the electricity meter out from under the stairs to tell you how much electricity you are using as you are using it. It has found a permanent home on the kitchen worktop and I can now tell which appliances and lights are on around the house just by looking at it.

4. START COMPOSTING
I have taken great delight in my compost bin. It doesn't save much carbon but cuts the amount of waste we send to landfill. The handful of worms I was given by the country's composting king, John Cossham of York , have multiplied and now happily devour all our kitchen waste. We are a family of five but thanks to the efforts of my worms, a year of green living and the compost bin is still less than half full.

5. EAT MORE VEGGIES
Our veggie box has proved a revelation. It is delivered once a week and contains locally produced organic vegetables. We've had vegetables delivered that I have never heard of before so it forces you to try things you'd normally walk straight past in the supermarket. It also means I have developed quite a repertoire of recipes for cabbage and courgettes.

6. EAT LESS MEAT
Farming animals produces an astonishing 18% of world emissions of greenhouse gases - much of it from the burps, farts and poos of the world's three billion cows and sheep. I tried going vegan for a month. It wasn't easy, you'd be amazed how many products contain animal products in one form or another. I shed two kilos and saw my cholesterol levels fall from a worrying 5.5 to just 3.4. But I love meat and am eating animals again, though not so many.

7. USE WASHABLE NAPPIES
The weather is now too bad to hang out our bamboo nappies on the line for our new baby Elsa.

We now get washable nappies delivered by a local company, Nappy Ever After. I'm still learning some of the more complicated folds.

8. BUY ENERGY-SAVING LIGHT BULBS

I was very sceptical about energy-saving light bulbs when we launched this project at the end of February last year. I thought the light they gave out was cold and couldn't believe that they'd make any significant savings in power use. But the bulbs have got much better and our electricity bill shows the difference they can make. We changed most of our bulbs - we've still got six halogens in the kitchen (down from 12) - and, thanks to my portable meter gadget (see tip 3), we've got much better at turning appliances off stand-by and we've slashed our electricity use by 22%. That's £100 worth.

9. TRY TO FLY LESS
What my year of green living really brought home was just how polluting the culture of cheap flights is . I pretty much bust my family's carbon budget, undoing many of the careful carbon savings we'd made, by jetting off to Jamaica to explore carbon offsetting. My carbon guru was very strict: he said if you've pumped the CO2 into the atmosphere it has to be counted, even if you pay someone else to cut their carbon by the same amount. So my advice is to try to fly less. Instead of jetting off to some European capital why not take a break here in Blighty?

10. TURN OFF THE TAPS
As climate change alters weather patterns, water use is increasingly becoming an issue as well as carbon. In The Gambia people use an average of 4.5 litres of water a day. Here in Britain we use an average of 150 litres a day. I've got water butts in the garden and have tried (not always successfully) to remember to do the little things like turning the tap off when I brush my teeth. My composting guru even persuaded me that we could use the toilet less by urinating in our compost bin. I did try this out but since our compost bin is in the front garden it wasn't - how shall I put this - something you'd want to do every day.

Is there anything I've missed? Do you have any suggestions of easy ways to reduce our impact on the environment? Or do you think that trying to cut our carbon emissions is pointless in the face of the rapid growth of economies like China and India

Go Green Or Else will be aired on BBC One and on this site on Monday 5 March at 2030 GMT.?

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/panorama/6413195.stm

Published: 2007/03/05 00:10:23 GMT

© BBC MMVII
There's no way we can do a lot of what this family is advocating and trying. We live too far from employment & town to stop using a car. There's no alternative form of transportation where we live and even riding a bicycle is a hazard as the roads are narrow and often covered in snow or ice.

We live in an old ranch house that was built before insulation was a given. There is a bit of later insulation added to attic areas and a few other means have been put in place to try to make a difference, however it is a drafty old home which would take a fortune to retrofit with insulation and better windows. In the winter I do all sorts of strange things to stop the icy drafts from whistling through.

We do eat less meat, and more fish, but the oceans are in dire straits and marine life is in danger, so what does one do to counteract that? We do eat more vegetables, and always have, not just to be green, we like them and have learned to have meat more as a side dish other than the main part of the meal. Not always, but quite often.

No babies about, no diapers to change so there isn't anything we can do to save water, or electricity here. Not sure which would be worse, buying disposable and fouling up land fills, or using washable diapers and using all of the water and products necessary to make sure they are clean and germ free. If one is on a well, or a cistern with a pump, perhaps a disposable diaper would be the way to go. ???

We have been buying energy saving light bulbs. We do all kinds of things to conserve electricity.

We don't fly much, preferring to drive unless there is a reason to get somewhere quickly.

We have learned to turn off taps as a forgotten stream of water when you're on a well uses 2/20 electricity, and that gets expensive, and cuts down on your pump life.

So much of what one can do depends on location and what that location allows. Not everything that people advocate is workable for all of us. SRH
^^^^^^^ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
*********
.Breaking the News

News:It's not the Internet that's killing newspapers. It's the equity-chasing investors and their friends at the FCC who have put outsize profits before a free press.

By
Eric Klinenberg
March/April 2007 Issue

Senate reconfirmation hearings tend to be predictable affairs, marked by polite give-and-take and senatorial grandstanding, but generally free of surprise plot twists. And so it was supposed to go last September 12, when Federal Communications Commission (fcc) chairman Kevin Martin appeared before the Commerce Committee. In March 2005, following the departure of Michael Powell (Colin's son), President Bush had named the young Republican lawyer to head the extraordinarily powerful five-person panel that oversees the nation's media and telecommunications policies. Martin, a boyish-looking 40-year-old who'd been on the fcc since 2001, planned to carry on much of his predecessor's unfinished business, particularly stiffening penalties for on-air indecency and the sweeping deregulation of media ownership rules. But unlike Powell, who was confrontational and contemptuous of his critics, the bland and soft-spoken Martin seemed unlikely to attract controversy.

But controversy caught up with him when Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) strayed from the script at his reconfirmation hearing. Boxer began by asking Martin about an fcc study, commissioned by Powell, on the impact of media ownership on local news. Unsuspecting, Martin said that it had never been completed. Then, as he watched glumly, Boxer brandished a draft of the study, which had, in fact, been written more than two years earlier, only to be buried by the fcc. The report found that locally owned television stations, on average, presented 5 1/2 minutes more local news per broadcast than stations owned by out-of-town conglomerates. The findings squarely contradicted the claims made by Martin, Powell, and big media companies, who have argued that lifting limits on ownership would improve local news coverage.

"Now, this isn't national security, for God's sakes," Boxer continued, unable to resist making Martin squirm. "I mean, this is important information. So I don't understand who deep-sixed this thing." Martin meekly said he had no idea, and promised he'd look into it. Within a week, a former fcc lawyer claimed that "every last piece" of the report had been ordered destroyed before it was leaked, and a second unreleased study came to light, prompting Boxer to refer the matter to the fcc's inspector general.

The discovery of the missing studies wasn't just bad for Martin's image, it was a blow to his pet project—trying to repeal what's known as the cross-ownership ban, a 31-year-old fcc rule that prohibits a single company from owning a newspaper and a TV station in the same regional market. Powell had repealed the rule in 2003 amid public outcry, only to have a federal court reinstate it the following year. Last April, Martin told the members of the Newspaper Association of America that he would renew the effort to end this regulatory relic from "the days of disco and leisure suits." Lifting the ban, he said, "may help to forestall the erosion in local news coverage." But now, the fcc's own internal findings confirmed what its critics had been saying for years—that letting one company dominate a city's news business actually undermines the quality of the local media that most Americans rely on for their news.

The renewed push to consolidate even more of the nation's newsprint and airwaves comes as the media are in profound transition. Although we are bombarded with a seemingly endless supply of media options—from cable television to blogs to satellite radio—more and more of the actual news and information we consume comes from a handful of giant media companies. (See "And Then There Were Eight") Meanwhile, locally owned outlets are being squeezed out of business or absorbed at an ever faster clip. In the past three decades, two-thirds of newspaper owners and one-third of television owners have shut down. Newspapers are particularly feeling the pinch: Fewer than 300 of the nation's 1,500 daily papers are still independently owned, and more than half of all markets are dominated by a single paper. The number of newspaper employees has dropped nearly 20 percent since 1990. Hardly a week goes by without another pundit lamenting the demise of the great American newspaper.

The eulogies are also coming from the newspaper executives and investors whose pursuit of phenomenal profits has turned many dailies into shadows of their former selves. They claim that ending the cross-ownership ban will throw a lifeline to foundering papers by allowing them to merge with TV stations and compete with the Internet. In reality, such a move would only fuel the "cut-and-gut" strategies that generate short-term value at the expense of the kind of journalism that exposed Watergate, nsa eavesdropping, and countless corrupt politicians. To see how disastrous this could be for the future of news, just take a look at the cities where the fcc has already allowed cross-ownership to get a toehold.

Page 2
Three weeks after Martin's embarrassing Senate appearance, the fcc held a rare public hearing in Los Angeles, the first of six that Martin had promised before his planned proposal of new ownership rules later this year. He had hoped the event would be a chance to win over skeptics. But it would be a tough sell: The ban on cross-ownership has bipartisan support from a loose-knit coalition that includes religious conservatives, centrist Democrats, and an array of progressive groups. "The failure to implement these rule changes is not our fault alone," Martin had told a meeting of newspaper publishers last spring. "The public is not convinced of the need to change these rules, and if you can't convince the public, our chances to do that are dim."

