Committing Treason And The Benghazi Murder Cover-Up

Take off your partisan hat and open your minds to the actual uninterrupted high treason that is part of the foreign policy establishment. Party politics is often just a show that plays to their respective bases. However, the tract and direction of extending the transnational empire just continues on a global scale. The full-blown treason committed by every administration that practices the internationalist vision of democracy domination is really a masquerade for worldwide dominion. Presidents are mere temporary talking heads for the oligarchy that actually rules. Murdering their own diplomats and hired help is incidental, when 1,455,590 Iraqi deaths since the U.S. invasion are ignored and dismissed.

Just how well is the consistent and bipartisan aggressive interventionist foreign policy doing? Go over the list of The Arab Spring country by country.

The Wall Street Journal provides a timeline on U.S. Government Reaction to the Benghazi Attack. “For days after the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya, intelligence officials and the Obama administration said it was likely the outgrowth of protests sparked by an anti-Islamic video made in the U.S. Follow some of the administration statements on the Libya attack.”The infamous propaganda voice for the Obamaistas, Media Matters puts forth their partisan spin in, What Dick Cheney’s Benghazi Criticism Misses.

“David Martosko of the Daily Mail Online provided former Vice President Dick Cheney a platform to criticize the Obama administration’s failure to anticipate the September 11, 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, without noting that seven attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities occurred during the Bush administration.”

Such diversion seeks to limit focus on the literal events that caused the Benghazi attack and the real reasons why Ambassador Christopher Stevens was left to perish by the Obama/Clinton foreign policy team of betrayers.

 

The shameful chronicle of the intentional and politically motivated stand down that doomed Stevens and his defenders was sensitively told during Gregory Hicks’ 30 Minute Recount of Benghazi Attack. While the Congressional hearings were praised for the attempt to restrain partisan grandstanding, the Washington press corps avoids placing blame on the administration as a tenant of their loyalty test. A government cover-up is made easy when the imperium friendly media is reporting on a proclaimed progressive administration.

The facts necessitate that even the venerable CBS mainstream media machine reluctantly admits that the Thousands of Libyan missiles from Qaddafi era missing in action, are a central concern with the overthrow of the Libyan regime.

“In the case of Libya’s missing MANPADS, there was also concern they would get into the Syrian conflict. “Once they start getting sold on the black market, we can’t control them,” says one source.

The source added he’s unaware of any U.S. attempt to send recovered Libyan MANPADS to arm Syrian rebels seeking to depose President Bashar al-Assad.”

According to the Business Insider, the veracity of this CBS source is questionable. Connect the dots and go back to the reason why a cover-up of the Benghazi murders becomes crucial to the long-term goals to destabilize the Middle East. The US Is Openly Sending Heavy Weapons From Libya To Syrian Rebels cites the following:

“The Obama administration has decided to launch a covert operation to send heavy weapons to Syrian rebels, Christina Lamb of The Sunday Times of London reports.Diplomatic sources told the Sunday Times that the U.S. “bought weapons from the stockpiles of Libya’s former dictator Muammar Gaddafi.”

The heavy arms include mortars, rocket propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles and the controversial anti-aircraft heat-seeking SA-7 missiles, which are integral to countering Bashar Al-Assad’s bombing campaign.”

Now compute the decades old design for the territory as stated by Wes Clark and the neocon dream. Glenn Greenwald provides further documentation in Salon that the various Middle Eastern and North African wars were planned before 9/11:

“General Wesley Clark … said the aim of this plot [to "destroy the governments in ... Iraq, ... Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran"] was this: “They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.” He then recounted a conversation he had had ten years earlier with Paul Wolfowitz — back in 1991 — in which the then-number-3-Pentagon-official, after criticizing Bush 41 for not toppling Saddam, told Clark: “But one thing we did learn [from the Persian Gulf War] is that we can use our military in the region – in the Middle East – and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes – Syria, Iran [sic], Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.” Clark said he was shocked by Wolfowitz’s desires because, as Clark put it: “the purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments? It’s not to deter conflicts?”

The diabolic union between Neoconservatives and Neoliberals produces a litter of demonic adventures that build up the body count and push the region into a globalist cesspit of satanic dimensions. In order to comprehend the interconnection of conflicts it is important to understand the deceptive war on terror and the assembled alliance with the Al Qaeda bogyman.

The message in the essay, It’s Dishonest to Talk about Benghazi Without Talking About the Syrian War, is a reality that many cowardly Americans are unwilling to deal with, much less act upon.