Martin assured the more than 500 people who had packed into an auditorium at the University of Southern California that "public input is critical to this process." Yet once the microphone was opened to the floor, it was obvious that he didn't like what he heard. "There were about 100 people who spoke," recalled Jonathan Adelstein, one of two Democrats on the fcc, "and I'd say 99 of them spoke out against media consolidation while one spoke out in favor of it. And I thought that was great, because that's just about the breakdown of how Americans feel about this issue." As speaker after speaker pounded the fcc's cozy relationship with the companies it's supposed to regulate, Martin slumped in his seat, head in hands. By the time his staff rescued him to attend another event, he looked like a man who wished he'd never gotten out of bed.

Martin had made the mistake of kicking off his final deregulatory push in Los Angeles. Having witnessed the havoc the Chicago-based Tribune Co. had wreaked upon the Los Angeles Times during the past six years, Angelenos were familiar with what can happen when an out-of-town company tries to control the local media.

Tribune Co. is the nation's second-largest newspaper owner (behind Gannett) and is, more importantly, the only corporation to own both a newspaper and a television station in the three largest markets in the United States—Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles. (The Chicago arrangement is grandfathered; the fcc has granted Tribune temporary waivers to cross-own properties in the other cities.) The company acquired the Los Angeles Times, along with New York's Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, and the Hartford Courant, when it purchased Times Mirror Co. for $8.3 billion in 2000. Its executives proclaimed that the deal would make Tribune "the premier multimedia company in America." They marched into Los Angeles prepared to merge news production at the Times and the WB network affiliate ktla, folding another city into their "convergence media" model, in which journalistic and corporate "synergies" between newspapers, TV stations, and websites reduce inefficiency and maximize profits.

The paper's employees and readers soon discovered that this jargon was code for old-fashioned downsizing. The Los Angeles Times had long been known for its extensive local coverage as well as national and international reporting on a par with the New York Times and the Washington Post. Indeed, it won six Pulitzers in 2004, before Tribune started slashing its domestic and international bureaus—just as world events and Southern California's booming immigrant population made their reporting more necessary than ever. By 2006, Tribune had eliminated one-fourth of the editorial staff, trimmed the news section, and canned two popular editors-in-chief after disputes over cutbacks, losing 335,000 subscribers in the process. (See "Reckless Disregard")

The Times' critics also charge that the leaner publication lost touch with local issues and its civic mission. "A succession of publishers and editors who don't know an Amber Alert from SigAlert"—warnings to look for kidnapped children and massive tie-ups on L.A. freeways, respectively—"have been parachuted in to run the Times," wrote Harry B. Chandler, a former Times executive whose family owned the paper for nearly 120 years, in an op-ed last November. "The paper needs executives who understand the area. Providing great editorial coverage and civic leadership for this, the largest, most complicated urban space in the world, are tasks unsuited to outsiders whose tour of duty in the Southland may not outlast the Santa Anas."

When convergence failed to produce a windfall, and Tribune Co. stock dropped almost 35 percent in three years, shareholders—including many members of the Chandler clan—revolted. Last fall, Tribune put its entire business on the block. The decision fed hopes that David Geffen or another benevolent mogul would acquire the Times (at press time, sharks including Rupert Murdoch were also circling). The auction also added to suspicions that Tribune had been, as one Hartford Courant writer put it, "bleeding its local properties to keep the corporate mother ship in Chicago above water."

If Tribune's record in Los Angeles should give pause to advocates of consolidation, so too should its stranglehold on its hometown media market, where its holdings include the Chicago Tribune; "superstation" CW affiliate wgn-tv; wgn, the region's top AM radio station; cltv, the only local cable news station; Chicago magazine; the top online entertainment guide; the most popular Spanish-language daily; a tabloid aimed at readers 18 to 34; and the Chicago Cubs.

Tribune Co.'s presence is so powerful that locals refer to Chicago as "Trib Town"; the Wall Street Journal observed that the company has become "synonymous with the part of the world in which its audience lives." When a story piques the interest of Tribune's managers and editors, it echoes through the company's news outlets, giving it extraordinary influence in setting the local political and cultural agenda. Independent and locally owned news outlets often take their cues from Tribune. As Steve Edwards, host of a popular local affairs program on public radio station wbez, told me: "If the Tribune decides something was a major story and runs front-page coverage and repeated editorials on it, you would hear that story topping many local newscasts; you would hear other reporters doing more coverage of that issue.... There's no question there would be a ripple effect." Or, as a Chicago media critic puts it, "Tribune is the 800-pound gorilla."

The company also has the power to relegate a story to obscurity merely by ignoring it. Mayor Richard M. Daley, who has himself enjoyed nearly unchecked power in the city for almost two decades, acknowledged this when Tribune Co. all but ignored his favorite team, the Chicago White Sox, during its march to the 2005 World Series. "How can you compete with Tribune?" he asked. "I mean, give me a break. They own the Cubs, they own wgn Radio [and] TV and cltv. Come on. You think you are going to get any publicity for the White Sox? You can't. Let's be realistic."

And Tribune's ability to decide what becomes news goes far beyond baseball. In 2000, for instance, the Chicago Housing Authority announced the city's largest planning initiative since the urban renewal programs of the 1950s, proposing a 10-year, $1.6 billion scheme to demolish 18,000 units of public housing, forcing thousands of families into the private market. Local and federal agencies implemented the massive, controversial plan without significant public input, not even from public housing residents. The project was ripe for investigation, yet Tribune's management didn't take issue with it, and the Chicago Tribune and its media siblings barely took notice. Almost 50 "special reports" are listed on the newspaper's website, yet not one concerns public housing. This oversight was consistent with the paper's larger blind spot concerning issues affecting black Chicagoans, says local author and activist Jamie Kalven. "What about coverage of segregation? Or poverty?" he asks. "You can't make up for that with a special report."

But is it truly possible for a company—no matter how large—to dominate a local market in the digital age? According to Tribune Co. executives, the company's editorial decisions have limited impact in Chicago because consumers there have an infinite number of additional news sources. "In an environment where people's choices for obtaining information have radically multiplied, there is no risk of one voice dominating the marketplace of ideas," Jack Fuller, then-president of Tribune's publishing division, told the Senate Commerce Committee in 2001. "Today in clamorous cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, it is frankly a challenge for any voice—no matter how booming—to get itself heard." Yet Tribune has told a different story to investors. Speaking to shareholders in 2005, President and ceo Dennis Fitz Simons boasted that the company's "varied media choices" for Chicagoans reached 6.4 million people, or more than 90 percent of the market.

Page 3
this is exactly the kind of imbalance the fcc had sought to prevent when it passed the 1975 newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban, and it's why Tribune Co. has long sought to roll back the rule. The company spent billions acquiring properties that are only temporarily exempt from being found in violation of the ban—unless the fcc changes the rules first. Between 1998 and 2005, it spent $1.1 million on lobbying and more than $380,000 on political contributions, trying to convince lawmakers that its business model proved the rule unnecessary.

This strategy seemed brilliant when President Bush put Michael Powell in charge of the fcc in 2001, giving him a mandate to clear away the agency's regulatory underbrush. Powell, after all, had famously quipped that he did not know what "the public interest" meant. "The night after I was sworn in, I waited for a visit from the angel of the public interest," he told a crowd of executives in 1998, after President Clinton appointed him to the commission. "I waited all night, but she did not come. And, in fact, five months into this job, I still have had no divine awakening and no one has issued me my public interest crystal ball."

Breaking with precedent, Powell announced that the burden of proof no long-er rested on the opponents of ownership limits, suggesting that most regulations were unnecessary unless it was otherwise demonstrated. In June 2003, he led a 3-2 party-line vote to relax cross-ownership restrictions. (The commission also voted to significantly loosen television ownership caps.) The decision was made in spite of the 3 million public comments that had flooded into the fcc, the overwhelming majority of them opposing deregulation. "Seldom have I seen a regulatory agency cave in so completely to the big economic interests," said Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.). Trent Lott, his Republican colleague from Mississippi, stated simply, "This is a mistake."

Powell may have been deaf to the public interest, but the courts were not. A year later, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked his order, finding that although the fcc had the right to ease cross-ownership laws, it had not shown sufficient justification to do so. It was a stunning blow to Powell, who announced his resignation nine months later, walking through the revolving door into a job at a media and telecommunications investment firm.

But repealing the ban still remains a holy grail for media companies, and the newspaper industry's bumpy entrance into the digital age has provided them with a new rationale. Consolidation, they claim, is necessary to save newspapers, which otherwise can't compete in the new economy.

In fact, falling circulation numbers and sinking stock prices notwithstanding, corporate executives' cries of impending poverty are exaggerated. Newspaper chains routinely generate profit levels that most companies would kill for. ExxonMobil topped the Fortune 500 list for 2005, reporting 11 percent profit margins, while the average profit for the entire list was 5.9 percent. That year, the top 13 publicly traded newspaper companies enjoyed average profit margins of 20 percent; the 3 most financially successful chains, Gannett, McClatchy, and E.W. Scripps, earned around 25 percent margins. The Tribune Co.'s newspaper division earned 20 percent, as did the beleaguered Los Angeles Times. And this during a year that analysts lamented as "the industry's worst" since the 2001 recession.

What newspaper executives do not exaggerate is the pressure they get from investment analysts and large shareholders, who demand extraordinary, constantly growing profit margins and punish companies that fail to achieve them. But the newspaper chains themselves are partly responsible for setting unrealistic expectations. During the '70s and '80s, Gannett developed what would become a popular formula for making papers more profitable: Buy up a local newspaper, crush the competition, jack up ad rates, downsize the editorial staff (and, if required, break the union), then watch earnings soar.

The cut-and-gut approach does not treat newspaper ownership as a public service, but rather as an investment in a commodity like any other. This can make dumping papers an attractive option when profits sag or shareholders get antsy. Last spring, the Knight Ridder chain succumbed to pressure from its largest private investor and sold off its entire lineup of 32 papers to the McClatchy Co. for more than $4 billion. McClatchy then made a healthy profit flipping 12 of its new titles, including the well-respected Philadelphia Inquirer and San Jose Mercury News. Then, in December, McClatchy reaped a $160 million tax write-off by selling its "underperforming" marquee paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The buyer, a private equity firm, had no experience running a newspaper. "They're buying cash flow and tax-benefits," an analyst told the New York Times. "It's not the sort of religious commitment that you hope to get from newspaper owners."

Obviously, the newspaper business is changing. The Internet has made it harder to sustain high profit margins, not because readers are abandoning news but because publishers have not yet figured out how to make more money from their websites. Until now, papers sustained themselves by selling a physical product and the ad space in it. With online readers refusing to pay for what they read and web ads generating pennies on the dollar, the old model is collapsing. As Jay R. Smith, president of Cox Newspapers, told Editor & Publisher, newspapers are "finding whole new pockets of audiences for which they get no credit," clocking record-breaking readership figures if online traffic is included. But online advertising will account for just 6 percent of newspapers' $50 billion in ad revenues in 2007, the Newspaper Association of America predicts.

What's really at risk here is not the future of newspapers but of the news itself. While our democratic culture could survive the loss of the daily paper as we know it, it would be endangered without the kinds of reporting that it provides. It's the journalism, not the newsprint, that matters.

Even in the online era, more than 60 percent of Americans say they read a local newspaper daily or several times a week. And with good reason: Few of the cable channels and websites that newspaper chains claim as competitors actually provide original news and information. Cable networks do virtually no local reporting of their own, and while bloggers do a good job exposing journalistic lapses, they generally aren't doing the muckraking, beat reporting, and pavement pounding that generate news. (See "A Blogger Says: Save the msm!") As the 3rd Circuit Court stated in its opinion upholding the cross-ownership ban, the Internet "may be useful for finding restaurant reviews and concert schedules," but it does not offer "the type of 'news and public affairs programming'" that public policies should promote.

fcc head kevin martin has suggested that "newspaper-owned [television] stations provide more news and public affairs programming and also appear to provide higher quality programming," echoing the findings of a 2003 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. However, the study did not examine what happens to the quality of newspapers after they merge with television stations. From what I've seen of these hybrid operations, the results are discouraging.

In the late 1990s, I spent two weeks inside Tribune Co.'s famous Chicago office tower interviewing reporters and editors for a book about a local heat wave, but found that everyone wanted to talk instead about "corporate synergies" and "cross-platform production." The company had just started to require its newspaper staff to report breaking stories on its cable news station, cltv. Many reporters were anxious about the new arrangement, which meant more work without more pay, and less time to do their regular jobs. They weren't comforted when managers announced that they were remodeling the newsroom to put a television studio directly outside the editor-in-chief's door. These reporters recognized that technology was changing their industry, and most were eager to learn new digital skills and make the occasional TV appearance. Their main concern was that as "content providers," they were losing time for reporting, thinking, and writing—the essential ingredients of their craft—forcing them to churn out increasingly dumbed-down articles.

It didn't help that their bosses had abandoned even a rhetorical commitment to newspaper journalism and the values it represents. "I am not the editor of a newspaper," Editor-in-Chief Howard Tyner told the American Journalism Review in 1998, "I am the manager of a content company." Tyner's predecessor, James Squires, had already observed this shift. "Journalism, particularly newspaper journalism, has no real place in the company's future," he wrote after leaving the paper. "No one ever uses the word. The company bills itself as an 'information and entertainment' conglomerate and hopes that newspapers will become a smaller factor in its total business."

Media General, a newspaper and television chain in the Southeast, became a leader in convergence journalism due to its long-standing ownership of the Tampa Tribune and nbc affiliate wfla. In 2002, I spent a week at its Tampa News Center, a cutting-edge facility where the newspaper, television, and web departments shared an editorial "Superdesk" that looked like the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Although the Tampa market is considerably smaller than Chicago's or Los Angeles', the News Center is one of the world's most technologically sophisticated and innovative convergence complexes, drawing visits from media executives eager to see the future of 21st-century news production.

Editors and reporters at the News Center were trained to constantly look for ways to make stories overlap in as many outlets as possible. Every day, print, TV, and online editors held a 15-minute "convergence meeting" to discuss shared projects. And every month, the company's multimedia manager compiled a report that listed successful overlap and praised "overt acts of convergence."

While the Superdesk enabled editors to do more with less, some Tampa Tribune reporters were finding themselves juggling competing demands. I shadowed several print journalists who were pulled away from their desks to do short spots and longer stories for television. While one was waiting to tape a shot, I asked her how she felt about the added work. "Well," she began, "the good part is that it's fun, it's different, it's difficult, and it's interesting for me. It's a break from my regular routine. But a few weeks ago I did TV every day for two weeks. And every day—when you spend 40 minutes writing the script, 20 minutes putting on makeup, 20 to 30 minutes taping, and then taking the makeup off—it takes, like, two hours to do the job. That's two hours—a quarter of my day—and that doesn't help my reporting." As their job descriptions required them to be more telegenic, some reporters feared that the norms of TV news production—short stories, soft features, celebrity journalism—were creeping into the print side.

These concerns reveal the vicious cycle that drives the newspaper business today: Slashing editorial content and standards may be a recipe for quick revenue, but it doesn't retain readers. However, doing the meaningful, quality reporting that print and online readers expect is expensive. And so each new round of convergence, downsizing, or outsourcing further erodes the product, paving the way for yet another round. As Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten commented last fall, "A newspaper that is indifferent to its bottom line goes out of business; a newspaper that thinks only of its bottom line has a business that isn't worth saving." He knew what he was writing about: In October 2005, as its circulation plummeted, the Times announced that it would attempt to regain readers by running shorter articles and more celebrity stories.

this is the choice that Kevin Martin, the Tribune Co., and other advocates of continued media deregulation seem to be offering: We must destroy our newspapers in order to save them.

It doesn't have to be this way. Citizens, communities, and even a few media executives are beginning to make intriguing suggestions about how to reverse the course of radical deregulation and replenish the nation's supply of local media outlets. Frank Blethen, whose family has owned and published the Seattle Times since 1896, has been advocating newspaper ownership caps that would discourage chain journalism and create new opportunities for locally controlled dailies. Grassroots organizations in several states, including California and Illinois, are calling for the fcc to put teeth back into the broadcast license-renewal process. And radio enthusiasts, recalling the '60s boom of free-spirited FM radio, are asking why radio and TV stations should not be required to air original programming on the 1,000-plus new channels they will get on the digital spectrum.

Meanwhile, the fcc says it will continue to hold public hearings on the future of America's media. The question is how closely Martin will be listening. Last November, he quietly commissioned his staff and a few select contractors to complete new studies on media ownership, which will presumably bolster the rule changes he unveils. Whatever happens next, the stakes couldn't be higher. As Michael Copps, the other Democrat on the fcc, observed at October's hearing in Los Angeles, "We're back at square one. It's all up for grabs."
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/03/breaking_the_news.html
*******

[Saundra Hummer]

.:: :: :: :: :: :: ::
Inside Bush's prosecutor purge
Why has the administration fired U.S. attorneys with sterling track records? To make room for its political loyalists, critics say, and exert its last shred of control.
By
Mark Follman

Feb. 28, 2007 | Ever since the Bush administration shocked the legal community by dismissing eight U.S. attorneys in December, Justice Department leaders have vigorously denied that the firings were politically motivated. "I would never, ever make a change in the United States attorney position for political reasons," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said in Senate testimony in early January. In a Feb. 6 hearing, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty told lawmakers, "When I hear you talk about the politicizing of the Department of Justice, it's like a knife in my heart."

But at least three of the eight fired attorneys were told by a superior they were being forced to resign to make jobs available for other Bush appointees, according to a former senior Justice Department official knowledgeable about their cases. That stands in contradiction to administration claims that the firings were related either to job performance or policy differences. A fourth U.S. attorney was told by a top Justice Department official that the dismissal in that attorney's case was not necessarily related to job performance. Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias in New Mexico -- who officially steps down from his post on Wednesday, and who says he was never told by superiors about any problems with his work -- plans to go public with documentation of the achievements of his office.

"I never received any indication at all of a problem" regarding performance or policy differences, Iglesias told Salon on Monday. "That only leaves a third option: politics."

Iglesias acknowledged that U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and can be dismissed without cause. "But it's really been maddening," he said, that the administration is pointing to job-performance issues to defend the firings. Iglesias, who was appointed by Bush in 2001, noted that his office got a "very positive" evaluation in the Justice Department's own internal ratings system as recently as last fall and that he received a letter from the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys in January 2006 commending him for his "exemplary leadership in the Department's priority programs," including antiterrorism, community crime prevention and law enforcement coordination.

Iglesias said he was "shocked" by the phone call on Dec. 7 telling him to resign. He added, "I think Americans need to have full confidence that their federal prosecutors are above politics."