“Both parties are avoiding the bigger picture … The fact that Democrats and Republicans alike have been using Benghazi as the center of U.S. efforts to arm the Al Qaeda-affiliated Syrian rebels.

Specifically, the U.S. supported opposition which overthrew Libya’s Gadaffi was largely comprised of Al Qaeda terrorists.According to a 2007 report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center’s center, the Libyan city of Benghazi was one of Al Qaeda’s main headquarters – and bases for sending Al Qaeda fighters into Iraq – prior to the overthrow of Gaddafi:”

What possible justification is there to intervene in Syria? The presupposed civil war is really a designed coup d’état overthrow that only benefits a greater Israel regional expansion. Note how the policy wonks work in their nefarious planning for destabilization. The flagship establishment mouthpiece Foreign Policy has the mission to signal the intentions of government stratagem as the master plans are implemented, in the article How to destabilize the Assad regime.

“In order to re-up its strategy, the administration should employ a cross-governmental approach that enlists the Treasury, Commerce, and Defense Departments. The Treasury Department should use sanctions to limit Assad’s ability to repatriate funds from oil exports and more properly enforce the 2012 GRAHVITY sanctions prohibiting the transfer of internet, communications, or surveillance technology to Syria. The Treasury Department should also prohibit U.S. companies from doing business with Assad’s enablers by designating those entities that continue to supply him with resources. Congress could bolster the latter measure by requiring federal contractors to certify that they are not in business with Assad’s enablers. Congress should also prohibit foreign financial institutions enabling Assad from doing business with U.S. banks. Meanwhile the Commerce Department should secure tighter control over the delivery of information and communications technology to Syria especially through authorized foreign distributors. Finally, as mandated by an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013, the Pentagon should cease its business with Rosoboronexport, one of Assad’s chief enablers, instead of entering into new contracts as it has expressed the intention to do.”

What do you call the treachery, when your own government is committing the subversiveness?

 

The cryptic psychopolitical spook Dr. Steve Pieczenik presents an astounding analysis that answers this question in the You Tube, Benghazi Truth: Obama Was Running Secret Army. His call to action is a rare and daring challenge to the military that is worth a sober assessment if for no other reason than observing the anxious and flabbergasted reaction from Alex Jones. The treason committed, depends upon the nationalist loyalties of the government agents. In this case, the evidence seems well placed that the security apparatus is serving the wrong master.The substance of the Benghazi duplicity and scandalous evasion of accountability is an entrenched practice that permeates every level of command and control. The courage of Gregory Hicks, Mark Thompson and Eric Nordstrom is an act of legitimate patriotism seldom seen out of Foggy Bottom.

If professional State Department public servants can speak truth to power, where are the guts of the General Military Officers? If the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a brood of poodle puppies and lap dogs, God Save the Republic. Dr. Pieczenik is In Search of James Mattoon Scott. Most subservient subjects are oblivious to the Seven Days in May scenario. Perpetuating the myth, that civilian command preserves the constitutional liberties of citizens, does not conform to the record of presidential dictatorship. When state treason is codified normality, the mere murder of four more Americans is hardly an afterthought to the executioners of the country. Respecting commander in chief traitors is an absurd national death wish.

We Sweep So Much Under The Rug In America

On the front of the March 11, 2013 cover of Time Magazine, legless athlete Oscar Pistorius stands like a physical specimen held up by his prosthetic legs. The title reads, “Man, superman, gunman: Oscar Pistorius and South Africa’s culture of violence,” by Alex Perry.

“Don’t keep sweeping your troubles under the rug for someday you’ll trip over it.”  Taylor Wapaha

While reading the article, I felt overwhelmed by the statistics: South Africa # 6 in the world for gun killings, 88 percent rise in home robberies in the past five years and total racial separation. Black poverty skyrocketed after the end of apartheid.  Two surveys found: “…28 percent of men admitted to being rapists and 46 percent of victims were less than 16 years of age, 23 percent under 11 and 9 percent under six years old.  Out of 3.5 million residents of Cape Town, 2.1 million live in shacks without toilets or running water.”

“In the townships, vigilante beatings and killings are the norm,” wrote Time writer Alex Perry. “South Africa’s private security industry employs 411,000 people, more than double the number of police officers.  South Africa knows crime as a vast stretch of lawlessness covering an area twice the size of Texas.  As much as $50 billion annually is lost to graft and crime.”

Much of Africa comprises dictators and unimaginable human brutality toward women.  When you include the Muslim world’s honor killings of 5,000 women killed by fathers, brothers and husbands annually, you get a sick feeling in your stomach. While the world “rapes” Africa for its natural resources, its human residents suffer indescribable misery from Cape Town to Cairo.  Note Egypt’s internal revolution, Syria killing of over 70,000 and Libya’s ongoing war, Somalia’s starving people, Sudan, etc.

What about human nature in America?

In my Denver Post, another equally disturbing article appeared by Lisa Wirthman: “I felt like I was dying inside.”  (February 24, 2013) The rape victim said, “I was paralyzed by flashbacks, nightmares and anxiety attacks.”

Domestic violence in America:

•          One in four U.S. adult women is a victim of domestic violence in her lifetime.  A woman in America suffers a violent attack every 15 seconds 24/7. Four million abuse cases annually.
•          Three women are killed by a current or former intimate partner each day in America.

(Source: Centers for Disease Control)

In America in the 21^st century in a highly educated society: rape and brutality continue without pause.

In the meantime, our country brutalized and killed countless people in Iraq in a war started by George W. Bush via the fabrication of “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” David Brown, Washington Post staff writer said, “A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.”

When it comes to mechanized violence, our U.S. Military killed over 2.1 million men, women and children in Vietnam.  The total deaths from the 11 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan may total over one million human beings.  How can our U.S. Congress act with such arrogance and self-righteousness to continue those wars for so long with so much cost and so much death? Yet, we sweep it under the rug and out of our minds.

War on Mother Nature succeeding

While we spend so much money on the “War on Terror”; “War on Poverty”; “War on Drugs” and other such “wars”, we fail dramatically.  Ten years of war in Iraq did absolutely nothing whatsoever to protect the United States of America. Instead, it ravaged a sovereign society and flooded our country with tens of thousands of Muslim refugees. Same with Afghanistan!

Notwithstanding, our “War on Mother Nature” proceeds with blinding speed. We humans, in the blink of 50 years and the invention of plastic, managed to create the 100 million ton Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the size of Texas, floating 1,000 miles off San Francisco. It kills millions of marine and avian life annually.  We have done nothing to stop adding to it.  No deposit-return laws worldwide—no nothing.

“The world’s navies and commercial shipping fleets make a significant contribution, throwing some 639,000 plastic containers overboard every day, along with their other litter,” said ocean reporter Richard Grant. “But after a few more years of sampling ocean water in the gyre and near the mouths of Los Angeles streams, Moore concluded that 80 per cent of marine plastic was discarded on land. There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer of the world’s oceans, killing a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year.”

In an Associated Press article by Verena Dobnic, “River of trash”, (March 3, 2013) she reports, “Just across the East river from midtown Manhattan’s shimmering skyscrapers sits one of the nation’s most polluted neighborhoods, fouled by generations of industrial waste, overflow from the city’s sewage system and an underground oil leak bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill. Oily, rainbow-slick water is filled with soda cans, plastic bottles, raw sewage and decaying food.  Ditched vehicles are stuck in the mud. What was once a watershed is now a sewage shed. Today, the creek’s bottom is lined with 15 foot thick layer of petroleum-based pollutants that scientists have dubbed “black mayonnaise.”

With endless poisons injected into our rivers, the Mississippi River creates a 10,000 mile square dead-zone at its mouth.  The Yangtze, Ganges and other great rivers create 20,000 square mile dead zones at their mouths.  Yet, we humans do absolutely nothing to clean up our messes all over the planet.

I’ve tried for 40 years to get Peter Coors of Coors Brewing to support a 10 cent deposit return law in Colorado. Instead, his money killed our deposit-return efforts in Colorado in 1974 and 1988.  Why do men and women with money and power in this country—do nothing for the good of our environment?   Why do the men and women of our U.S. Congress do absolutely nothing for the good of our natural world?

What would solve so many of the aforementioned problems?  Answer: first and foremost—education to create responsible citizens who care about their world, loving families, jobs, stable communities, recreation and a healthy natural world.  Is it asking too much for our leaders to work for the betterment of our lives rather than endless wars, profits over humanity and destruction of planet?

In the end, with another 3.1 billion people projected to be added to this planet within the next 37 years, is there any hope for civility, care about our planet and care about our fellow human beings?

Immigration Reform Places Interests of Illegal Aliens Ahead of Americans

You must understand the duplicity of our U.S. Congress and President Obama.  They place the interests of illegal aliens and businesses who hire them over and above American citizens.  The White House and Congress place illegality of businesses who hire illegal aliens and the illegality of the alien migrants—over and above 47 million Americans who cannot secure jobs, but must live on taxpayer funded food stamps.