Suspicions about the unusual purge of eight U.S. attorneys in December exploded into the open across the legal community and on Capitol Hill after McNulty conceded in Senate testimony on Feb. 6 that the U.S. attorney in Arkansas, Bud Cummins, was pushed out for no reason other than to give someone else a shot at the job. Using a little-noticed provision in the Patriot Act allowing interim appointments, Gonzales gave the post to Timothy Griffin -- who had been both an operative for the Republican National Committee and a deputy to senior White House advisor Karl Rove -- in what many believe was a maneuver to sidestep the traditional Senate confirmation process for U.S. attorneys.

More recently, U.S. attorney Carole Lam, who is best known for nailing corrupt Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham and his partners in crime, was replaced on Feb. 15 by Karen P. Hewitt, who according to a Justice Department press release, "will serve on an interim basis until a United States Attorney is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate." According to an Op-Ed in Monday's New York Times, Hewitt has a résumé with "almost no criminal law experience" and is a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

While Cummins was first informed of his dismissal last June, it wasn't until Dec. 7 that Michael Battle, a top Justice Department official, informed the rest of the group of U.S. attorneys in phone calls that they would be required to step down. That group included Daniel Bogden in Nevada, Paul Charlton in Arizona, John McKay in Seattle, Carole Lam in San Diego, and David Iglesias in New Mexico -- all of whom had received positive job reviews before they were dismissed and some of whom are viewed by colleagues and law enforcement officials as exceptional leaders. Most of them have said publicly that they were never told of any management or policy problems by their superiors.

According to the former senior Justice Department official, one of the U.S. attorneys in the group was told by Battle on Dec. 7: "It's hard not to think you did something wrong when you get a call like this, but that's not always the case." Two other U.S. attorneys in the group, upon seeking clarification from superiors in Washington, were told by a different top Justice Department official that they were being pushed out to give other Bush appointees their posts. A current senior Justice Department official confirmed that one of those two was Bogden in Nevada.

When asked about those conversations with top officials, Bryan Roehrkasse, a public affairs spokesman for the Justice Department, declined to comment about "specific personnel matters."

Former officials, legal scholars and U.S. lawmakers from both parties have publicly questioned the administration's stated rationale for the firings and have suggested troubling theories about the real reasons for the purge, which experts say is without precedent. Some former Justice Department officials say they believe the administration's moves are a politically driven power grab -- aimed not only at a tighter grip on policy from Washington, but also at creating openings with which to reward their friends and build up a bench of conservative loyalists positioned to serve in powerful posts in future administrations.

"It's really remarkable to have a wholesale removal of an administration's own U.S. attorneys, particularly this deep into the term," said John Kroger, a federal prosecutor under Clinton and Bush who now teaches at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore. "Clearly there was a concerted decision made to ask a bunch of them to leave. It suggests a desire to more tightly control policy. With the Democrats in control of Congress, perhaps it's because this is one of the few levers of government they have left."

Many point to the Cummins firing as proof that the administration is lying. "It is simply not believable that these were all performance-based dismissals, and everyone knows it," said a veteran prosecutor who served for a decade in the Justice Department until 2005. He also noted that he found it interesting that half of the posts cleared out are in the Southwest, where immigration is a key issue.

Kroger added that a stint as U.S. attorney is often a springboard to federal judgeships or other prestigious appointments. "Being a U.S. attorney is a huge credential, one a lot of people would like to have," he said. "It certainly looks like they're clearing out spots to reward loyalists in the last two years of the administration."

To support their claim that the dismissals were performance related, Bush officials have pointed to one among the fired U.S. attorneys, Kevin Ryan in San Francisco, who has been widely reported to be a focus of management complaints. The firing of Margaret Chiara in Michigan, the eighth U.S. attorney caught up in the December purge, was not made public until last Friday. To date, no explanation for her dismissal has been provided by Chiara or administration officials, but the former senior Justice Department official confirmed she was asked to resign in December and was in negotiations to stay in her post.

Realistically, federal appointments are never apolitical. But while U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, they are traditionally recommended by federal judges and senators from the regions they serve, and are ultimately confirmed by the Senate. But thanks to a change put into the Patriot Act by Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter when it was reauthorized in late 2005, Gonzales and the White House gained the power to fill vacancies with interim appointees who can hold office for indefinite terms. Earlier this month, the Senate Judiciary Committee put forth legislation to restore limits for those terms (and thereby congressional vetting for long-term hires), but a full Senate vote on the bill was blocked by Republicans.

Incoming presidents are known to overhaul the corps of U.S. attorneys installed by prior administrations. Upon taking office, both Presidents Clinton and Bush replaced nearly all of the head prosecutors serving in the Justice Department's 94 districts nationwide. But it is rare for even one U.S. attorney to otherwise be dismissed during a president's term -- and in this case, all those dismissed by Bush were his own appointees.

Experts see a continuing pattern that began long ago: A Bush White House seizing greater executive power to the detriment of democratic principle.

"No doubt this is a threat to the independent stature that the Justice Department as an institution has enjoyed over the years," said Sam Buell, an associate professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis and a former federal prosecutor under the current President Bush. "It goes against the 'hands off' tradition, which has insulated U.S. attorneys from criticisms of politics influencing their choices and handling of cases. This doesn't look like a decision that's been made in the best interest of law enforcement."

Indeed, several of the fired attorneys had stellar track records. Like Iglesias in New Mexico, Daniel Bogden steps down Wednesday from the helm of a U.S. attorney's office in Nevada that saw unsurpassed achievements in law enforcement during his tenure. In a phone interview Monday, Bogden cited a record number of cases targeting guns, drugs, identity theft and sexual exploitation, among other criminal issues.

"To this day, I've never been told of any deficiencies in my performance or that of my office," Bogden said. "I've never been called by anyone suggesting that I should do something differently on policy, or that I was going against their policy."

In Seattle, John McKay's record as U.S. attorney has left many observers baffled by his dismissal. The raison d'être of the Bush White House is supposed to be the war on terrorism -- and McKay, by many measures, was an invaluable lieutenant in that battle.

McKay was appointed by Bush shortly after terrorists struck the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. Over the next five years, in a major port city and a border region critical for antiterrorist operations, he personally handled high-profile prosecutions, including that of Ahmed Ressam, who had driven across the Canada-U.S. border with plans to bomb Los Angeles International Airport at the turn of the millennium. In 2004, at a time when poor coordination among law enforcement agencies had been judged at least partly to blame for the 9/11 attacks, McKay developed an innovative data-sharing system that continues to be rolled out today in law enforcement offices nationwide.

Just over five months ago, on Sept. 22, 2006, the Justice Department completed a comprehensive evaluation of McKay's office, filled with high marks on both criminal and counterterrorism matters, including McKay's efforts to build greater cooperation among law enforcement agencies in both the United States and Canada. McKay "has been responsible for major advances in a cooperative cross-border effort," the report said. "All involved in these efforts pointed to U.S. Attorney McKay as the individual most responsible for the dramatic increase in cooperation."

"The report says nothing about me with regard to management or policy differences," McKay said in an interview last week. "Counterterrorism was our No. 1 priority, and I put an enormous amount of my personal time into it." He added, "If there were performance issues of any kind, they didn't tell me about it, and to this day I'm unaware of any."

"This is a huge loss," said Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle's chief of police. "I've worked with a lot of U.S. attorneys in my time and John is absolutely at the top of the ladder, not only on issues of terrorism but on law enforcement in general. I can tell you that if they're saying John's dismissal was performance related ... I find that almost inconceivable." Kerlikowske noted that McKay had crucial perspective, having served as a White House fellow at the FBI. "He knew how tough the barriers could be between law enforcement agencies, and he really helped break down those walls with information sharing."

"He was a champion with all the federal law enforcement agencies, but especially with ATF," said Kelvin Crenshaw, a 19-year veteran of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the special agent in charge of the Seattle field office. "He's one of the best U.S. attorneys I've ever worked with."

Administration officials have declined to provide further explanation for any of the attorneys' dismissals, including McKay's. On Feb. 14, McNulty, the deputy attorney general, gave a private briefing to the Senate Judiciary Committee, but afterward, Patty Murray, D-Wash., said, "I heard nothing from Department of Justice officials that changed my mind about John McKay's performance." Other senators who were present concurred with that view, according to a Democratic congressional aide briefed on the closed-door session.

Questions remain about how the Bush administration will seek to fill the newly vacant posts. Some former Justice Department officials say they believe that the administration has since revised its plans to reward political loyalists with the jobs, due to the backlash against the decision to push out Cummins in Arkansas and hand his post to Griffin. Earlier this month, the administration withdrew Griffin's name from consideration for a permanent appointment, though he remains in office indefinitely.

But if other recent appointees are an indication, the administration may be intent on installing conservatives with close ties to the White House. According to a Jan. 26 report by McClatchy Newspapers, since last March the administration has named at least nine U.S. attorneys who fit that profile, most of them hand-picked by Gonzales under the little-noticed provision of the Patriot Act that has since become law. They include Jeff Taylor, previously an aide to both Gonzales and former Attorney General John Ashcroft; Alexander Acosta, a protégé of conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito; and Edward McNally, a former senior associate counsel to President Bush.

And some critics expect that, despite the recent uproar over Cummins and the other attorneys' firings, the Bush White House will continue to find ways to erode the independence of the Justice Department.

"This is an administration that has not hesitated to discard conventional wisdom just because people say it's wrong," said Buell, the former federal prosecutor under Bush. "This is an administration that looks at the landscape and isn't afraid to rewrite the rules and say, 'We're going to do it our own way.'"