Ironically, Obama and Congress import 100,000 legal immigrants every 30 days in light of the fact that we suffer 14 million unemployed Americans.  They import green card holding Somalian, Congolese, Sudanese and Indian immigrants who displace and take jobs from our own minority working poor.  When those immigrants can’t find jobs, they apply for and receive welfare in free food, housing, medical and allowances.  It costs you billions of dollars as a taxpaying American.  With 100,000 added every 30 days, there is not letup.

Yet, Congress and Obama want to legalize 20 million illegal aliens to give them access to our Social Security, housing, food stamps, medical and schools.   In a swoop of the pen, our financially broken and $16 trillion in-debt country will take on 20 million dish washers, nannies, gardeners and unskilled and uneducated poor.  It defies anyone’s imagination.

They won’t enforce the laws on the books, but they want to legalize illegality.  They won’t enforce any new laws either, thus, millions more can be expected to pour into America like a Human Katrina.

“Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide [that adds 80 million net gain annually to the planet], but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all—ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet.” Dr. Otis Graham, Unguarded Gates
Dan Stein, president of The Federation for American Immigration Reform, www.FAIRUS.org talk about what we face this week.

“President Obama’s outline for overhauling the nation’s immigration policy places the interests of illegal aliens above the vital interests of American workers and taxpayers,” said Stein.  “The president’s speech in Las Vegas sketched out a reform plan designed to aid and abet those who broke our immigration laws, increase competition for American workers, and pander to those who politically profit from illegal immigration, rather than truly fix a system that has been broken for decades.

“President Obama’s plan offers nothing to American workers except the certainty of even greater competition for scarce jobs and further suppression of their wages. It offers nothing to American taxpayers except assurance they will pay ever increasing costs as millions of low-skilled illegal immigrants move through the amnesty process and become eligible for government assistance programs.

“President Obama’s immigration reform plan is sadly premised on the notion that it is the illegal immigrants who are the victims of our nation’s dysfunctional immigration policies, and our policies must be changed to address their grievances.  In fact, it is the American people who are the true victims of our dysfunctional immigration policies, and especially this president’s defiant refusal to enforce laws meant to protect them.”

“Immigration “reform,” as outlined by the president, would not only leave our failed policy of family chain migration in place, but would actually speed up admissions of extended relatives who enter the country irrespective of their job skills and education. The plan also calls for increases in employment-based immigration, even as we are still grappling with historically high levels of unemployment affecting workers in virtually all segments of our labor market.”

While promising amnesty and increased legal immigration, President Obama offered nothing regarding enforcement of the law, except maintaining the same non-enforcement policies he has implemented during his first term.

“Given President Obama’s record on immigration enforcement, his promises to secure the border and enforce federal law are simply worthless,” responded Stein. “For one thing the GAO recently chastised the administration for its claims that our borders are under control by noting that the administration does not even have a ‘yardstick’ for measuring operational control of our borders.

“Second, President Obama has asserted virtually unlimited discretion to ignore the immigration laws. He has also demonstrated a willingness to grant blanket work authorization to entire classes of illegal aliens. Much like REAL ID, it could be years, even a decade or more, before the mandate for universal E-Verify is carried out. In the meantime, countless millions of new illegal immigrants are likely to show up with the assurance that as long as they do not commit a violent crime, there will be no consequence for violating our immigration laws.

“President Obama’s actions during his first administration made it clear that his immigration policies are geared toward satisfying the economic and political interests of illegal aliens and their supporters. The legislative plan he outlined today confirms that the interests of the American people are not part of his vision of immigration reform.”

Contact Dan Stein at www.FAIRUS.org . Better yet, join FAIR and bring your individual power to collective power with over 250,000 members.

Burn, Burn – Africa’s Afghanistan

LONDON – One’s got to love the sound of a Frenchman’s Mirage 2000 fighter jet in the morning. Smells like… a delicious neo-colonial breakfast in Hollandaise sauce. Make it quagmire sauce.

Apparently, it’s a no-brainer. Mali holds 15.8 million people – with a per capita gross domestic product of only around US$1,000 a year and average life expectancy of only 51 years – in a territory twice the size of France (per capital GDP $35,000 and upwards). Now almost two-thirds of this territory is occupied by heavily weaponized Islamist outfits. What next? Bomb, baby, bomb.