-- By Mark Follman
Go on-site for photo and links within the article by clicking on the following URL:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/02/28/attorneys/
:: :: :: .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Missing: a huge chunk of the earth's crust

By
Stefano Ambrogi
Mon Mar 5, 11:22 AM ET

A team of British scientists has set sail on a voyage to examine why a huge chunk of the earth's crust is missing, deep under the Atlantic Ocean -- a phenomenon that challenges conventional ideas about how the earth works.

The 20-strong team aims to survey an area some 3,000 to 4,000 metres deep where the mantle -- the deep interior of the earth normally covered by a crust kilometres thick -- is exposed on the sea floor.

Experts describe the hole along the mid-Atlantic ridge as an "open wound" on the ocean floor that has puzzled scientists for the five or so years that its existence has been known because it defies existing tectonic plate theories of evolution.

"We know so little about it," said Bramley Murton, a senior research scientist at Southampton's National Oceanography Center.

"It's a real challenge to our established understanding of what the earth's surface looks like underneath the waves," he told Reuters by telephone from the brand new, hi-tech British research ship RRS James Cook.

Mid ocean ridges are places where new oceanic crust is born, with red-hot lava spewing out along the seafloor.

What scientists are keen to know is whether the crust was ripped away by huge geological faults, or whether it never even developed in the first place.

The primary motivation for the project was to understand how the earth continues to evolve.

"The area that we are looking at is part of a mountain range that spans thousands of square kilometres, but we are beginning to realize that there are probably millions of square kilometres where the ocean floor is missing," Murton said.

The six week mission, led by geophysicist Roger Searle of Durham University and Chris MacLeod of Cardiff University's School of Earth, Ocean and Planetary Sciences, will recover sample cores of rock by drilling into the mantle using a rig lowered on to the sea floor.

Asked if the discovery posed a threat to the environment, Murton replied: "It's not problematic for the earth because it is a natural earth process -- but in terms of knowing how the earth works and how the world is put together it is important."

Murton also said the expedition would shed light on the composition of sea water amongst other initiatives.

Crust formation is a fundamental mechanism of the earth which affects the chemistry of the world's oceans.
Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited.

Progress by the research team can be monitored via a live web link to the ship at: http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/gg/classroom@sea/JC007/. ^^^^^^^^^ .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
~~~~~~~
"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own -- and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans. "

General David M. Shoup
Commandant of the Marine Corps 1960-63
Winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor
Source: May 14, 1966

~~~

"Landholders ought to have a share in the government to support these invaluable interests and check the other many. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority."

James Madison
(1751-1836)
Father of the Constitution for the USA
4th US President
Source:
Max Farrand, ed.,
The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787
3rd ed., vol. I., p. 422

~~~

"Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers."

Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963)
Author
Source:
Forward to 'Brave New World', 1932

~~~

"Chief among the spoils of victory is the privilege of writing the history."

Mark Alexander
Editor/Publisher of Patriot Post
Source:
Patriot Post, No. 06-07
Published 17 February 2006

~~~~~
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
:: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Iraqi Death Squads and Why the Middle East is More Dangerous Now Than in Past 30 Years

An interview with Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk is a veteran war correspondent and one of the world's most experienced journalists covering the Middle East. He has reported from across the Arab world for the past thirty years..

Broadcast - 03/05/07 - Democracy Now!- Audio Runtime 8 Minutes

CLICK PLAY TO LISTEN (Go on-site to access any of these options by clicking on the followoing URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17235.htm

Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3
Watch 128k stream Watch 256k stream

:: :: ::
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
~~~~~~~
"If once [the people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions."

Thomas Jefferson
to
Edward Carrington, 1787

~~~


"...There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing."

Daniel Webster
June 1, 1837

~~~


"Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

Frederick Douglass

~~~~~
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
When a Leader Missteps, a World Can Go Astray

By
MICHIKO KAKUTANI

03/06/07 "New York Times" -- - In the months before the American invasion of Iraq, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, was one of the few members of the foreign policy establishment (along with Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to President George H. W. Bush) to speak out strongly about the dangers of going to war unilaterally against Saddam Hussein, and to warn, presciently it turns out, of the possibly dire consequences of doing so without a larger strategic plan.
In August 2002, as the current Bush administration was already hurrying toward an invasion, Mr. Brzezinski cautioned that war “is too serious a business and too unpredictable in its dynamic consequences — especially in a highly flammable region — to be undertaken because of a personal peeve, demagogically articulated fears or vague factual assertions.” In February 2003, just weeks before the invasion, he added that “an America that decides to act essentially on its own regarding Iraq” could “find itself quite alone in having to cope with the costs and burdens of the war’s aftermath, not to mention widespread and rising hostility abroad.”

In his compelling new book, “Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower ,” Mr. Brzezinski not only assesses the short- and long-term fallout of the Iraq war, but also puts that grim situation in perspective with the tumultuous global changes that have taken place in the last two decades. He dispassionately analyzes American foreign policy as conducted by the last three presidents — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush — and he gives the reader a sobering analysis of where these leaders’ cumulative decisions have left the United States as it now searches for an exit strategy from Iraq, faces potentially explosive situations in Iran and North Korea and copes with an increasingly alienated Europe and an increasingly assertive China.

Mr. Brzezinski’s verdict on the current president’s record — “catastrophic,” he calls it — is nothing short of devastating. And his overall assessment of America’s current plight is worrying as well: “Though in some dimensions, such as the military, American power may be greater in 2006 than in 1991, the country’s capacity to mobilize, inspire, point in a shared direction and thus shape global realities has significantly declined. Fifteen years after its coronation as global leader, America is becoming a fearful and lonely democracy in a politically antagonistic world.”

“Second Chance” is, in some respects, a continuation of the author’s earlier books “The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership” (2004) and “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives” (1997), which examined the responsibilities and perils of global leadership facing America as the one superpower in a post-cold-war world. As in those books, Mr. Brzezinski employs a brisk, no-nonsense style here, using his erudition in history and foreign policy to lay out his views succinctly. A confirmed realist (a school of thinking willfully dismissed by the idealists and ideological hawks in the current Bush administration), the author writes with a keen understanding of the ways in which military or political actions in one part of the world can affect developments in another region, as well as a shrewd appreciation of the fallout of a global zeitgeist that is increasingly anti-imperialist, anti-Western and anti-American.

What this book does most strikingly is remind the reader just how drastically things have changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. At that point, Mr. Brzezinski writes, America was “globally admired” and “faced no peer, no rival, no threat, neither on the Western front nor the Eastern front, nor on the Southern fronts of the great cold war that had been waged for several decades on the massive Eurasian chessboard.”

A mere decade and a half later, he argues, the United States is “widely viewed around the world with intense hostility,” its “credibility in tatters,” its military bogged down in the Middle East, “its formerly devoted allies distancing themselves.”

Although Mr. Brzezinski holds the current president, George W. Bush, most responsible for undermining the United States’ “geopolitical position” and for misunderstanding “the historical moment,” he also points to misjudgments and missed opportunities on the part of his two predecessors in office.

Mr. Brzezinski gives the first President Bush high marks for handling “the collapse of the Soviet Union with aplomb” and mounting an international response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait “with impressive diplomatic skill and military resolve,” but says he failed to “translate either triumph into an enduring historic success.”

The senior Mr. Bush, Mr. Brzezinski says, neither used “America’s unique political influence and moral legitimacy” to help transform Russia into a genuine democracy, nor used the victory in the first gulf war strategically to press for an Israeli-Palestinian accord and help transform the Middle East.

In the dozen years that followed, the author goes on, perception of the United States’ role in the Middle East steadily deteriorated, as America “came to be perceived in the region, rightly or wrongly, not only as wearing the British imperialist mantle but as acting increasingly on behalf of Israel, professing peace but engaging in delaying tactics that facilitated the expansion of the settlements.”

In Mr. Brzezinski’s opinion, Bill Clinton deserves credit for setting forth parameters for a Middle East peace settlement at Camp David II, for expanding and consolidating the Atlantic alliance and for helping to stabilize the Balkans. But in the end, he contends that Mr. Clinton’s “casual and politically opportunistic style of decision-making was not conducive to strategic clarity, and his faith in the historical determinism of globalization made such a strategy seem unnecessary.”

By 1995, Mr. Brzezinski goes on, America’s “global status was probably at its peak,” but a “multiplicity of complex” situations that had surfaced in the wake of the cold war’s end had metastasized: “As a result, the global totem-pole atop which Clinton stood tall rested on shaky ground.”

Though the terrorist attacks of 9/11 wrought a moment of “global solidarity with America,” Mr. Brzezinski writes, the Bush administration’s swaggering unilateralism and “neocon Manicheanism” would turn a moment of opportunity into “a self-inflicted and festering wound while precipitating rising global hostility toward America.” Indeed, he argues that the Iraq war “has caused calamitous damage to America’s global standing,” demonstrating that the United States “was able neither to rally the world to its cause nor to decisively prevail by use of arms.”

Further, he says, “the war in Iraq has been a geopolitical disaster,” diverting resources and attention from the terrorist threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan, even as it’s increased “the terrorist threat to the United States” by fomenting resentment toward America and providing “fertile soil for new recruits to terrorism.”

This precarious situation, Mr. Brzezinski says, means that “it will take years of deliberate effort and genuine skill to restore America’s political credibility and legitimacy,” placing enormous importance on the diplomatic and strategic skills of the next president “to fashion a truly post-cold-war globalist foreign policy.”

“Nothing could be worse for America, and eventually the world,” he writes at the end of this unsparing volume, “than if American policy were universally viewed as arrogantly imperial in a postimperial age, mired in a colonial relapse in a postcolonial time, selfishly indifferent in the face of unprecedented global interdependence, and culturally self-righteous in a religiously diverse world. The crisis of American superpower would then become terminal.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

To gain access to links go on site, you may make comments as well. Just click on the following URL:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17245.htm /\/\/\/\/\/\/\
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
:: :: :: :: :: :: ::
The Right to Know
By
James Rothenberg

03/06/07 "ICH" --- - Fooling most of the people all of the time is standard job procedure for Washington’s state managers, who could no more level with the common citizen than would the CEO of a giant corporation level with the temporary help. Compared to the replicating managerial class the citizenry is temporary, lacking the insights and having none of the tools necessary to interpret, let alone affect, public and foreign policy.

Government does not have the right to privacy, yet it enjoys it. The Bill of Rights specifically and diametrically affords the people that right, “extending the ground of public confidence in the Government”, but increasingly the people lack it. The powerful in every age and place entitle themselves to secrecy for some higher good – that there are some things it wouldn’t do for the public to know, that the rabble has to be protected from themselves. This is far from unique to our neoconservative shadow government, although there’s a case for their abusing the privilege.

The population is kept informed just enough to be able to follow their cues. Please your superiors, stand erect when the national anthem is played and salute when that flag goes by. Genuflect to leaders who mouth words like liberty, justice, and democracy. Following the cues will lead one in the desired direction of conformity where ideas are framed in ways that assure American motivations are cast in the most favorable light.

Consider the adjectives used to describe the Cheney team’s handling of Iraq – mistake, folly, misadventure, blunder – terms used equally by critics from the left and right. These terms seem to convey more than they actually do because they overlook the initial motivation for the attack and deal only with its aftermath. The cat burglar does not blunder in pulling off the gem heist, only when tripping up and getting caught.

On the surface, the current situation pits those who are weary of the losing struggle (loss of life, limb, wealth, and reputation with nothing to show for it) against those who feel that hunkering down may still save the day (American pride and honor in not letting it “get worse”).

Superficial talk aside, attempting to describe the Iraq situation without an understanding of the original motivation for our attack is like trying to figure out how far away you are without knowing what you were heading for. The Cheney team cannot state clearly why they want to stay because that would reveal the truth about why they wanted to go.

At stake are Middle East energy resources, the control of which transcends this particular administration and has been fundamental US policy since after the second World War, now an even greater imperative due to peak oil scenario (Recall the vice president’s still-secret energy meetings). The issue is not access to the oil – it is control – and the enemies are not Iraq, Iran, and Syria but China, in the main, and to lesser degrees Russia, India, Japan, possibly even a united Europe.

The Middle East is either going to be linked up to the “West” (meaning the US) or go over to the Asian bloc (meaning China), and the power that goes with this control is enough to make or break a superpower. That’s why we went, that’s why we’re staying, and that’s what cannot be stated in the polite circles of influential opinion.

James Rothenberg, writer/activist - jrothenberg@taconic.net
Go on-site to access links, comments, or to add your own by clicking on the following URL:

URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17248.htm

:: :: :: :: ::
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
*************
War is a Disaster
-
An Oil Shortage is Not
By
Nathan Allonby

03/06/07 "ICH" -- - Stock prices crashed last week in a panic sparked by a combination of factors including the weakness of the US economy and fears about a possible war with Iran (1).

Although war was far from the only factor in the crash, the markets are regarding the prospect of war very negatively and with extreme nervousness. It is clear the markets do not want war - they anticipate a very negative effect upon the economy. They don’t want anyone to rock the boat when it is already half-full of water.

By contrast, record oil prices last year did not prevent stock prices surging to record highs also. The markets saw rising oil prices as much as an opportunity as a problem. Sure, rising oil prices could cause an adjustment, but not a crash.

There has been a lot of speculation about the effects of “peak oil” - the idea that oil production is about to peak, or has already done so, and that from now on oil production will fall continuously, leading to rising energy prices. Many commentators have worried whether this would make our current lifestyles unsustainable, with dramatic social and economic readjustments. This belief is based upon the myth that energy consumption directly supports economic activity and that a fall in energy consumption must lead to a fall in economic activity. In fact, that is not strictly true because there are several intervening factors between energy consumption and output, not least of which being efficiency. Yes, there is a simple relationship between the level of economic activity and the level of oil consumption (for a fixed price, with more money, you can buy more oil) but not the other way around.

There are precedents to show us what may really happen as a result of “peak oil”. Britain hit “peak coal” in 1913. As a result, between 1907 and 1937, Britain’s energy consumption was held almost static. Despite this, Britain’s economic output doubled. Quoting E.F. Schumacher, Chief Economist of Britain‘s National Coal Board in the 1950s and 60s and author of “Small is Beautiful”: -

“had there been no replacement of coal by oil, total internal coal consumption in 1937 might have been 3% higher than it was and thus 3% higher than in 1907. No, it was not oil and it was not any other source of fuel that made it possible to double total output without increasing coal consumption; it was the increase in the efficiency of coal consumption, an improvement largely enforced by the fact that coal was becoming steadily and remorselessly dearer. I think we should remember this when we come to consider the future.” (2)

Just think about this - the markets dealt with a situation similar to peak oil and made a successful adjustment.

A contraction in oil and energy supplies might merely mean a change in technology, not an economic disaster. There are those who believe that this new technology may spark an economic boom. Barclays investment bank recently calculated that new technology to reduce fuel consumption, in response to global warming, would produce an economic bonus of $10 trillion through development of new technology (3).

We have been at this moment in history before. In the mid-1980’s the US had developed a whole raft of new energy technologies in response to soaring oil prices. USA had developed the best wind turbines in the world, following an extended research programme by NASA and the US Department of Agriculture. General Electric and Boeing had each created wind turbines 25 years ahead of their time - larger than anything made until the last 2 years. Westinghouse made a wind turbine that was extremely rugged and cost-efficient. The US had developed a new technology of “passive solar heating” - heating homes purely by means of the sunlight entering the windows, without extra energy input. A government programme at Los Alamos over a dozen years had perfected the technology.

In the early 80s, USA led the way in new energy technologies. What went wrong?

What happened was the Iran-Iraq war. Contrived by George Bush Snr and Donald Rumsfeld, this war help artificially drive down world oil prices as the two oil states desperately pushed up exports to pay for arms. As the price of oil dropped, corporate America dropped the new technologies like a stone.

Today, faced with the same energy crisis returned, and more serious for the delay, the US is now preparing for another oil war. Having repeatedly intervened in the Middle East over 50 years(4), the US now envisages a broader geo-political struggle redrawing the boundaries of the entire Middle East and central Asia (5).

When we wanted to save jobs, didn’t our governments tell us it was futile to resist the power of the markets? Why is it that the US governments want to resist the markets when the markets tell us to reduce our fuel consumption?

When new technology brought job losses, we were told we had to embrace change or die. However, faced with declining oil production, instead of embracing change and leading the way forward with new technology, it seems US government and corporate industry would rather choose death - or at least, murder. They see the fight for oil as a life or death struggle.

Ultimately, this is a struggle they cannot win. A new factor has entered the equation - global warming.

Supposing the US is successful in obtaining access to ever greater oil resources, and succeeded in obtaining a few more years of artificially cheap oil, what would be the consequences? Global warming could cause massive reduction in agricultural output and soaring food prices. For at least 20% of the world’s population, this would bring food shortages and famine. The would be massive population displacement and war. However, it seems the Bush administration is happier to risk mass starvation rather than reduce oil consumption. Perhaps they calculate a profit in starvation and conflict. Apparently, human suffering is no object. The Iran-Iraq war cost over a million lives. The new oil wars will cost considerably more. And USA will feel this at home.

Why does the US believe that energy conservation is so unacceptable?

The only visible reason for the US oil obsession is the military-industrial-political complex. The US military is the world’s 4th largest consumer of oil - consuming more than many countries (6). The US needs to maintain a strong domestic oil industry to service its military. The history of the oil industry in Iran is that it was originally developed for military reasons - to fuel the British Royal Navy. We seem to be caught in a vicious cycle where the US need the military to secure oil supplies and they need secure oil to maintain the military.

It does not help that US politicians, e.g. Bush and Cheney, have private oil fortunes and are incestuous with the Saudis. It does not help that the Saudis are effectively paid for oil in arms, and hence that a $ multi-billion US arms industry is dependent upon a thriving oil trade. It does not help that Bush and Rumsfeld have extensive investments in the arms industry and have personally profited from the wars they started.

In the West today, we can see a polarisation of competing paradigms. Those nations allied closely with the Bush and the War on Terror tend to be those with higher levels of inequality, poverty and crime with an aggressive social model and a detached political elite - e.g. Britain and Italy - whereas those nations less supportive of the US and its wars tend to be those with greater equality, lower levels of poverty, greater social cohesion, open societies and a transparent political process - e.g. Scandinavia. One seeks to defend the status quo, at any cost, the other is prepared to embrace change.

Consider Denmark. Two weeks ago, my wife went to Copenhagen to play at a folk music festival. While she was there, she saw a demonstration outside the Danish parliament, protesting about the presence of Danish troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (Denmark has subsequently decided to pull out of Iraq and may well withdraw from Afghanistan also). The parliament building was completely open, with no police visible at all. I will repeat that - not a single policeman. The protestors could approach and speak to the MPs as they entered and left the building. They are safe without elaborate security.

Contrast this with Britain, where Parliament is surrounded by concrete anti-vehicle barriers three rows deep, police with machine guns, X-ray scanners and security devices. Ministers are whisked away from the public in armour-plated cars. Demonstrations within a mile of Parliament have been banned under the Serious and Organised Crime Act.

Denmark is not scared of terrorism. It is at peace with its own people. It has a cohesive society. The Health service is excellent and free. Education is free, and a highly educated population contributes to success in high-tech industries. Poverty is at very low levels. Crime is super-low. There is no fear. In a society where there is so little poverty, excessive wealth is unnecessary and considered vulgar and socially corrosive. People are judged more by their personal qualities than their financial wealth. The social ideal is to be “lukkelig and hyggelig” - literally, “happy and cosy“ - cohesive, not dog-eat-dog. It would be impossible to imagine a self-serving, ignorant, oil millionaire, lacking empathy or compassion, being elected in Denmark.

Denmark is ready for a fuel shortage - it has developed new energy technology and is exporting it to the rest of the world. Denmark picked up the new energy technologies that USA dropped. Denmark has the world’s two largest manufacturers of wind turbines and the largest manufacturer of building insulation - Rockwool. Isn’t it funny how a small nation can have more vision than the world’s most powerful nation. Perhaps that is because they have less investment in maintaining the status quo.

Britain is becoming the opposite of Denmark in every respect, The British government worships wealth. Britain has become a tax haven for the rich of every nation - because foreigners don’t pay tax in Britain. But Britain has 5 times more child poverty than Denmark. Following in tow is gun crime and a record prison population. The British universities have recently changed from being free to being fee-paying and the free National Health System is under stress and is gradually being privatised.

Britain has just announced a new energy policy, of more nuclear power - by incredible coincidence at the same time as also announcing an intention to renew its nuclear weapons system.

We can either choose policies based on relatively painless adaptation and change or we can choose policies based on war and death. The right way forward is obvious. It was obvious 20 years ago. Unfortunately, the people who made the wrong choice then are still in power today, and they intend to make the wrong choice again - only this time, on a bigger scale.

The author is a British engineer currently involved in overseas development.

References

1) http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2022794,00.html

Wall St suffers biggest fall since 9/11

Larry Elliott, economics editor
Wednesday February 28, 2007
The Guardian

2) Geoffrey Kirk (Editor)

“Schumacher on Energy - Speeches and Writings of E.F. Schumacher”

Jonathan Cape, 1982

3) Climate challenge will heat up the global economy, Barclays predicts

by Jane Padgham

Published: 08 February 2007

“The Independent”

Climate change will boost the global economy and dominate financial markets over the next 25 years, a leading investment bank has predicted. In a new report, Barclays Capital challenges the conventional wisdom that global war...

4) http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6308.htm

U.S. Intervention in the Middle East

Information Clearing House

5) http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14810.htm

US Army Contemplates Redrawing Middle East Map to Stave-off Looming Global Meltdown

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

09/02/06

Dissidentvoice

(6) http://www.energybulletin.net/26194.html

US military oil pains

by Sohbet Karbuz

Published on 17 Feb 2007

Energy Bulletin.

Go on-site to view this article and to gain access to any links, comments, or to add your own, just click on the following:

URL:http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17246.htm

***********
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
~~~~~~~~~~~Evidence Mounting for Armchair Revolution:

Ambivalent Couch Potatoes Mobilizing

By
J.D. Suss

03/06/07 "ICH' -- -- Human activity causes global warming and climate change. Yet even otherwise reasonable and intelligent citizens disbelieve it. Why? To err is to be liberal, and, if footnotes are lacking, unscientific. Better to err as conservator (of what? the status quo?) of that set out below?
Agribusiness and factory farms put dangerous chemicals into the food chain. Synthetic fertilizers, antibiotics, growth hormones, pesticides, fumigants, and such – all go into our bodies. After all is said and done, you are what you eat, aren’t you? Forcing ruminants to eat corn instead of grass, and heavily investing in the monocrops of corn and soy is said to be at the root of alarming agro-problems. Hey, haven't you heard? Our modern, unnatural farm techniques are causing untold animal suffering and spoiling our environment. Haven't you heard?

Food technology and food processors work hand-in-glove with agribusiness and factory farms. It is not enough that our food is already adulterated because of how it is grown or raised. Laboratories genetically modify it. Manufacturers further degrade it via various processes that modify it in a multitude of other synthetic ways. With high fructose corn syrup in practically everything now (since its invention in 1980), child obesity and type-two diabetes have grown to epidemic proportions. And oh, say, can you see? Industrial food chain supermarket displays of sugary or artificially sweetened soft drinks – sugary breakfast cereals piled high. Hey, what about that?! We better get the FDA on the case! Hah!

There’s no health insurance for most Americans, and therefore no proper health care unless you have money to pay for it. That’s too bad. If people could pay for the drugs that pharmaceutical companies now push on us via TV commercials, those companies could make even bigger profits from the collective misery of a nation whose health has already been compromised by agribusiness, factory farms, and avaricious food processors. Where has all the real food gone?

Uncontrolled industrial predation of the seas has significantly depleted it of fish. Sorry Charlie!

Even drinking water is for sale now, but – what leaches out of that plastic in which most water is packaged? Could there be toxins in our water from these plastic bottles? What, no real water anymore either? Not angry yet?

The HUD slush fund: Billions for unauthorized “executive programs” providing profits for the financial services industry. New meaning to trickle-down.

There’s no accountability at the FBI, which is worried more about “saving face” than catching terrorists and protecting national security. The 9/11 Commission wolves guard the intelligence henhouse, like chickens coming home to roost. So says some new open source intelligence recently gathered. Hey, is that investigative journalism?

The World Bank, IMF, WTO, USAID – much too obvious hegemonic tools of US Empire. You have noticed them, haven’t you?

The Federal Reserve is a tool of private banking that, together with the IRS, hold the nation hostage – in bondage to bankers. Did you ever ask to use the restroom while in a bank?

Mega-Corporations now rule – huge corporate chains have replaced countless small independent business owners; government has “outsourced” its traditional governmental functions to mega-corporations – even many logistical aspects of its war-making function.

Five giant corporate entities own most of media now and there is essentially no free press interested in doing investigative journalism anymore – but if it does, it’s smeared as that “leftist” or “liberal” press. The truth of current events can often be found on the web. But even when we know the (questionably vetted) truth, does that really change anything, I mean, in the long run?

Predatory oil companies routinely broadcast their “environmentally conscious and caring” commercials, while posting historic profits in the billions of dollars. Idiot consumers supportively populate the roads with their hideous SUVs, still sporting “W” stickers, adding to road rage (don’t you think?)

A neo-con regime, twice dubiously “elected,” has succeeded in destroying whatever goodwill the USA had left. It knows only an unthinking muscular unilateralism; lie after lie to the citizenry and still – no one cares. Everything’s for sale in the US. The Congress? Sell-outs. The judiciary? Judges are lawyers in robes, silly!

The “War on Drugs” is a gigantic cover for more corruption. More?

The “War on Terror,” with its billions budgeted for an unaccountable Pentagon, with its extraordinary rendition, CIA torturers, heavy metal troops enforcing petro-dollar policy –

The NSA is spying on citizens and the Congress tries so awfully hard to show its concern!

Challenge and/or reject religion and you are an atheist – as if no love of God or real spirituality can exist outside the orbit of traditional myth religions.

The Democrats, with Hillary Clinton leading the charge, have to be such staunch believers in that old time religion…and – have you noticed? – are so damned tough when it comes to national defense! Oh you better believe it, Buster! Honesty has become “quaint,” don’t you think?

We interrupt this program for a news break! The TV is now watching you! So come on, pick up that remote. Don’t let the revolution start without you. Remember – the revolt of a thousand bytes begins with that first, assertive click!

The author is a American metapolitical citizen-lawyer and recent Ph.D. in Humanities, who hopes one day to turn his doctoral dissertation, The Odyssey of the Western Legal Tradition: Integral Jurisprudence – Toward the Self-Transcendence of Deficient-Mental Legal Culture, into a book.
© 2007 by Jonathan D. Suss
Go on-site to gain access to links and comments by clicking on the following URL:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17247.htm~~~~~~~~~
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
:: :: :: :: :: :: ::
How decay overtook Walter Reed
The problems at the US Army hospital show how strained military resources have become.
By
Gordon Lubold
Staff writer of
The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON
Lawmakers probing the scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center are saying it wasn't just a failure of leadership.

Constrained resources during a war lasting longer and costing more than anyone in the administration had expected, along with a controversial privatization initiative at the hospital, also played a role. But beyond these circumstances, one key factor has come up during congressional testimony this week: The facility was due to be shuttered in coming years, raising the possibility that officials were reluctant to make large financial commitments to it.

This combination of challenges illustrates just how strained military resources have become as the US grapples with its longest conflict since the Vietnam War. And as the current center of attention, Walter Reed has emerged as a symbol of the difficult decisions confronting the Pentagon. A core question: How can the Defense Department maintain facilities that are to be closed, including its premier Army hospital, without essentially throwing money away?

"You've got to pay the money, and the reason is simple: Up until the moment you cease operations, and you pull down the flag, it's a US military installation, and it has vital services it has to provide," says Christopher Hellman, a former congressional staffer who has followed the base-closure process closely. (Walter Reed is part of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process.) "The reality is you don't have the luxury of canceling contracts and delaying maintenance work at what is still an operational facility," says Mr. Hellman, now a military policy analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington.