So welcome to the latest African war; Chad-based French Mirages and Gazelle helicopters, plus a smatter of France-based

Rafales bombing evil Islamist jihadis in northern Mali. Business is good; French president Francois Hollande spent this past Tuesday in Abu Dhabi clinching the sale of up to 60 Rafales to that Gulf paragon of democracy, the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The formerly wimpy Hollande – now enjoying his “resolute”, “determined”, tough guy image reconversion – has cleverly sold all this as incinerating Islamists in the savannah before they take a one-way Bamako-Paris flight to bomb the Eiffel Tower.

French Special Forces have been on the ground in Mali since early 2012.

The Tuareg-led NMLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad), via one of its leaders, now says it’s “ready to help” the former colonial power, billing itself as more knowledgeable about the culture and the terrain than future intervening forces from the CEDEAO (the acronym in French for the Economic Community of Western African States).

Salafi-jihadis in Mali have got a huge problem: they chose the wrong battlefield. If this was Syria, they would have been showered by now with weapons, logistical bases, a London-based “observatory”, hours of YouTube videos and all-out diplomatic support by the usual suspects of US, Britain, Turkey, the Gulf petromonarchies and – oui, monsieur – France itself.

Instead, they were slammed by the UN Security Council – faster than a collection of Marvel heroes – duly authorizing a war against them. Their West African neighbors – part of the ECOWAS regional bloc – were given a deadline (late November) to come up with a war plan. This being Africa, nothing happened – and the Islamists kept advancing until a week ago Paris decided to apply some Hollandaise sauce.

Not even a football stadium filled with the best West African shamans can conjure a bunch of disparate – and impoverished – countries to organize an intervening army in short notice, even if the adventure will be fully paid by the West just like the Uganda-led army fighting al-Shabaab in Somalia.

To top it all, this is no cakewalk. The Salafi-jihadis are flush, courtesy of booming cocaine smuggling from South America to Europe via Mali, plus human trafficking. According to the UN Office of Drugs Control, 60% of Europe’s cocaine transits Mali. At Paris street prices, that is worth over $11 billion.

Turbulence ahead 

General Carter Ham, the commander of the Pentagon’s AFRICOM, has been warning about a major crisis for months. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. But what’s really going on in what the New York Times quaintly describes as those “vast and turbulent stretches of the Sahara”?

It all started with a military coup in March 2012, only one month before Mali would hold a presidential election, ousting then president Amadou Toumani Toure. The coup plotters justified it as a response to the government’s incompetence in fighting the Tuareg.

The coup leader was one Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, who happened to have been very cozy with the Pentagon; that included his four-month infantry officer basic training course in Fort Benning, Georgia, in 2010. Essentially, Sanogo was also groomed by AFRICOM, under a regional scheme mixing the State Department’s Trans Sahara Counter Terrorism Partnership program and the Pentagon’s Operation Enduring Freedom. It goes without saying that in all this “freedom” business Mali has been the proverbial “steady ally” – as in counterterrorism partner – fighting (at least in thesis) al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Over the last few years, Washington’s game has elevated flip-flopping to high art. During the second George W Bush administration, Special Forces were very active side by side with the Tuaregs and the Algerians. During the first Obama administration, they started backing the Mali government against the Tuareg.

An unsuspecting public may pore over Rupert Murdoch’s papers – for instance, The Times of London – and its so-called defense correspondent will be pontificating at will on Mali without ever talking about blowback from the Libya war.

Muammar Gaddafi always supported the Tuaregs’ independence drive; since the 1960s the NMLA agenda has been to liberate Azawad (North Mali) from the central government in Bamako.

After the March 2012 coup, the NMLA seemed to be on top. They planted their own flag on quite a few government buildings, and on April 5 announced the creation of a new, independent Tuareg country. The “international community” spurned them, only for a few months later to have the NMLA for all practical purposes marginalized, even in their own region, by three other – Islamist – groups; Ansar ed-Dine (“Defenders of the Faith”); the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO); and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Meet the players

The NMLA is a secular Tuareg movement, created in October 2011. It claims that the liberation of Azawad will allow better integration – and development – for all the peoples in the region. Its hardcore fighters are Tuaregs who were former members of Gaddafi’s army. But there are also rebels who had not laid down their arms after the 2007-2008 Tuareg rebellion, and some that defected from the Malian army. Those who came back to Mali after Gaddafi was executed by the NATO rebels in Libya carried plenty of weapons. Yet most heavy weapons actually ended up with the NATO rebels themselves, the Islamists supported by the West.

AQIM is the Northern African branch of al-Qaeda, pledging allegiance to “The Doctor”, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Its two crucial characters are Abu Zaid and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, former members of the ultra-hardcore Algerian Islamist outfit Salafist Group for Predication and Combat (SGPC). Belmokhtar was already a jihadi in 1980s Afghanistan.

Abu Zaid poses as a sort of North African “Geronimo”, aka Osama bin Laden, with the requisite black flag and a strategically positioned Kalashnikov featuring prominently in his videos. The historical leader, though, is Belmokhtar. The problem is that Belmokhtar, known by French intelligence as “The Uncatchable”, has recently joined MUJAO.

MUJAO fighters are all former AQIM. In June 2012, MUJAO expelled the NMLA and took over the city of Gao, when it immediately applied the worst aspects of Sharia law. It’s the MUJAO base that has been bombed by the French Rafales this week. One of its spokesmen has duly threatened, “in the name of Allah”, to respond by attacking “the heart of France”.

Finally, Ansar ed-Dine is an Islamist Tuareg outfit, set up last year and directed by Iyad ag Ghali, a former leader of the NMLA who exiled himself in Libya. He turned to Salafism because of – inevitably – Pakistani proselytizers let loose in Northern Africa, then engaged in valuable face time with plenty of AQIM emirs. It’s interesting to note in 2007 Mali President Toure appointed Ghali as consul in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. He was then duly expelled in 2010 because he got too close to radical Islamists.

Gimme ‘a little more terrorism’ 

No one in the West is asking why the Pentagon-friendly Sanogo’s military coup in the capital ended up with almost two-thirds of Mali in the hands of Islamists who imposed hardcore Sharia law in Azawad – especially in Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal, a gruesome catalogue of summary executions, amputations, stonings and the destruction of holy shrines in Timbuktu. How come the latest Tuareg rebellion ended up hijacked by a few hundred hardcore Islamists? It’s useless to ask the question to US drones.

The official “leading from behind” Obama 2.0 administration rhetoric is, in a sense, futuristic; the French bombing “could rally jihadis” around the world and lead to – what else – attacks on the West. Once again the good ol’ Global War on Terror (GWOT) remains the serpent biting its own tail.

There’s no way to understand Mali without examining what Algeria has been up to. The Algerian newspaper El Khabar only scratched the surface, noting that “from categorically refusing an intervention – saying to the people in the region it would be dangerous”, Algiers went to “open Algerian skies to the French Mirages”.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Algeria last October, trying to organize some semblance of an intervening West African army. Hollande was there in December. Oh yes, this gets juicier by the month.

So let’s turn to Professor Jeremy Keenan, from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at London University, and author of The Dark Sahara (Pluto Press, 2009) and the upcomingThe Dying Sahara (Pluto Press, 2013).

Writing in the January edition of New African, Keenan stresses, “Libya was the catalyst of the Azawad rebellion, not its underlying cause. Rather, the catastrophe now being played out in Mali is the inevitable outcome of the way in which the ‘Global War on Terror’ has been inserted into the Sahara-Sahel by the US, in concert with Algerian intelligence operatives, since 2002.”

In a nutshell, Bush and the regime in Algiers both needed, as Keenan points out, “a little more terrorism” in the region. Algiers wanted it as the means to get more high-tech weapons. And Bush – or the neo-cons behind him – wanted it to launch the Saharan front of the GWOT, as in the militarization of Africa as the top strategy to control more energy resources, especially oil, thus wining the competition against massive Chinese investment. This is the underlying logic that led to the creation of AFRICOM in 2008.

Algerian intelligence, Washington and the Europeans duly used AQIM, infiltrating its leadership to extract that “little more terrorism”. Meanwhile, Algerian intelligence effectively configured the Tuaregs as “terrorists”; the perfect pretext for Bush’s Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative, as well as the Pentagon’s Operation Flintlock – a trans-Sahara military exercise.

The Tuaregs always scared the hell out of Algerians, who could not even imagine the success of a Tuareg nationalist movement in northern Mali. After all, Algeria always viewed the whole region as its own backyard.

The Tuaregs – the indigenous population of the central Sahara and the Sahel – number up to 3 million. Over 800,000 live in Mali, followed by Niger, with smaller concentrations in Algeria, Burkina Faso and Libya. There have been no less than five Tuareg rebellions in Mali since independence in 1960, plus three others in Niger, and a lot of turbulence in Algeria.

Keenan’s analysis is absolutely correct in identifying what happened all along 2012 as the Algerians meticulously destroying the credibility and the political drive of the NMLA. Follow the money: both Ansar ed-Dine’s Iyad ag Ghaly and MUJAO’s Sultan Ould Badi are very cozy with the DRS, the Algerian intelligence agency. Both groups in the beginning had only a few members.