Still, some experts don't necessarily see that the Army made a conscious decision to stop paying maintenance bills on the facilities at Walter Reed just because it was closing.

"Buildings don't fall apart in the year and a half since the base closure commission issued its recommendations," says Jeremiah Gertler, a senior analyst on the 1995 base closure commission.

Merging operations
Under a decision made by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Walter Reed was to be shuttered completely. Its medical and other operations were to merge with other military installations in the area. Much of the operation was to be folded into the existing National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and the result was to become a new-and-improved facility called the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

"The commission acknowledged Walter Reed Army Medical Center's rich heritage and earned reputation as a world-class medical center," the commission recommended. "However, the commission found that service members deserve a state-of-the-art 21st century medical center and that [Mr. Rumsfeld]'s proposal would increase military value."

The plan has a one-time cost of $989 million, but would save $145 million each year.

Funding for the overall BRAC initiative had been threatened considerably this year to the tune of $3.1 billion under the Joint Resolution for fiscal 2007, according to defense officials. A lower funding level would "jeopardize our ability to complete BRAC actions ... and stymie our efforts to construct facilities and move equipment and people to receiver locations," according to an internal Pentagon memo dated Feb. 15.

The Joint Resolution that cut the funding for BRAC initiatives was passed by Congress and signed by Bush on Feb. 15, but defense analysts like Hellman believe Congress will still fund BRAC at some point in the future under regular appropriations.

However, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, a former commander at the hospital who is now the Army's surgeon general, testified Monday before members of an Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee to say that he had all the resources he needed.

Rep. Christopher Shays (R) of Connecticut became angry when General Kiley maintained that the Army had all the money it needed for the facility.

Failure to air dirty laundry publicly – or maintain you have enough funding when you don't, is disingenuous, Representative Shays said. "Frankly, that's almost – it's being dishonest," he said. "It's being dishonest to yourself, and it's being dishonest to us. And I will look forward to the day when someone who's in uniform comes to us and says, under oath, 'I'm not given the resources I need to do my job.' "

One comptroller's experience
But finding the money necessary to keep a crucial facility up and running should not have been a problem even if it were to be closed, says a former Pentagon official who held the purse strings.

When he was the chief comptroller of the Pentagon up until 2004, Dov Zakheim remembers visiting Walter Reed, but, he says, he was always "escorted," and therefore never had an opportunity to see the conditions in which Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were living.

But money would have been made available to fix the problems at Walter Reed, despite the fact that the facility is slated to close. "Had this situation been brought to my attention, we could have moved money. No one on the Hill would have opposed a reprogramming to improve facilities for those who were injured, wounded and/or disabled," he says.

The hospital had also begun to privatize a portion of its workforce in a controversial move that local lawmakers had decried. More than 350 support jobs at the hospital are to be outsourced.
...............
[B].Just a minute here, just a few questions about all of this! Were the upper brass's hospital wings in disrepair? Was their treatment substandard, professionally as well as personally? Were the wings reserved for them anything like what GI's were expected to put up with? When this is answered, and it's shown that the upper brass were having the same problems with rooms, staff and treatment, medically and personally, then we might have some different feelings. Different from those we're now harboring. SRH

Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links

Copyright © 2007 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved. from the March 07, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0307/p01s01-usmi.html
:: :: :: .

[Saundra Hummer]

.
.///\\\///\\\///\\\
Cheney under political cloud after Libby trial

By
John Whitesides
Political Correspondent
56 minutes ago

The White House offered support on Wednesday for Vice President Dick Cheney, a powerful proponent of the Iraq war, after the conviction of his top aide dealt a fresh blow to Cheney's political reputation and raised new questions about his influence.

The trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby showed Cheney, often portrayed by critics as the shadowy Darth Vader behind the war in Iraq, was deeply involved in an effort to discredit a critic of the administration's prewar intelligence.

Libby's conviction on perjury and obstruction of justice charges placed Cheney squarely in the center of a new political storm. Democrats said Libby was "the fall guy" for his boss, who was not charged in the case and not called to testify.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said Cheney would remain an influential and trusted adviser to President George W. Bush.

"To the idea that somewhere the vice president has been 'diminished' ... No, not true," Snow told reporters. "The vice president still remains a trusted aide. The vice president is somebody upon whose counsel the president depends."

The administration offered concrete evidence of Cheney's continued role in the last week. As the jury deliberated Libby's case, Cheney completed a trip around the world to make the administration's diplomatic case against Iran's nuclear ambitions and for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On his return, he was greeted as a hero in a speech to a conference of conservative activists who constitute the administration's core group of supporters.

"Publicly he may be scarred, he's a damaged commodity, but the question is whether he still has clout in the administration and the answer has to be yes," said Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution.

CONSTITUENCY OF ONE
"He really has a constituency of one -- President Bush," Hess said. "We really don't know what that relationship is, but there is no evidence that it has been impaired. The president still seems to listen to him."

Cheney's lack of political ambition -- he said from the beginning that he would not seek the presidency after his term as vice president ended -- has helped inoculate him from purely political evaluations.

With neither Bush nor Cheney destined to appear on a political ballot again, the vice president's mounting political liabilities are less crucial, Hess said. Any speculation Bush might replace Cheney is "silly talk," he said.

Snow said no one else could judge the relationship between the president and Cheney, who has been one of the most powerful and influential vice presidents in history.

"What he says is offered in confidence and received in confidence. Anybody who wants readouts on how they interact, they're in the wrong place because neither of them is going to talk about it," Snow said.

Cheney said he was "disappointed" by the conviction of Libby in the probe of the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, publicly challenged the administration's intelligence claims about Iraq.

Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has said there will be no more charges and the investigation is inactive.

With two more years remaining in the administration, Cheney is likely to continue playing his role as fund raiser and voice for the administration before selected audiences.

"He'll continue to give red meat to the true believers, and maybe in larger doses than ever. So he gets beat up by The New York Times -- you get a badge of honor for that in some circles," Hess said.

Go on-site for any links and photo's by clicking on the following URL:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070307/ts_nm/usa_cheney_dc;_ylt=AkZzvDtJlhdW0eoxQCjbLHGs0NUE ///\\\///\\\///\\\///\\\
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::
Vermont towns seek to impeach Bush
Wed Mar 7, 2007 7:18AM EST
By Jason Szep
.............
BOSTON (Reuters) - More than 30 Vermont towns passed resolutions on Tuesday seeking to impeach President Bush, while at least 16 towns in the tiny New England state called on Washington to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.

Known for picturesque autumn foliage, colonial inns, maple sugar and old-fashion dairy farms, Vermont is in the vanguard of a grass-roots protest movement to impeach Bush over his handling of the unpopular Iraq war.

"We're putting impeachment on the table," said James Leas, a Vermont lawyer who helped to draft the resolutions and is tracking the votes. "The people in all these towns are voting to get this process started and bring the troops home now."

The resolutions passed on Vermont's annual town meeting day -- a colonial era tradition where citizens debate issues of the day big and small -- are symbolic and cannot force Congress to impeach Bush, but they "may help instigate further discussions in the legislature," said state Rep. David Zuckerman.

"The president must be held accountable," said Zuckerman, a politician from Burlington, Vermont's largest city.

After casting votes on budgets and other routine items, citizens of 32 towns in Vermont backed a measure calling on the U.S. Congress to file articles of impeachment against Bush for misleading the nation on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and for engaging in illegal wiretapping, among other charges.

Five Vermont towns passed similar resolutions last year.

The idea of impeaching Bush resides firmly outside the political mainstream.

The new Democratic-controlled Congress has steered clear of the subject, and Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold's call last year to censure Bush -- a step short of an impeachment -- found scant support on Capitol Hill, even among fellow Democrats.

Vermont's congressional delegation has shown no serious interest in the idea.

'SOLDIERS HOME NOW'

Sixteen Vermont towns passed a separate "soldiers home now" resolution calling on the White House, the U.S. Congress and Vermont's elected officials to withdraw troops from Iraq.

"The best way to support them is to bring each and every one of them home now and take good care of them when they get home," the resolution said.

It was unclear how many towns had put the resolutions to a vote, and the results of all the town meetings in the state of about 609,000 people may not be known for days.

Residents of Burlington were voting on a separate question calling for a new investigation into the September 11 attacks.

Voters were asked to circle "yes" or "no" to the question: "Shall Vermont's Congressional Delegation be advised to demand a new, thorough, and truly independent forensic investigation that fully addresses the many questions surrounding the tragic events of September 11, 2001?"

Doug Dunbebin, who gathered signatures to get the issue on the ballot, said questions linger about September 11, when hijacked plane attacks killed nearly 3,000 people at New York's World Trade Center, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.

A group known as Scholars for 9/11 Truth believes the events of that day were part of a conspiracy engineered by the U.S. government and that it took more than two planes to bring down the Twin Towers in New York.

Vermont's new U.S. representative, Peter Welch, a Democrat, said there was no need for a further investigation.
(Additional reporting by Julie Masis)
© Reuters 2006. All rights reserved.
Go on-site for photo's as well as links, by clicking on the following URL:

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0644242420070307 .I believe wasting time on conspiricy theories is just that, a waste of time. What does need to be centered on is the administrations willingness to ignore the warnings given to them in documents and verbal warnings by the Clinton Administration as they left office. It was disgraceful. Consequently we've suffered greatly because of their attitude and their "other priorities". SRH :: :: :: :: :: :: ::
.

[Saundra Hummer]

.
***A MUST READ***
Seven Countries In Five Years

An interview with General W