Then came a tsunami of AQIM fighters. That’s the only explanation for why the NMLA was, after only a few months, neutralized both politically and militarily in their own backyard.

Round up the usual freedom fighters

Washington’s “leading from behind” position is illustrated by this State Department press conference. Essentially, the government in Bamako asked for the French to get down and dirty.

And that’s it.

Not really. Anyone who thinks “bomb al-Qaeda” is all there is to Mali must be living in Oz. To start with, using hardcore Islamists to suffocate an indigenous independence movement comes straight from the historic CIA/Pentagon playbook.

Moreover, Mali is crucial to AFRICOM and to the Pentagon’s overall MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) outlook. Months before 9/11 I had the privilege to crisscross Mali on the road – and by the (Niger) river – and hang out, especially in Mopti and Timbuktu, with the awesome Tuaregs, who gave me a crash course in Northwest Africa. I saw Wahhabi and Pakistani preachers all over the place. I saw the Tuaregs progressively squeezed out. I saw an Afghanistan in the making. And it was not very hard to follow the money sipping tea in the Sahara. Mali borders Algeria, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Senegal, the Ivory Coast and Guinea. The spectacular Inner Niger delta is in central Mali – just south of the Sahara. Mali overflows with gold, uranium, bauxite, iron, manganese, tin and copper. And – Pipelineistan beckons! – there’s plenty of unexplored oil in northern Mali.

As early as February 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T Moeller wassaying that AFRICOM’s mission was to protect “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market”; yes, he did make the crucial connection to China, pronounced guilty of ” challenging US interests”.

AFRICOM’s spy planes have been “observing” Mali, Mauritania and the Sahara for months, in thesis looking for AQIM fighters; the whole thing is overseen by US Special Forces, part of the classified, code-named Creek Sand operation, based in next-door Burkina Faso. Forget about spotting any Americans; these are – what else – contractors who do not wear military uniforms.

Last month, at Brown University, General Carter Ham, AFRICOM’s commander, once more gave a big push to the “mission to advance US security interests across Africa”. Now it’s all about the – updated – US National Security Strategy in Africa, signed by Obama in June 2012. The (conveniently vague) objectives of this strategy are to “strengthen democratic institutions”; encourage “economic growth, trade and investment”; “advance peace and security”; and “promote opportunity and development.”

In practice, it’s Western militarization (with Washington “leading from behind”) versus the ongoing Chinese seduction/investment drive in Africa. In Mali, the ideal Washington scenario would be a Sudan remix; just like the recent partition of North and South Sudan, which created an extra logistical headache for Beijing, why not a partition of Mali to better exploit its natural wealth? By the way, Mali was known as Western Sudan until independence in 1960.

Already in early December a “multinational” war in Mali was on the Pentagon cards.

The beauty of it is that even with a Western-financed, Pentagon-supported, “multinational” proxy army about to get into the action, it’s the French who are pouring the lethal Hollandaise sauce (nothing like an ex-colony “in trouble” to whet the appetite of its former masters). The Pentagon can always keep using its discreet P-3 spy planes and Global Hawk drones based in Europe, and later on transport West African troops and give them aerial cover. But all secret, and very hush hush.

Mr Quagmire has already reared its ugly head in record time, even before the 1,400 (and counting) French boots on the ground went into offense.

A MUJAO commando team (and not AQIM, as it’s been reported), led by who else but the “uncatchable” Belmokhtar, hit a gas field in the middle of the Algerian Sahara desert, over 1,000 km south of Algiers but only 100 km from the Libyan border, where they captured a bunch of Western (and some Japanese) hostages; a rescue operation launched on Wednesday by Algerian Special Forces was, to put it mildly, a giant mess, with at least seven foreign hostages and 23 Algerians so far confirmed killed.

The gas field is being exploited by BP, Statoil and Sonatrach. MUJAO has denounced – what else – the new French “crusade” and the fact that French fighter jets now own Algerian airspace.

As blowback goes, this is just the hors d’oeuvres. And it won’t be confined to Mali. It will convulse Algeria and soon Niger, the source of over a third of the uranium in French nuclear power plants, and the whole Sahara-Sahel.

So this new, brewing mega-Afghanistan in Africa will be good for French neoloconial interests (even though Hollande insists this is all about “peace”); good for AFRICOM; a boost for those Jihadis Formerly Known as NATO Rebels; and certainly good for the never-ending Global War on Terror (GWOT), duly renamed “kinetic military operations”.

Django, unchained, would be totally at home. As for the Oscar for Best Song, it goes to the Bush-Obama continuum: There’s no business like terror business. With French subtitles, bien sur.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com

Source: Asia Times Online

Election 2012: How The Winner Will Destroy America

After all the hollow and uninspired elections that this country has suffered through over the past several decades, one might think that at some point long ago the American public would have finally struck a plateau of disenfranchisement; that we could sink no further into despondency, that there is a saturation limit to the corruption of our voting process.  Unfortunately, there has been no such luck.  I have to say that in all honesty I have never seen more people gut jumbled and disgusted with our electoral system than I have in 2012.  Sure, there is still a hyper-gullible segment of the populous that continues to play the game, but even those idiots are beginning to admit that the choices offered are dismal at best, catastrophic at worst.  The fog of the false Left/Right paradigm is starting to lift, and all that lay in its wake is a hoard of lost wide-eyed flabbergasted followers without a coattail or a talking point to cling to.  Sudanese refugees have a better chance of survival than these people do…

Even in the more obvious of fraudulent past elections there was at least an attempt by the establishment to present a pageant of conflicting ideologies (George W. Bush vs. John Kerry comes to mind).  There has always been the Democrat who pretends to be anti-war, or the Republican who pretends to be small government, or the Democrat who pretends to defend our right to privacy, and the Republican who pretends to be pro-2nd Amendment.  But in 2012, even the theater of rhetoric has disappeared.  Both primary party candidates seem to be sharing the same intestinal tract and the same teleprompter, and now, the average American is asking a new set of questions.  They do not wonder how these men will change things for the better.  Not at all.  Instead, they wonder which one will do LESS DAMAGE while in office.  This is the terrible reality we have come to understand in our society today.  It is a sad awakening, but a necessary one.

As you read this now, the new President of the United States is being “chosen” or has been chosen.  Whoever the “winner” happens to be is ultimately irrelevant.  They do not count.  They are mascots.  Middle management cronies running through the motions to distract the masses while enacting the policies of their superiors.  They are fry cooks serving greasy overpriced democracy with no real sustenance.  What does matter, though, is what comes next.  I’m sorry to say that the idea that one man will do less damage than the other is a naïve sentiment.  Democrat?  Republican?  Obama?  Romney?  The crimes and calamities wrought will be exactly the same.  Take a look into my crystal ball and see the future.  Here is how the winner will destroy America…

1)  He Will Continue The Policy Of Dollar Devaluation 

Neither candidate has expressed any interest through the election or even before it to protect the value of our currency, and both candidates have supported steps towards quantitative easing and fiat printing in order to delay an inevitable national debt crisis.  Both Romney and Obama have sung the praises of Ben Bernanke (Romney changed his tune just in time for his campaign, but who’s buying that?) and the private Federal Reserve despite the consistent failures of that despotic institution to produce any tangible economic results with their Keynesian methods.

The dollar will see a vast devaluation during the term of this candidate and a loss of world reserve status, leading to stagflation (a combination of the worst elements of deflationary and inflationary crises in the same event).  Skyrocketing prices and crumbling unemployment will be the highlights of his presidency, because he will never take measures to reign in or dismantle the primary root cause of the problem; the Federal Reserve itself.

2)  He Will Continue Extreme Government Debt Spending

Neither candidate has offered a practical or operable solution to the $16 trillion official national debt problem we now face, let alone the tens of trillions of dollars in entitlement obligations that the Treasury Department never talks about.  A nation can only live off food stamps and credit for so long before it implodes like a wet paper sack. And this is exactly what we have become; an entire culture of debt addicts and money hounds searching for our next fix of foreign or central bank cash.  The fact is, both Obama and Romney would INCREASE spending while using fiat injections to buttress an ever weakening economy in the name of “stability”.  The new president will claim that if spending cuts are initiated, it will send the U.S. financial system into a tailspin and a “return” to recession conditions.  This will of course be a lie.  We have not left recession/depression conditions since 2008.

3)  He Will Support And Expand On Wars In The Middle East

There is no such thing as a mainstream “anti-war candidate” in 2012.  Not even a fake one.  Obama’s measures of state violence and complete lack of respect for the sovereign internal matters of foreign nations surpass the madness of George Bush Jr.  He has even gone so far as to assert that his office has the right to assassinate American citizens without trial, evidence, or due process of the law.  Not only has he asserted the right to this power, he has used it!  Romney’s position, hilariously, is that Obama has not gone far enough!  Either way, the winner in 2012 is going to leap like a vile locust into new countries and unleash a plague of laser guided death.  The next president WILL be a war hungry president.

4)  He Will Lock Down The Web And Limit Internet Speech 

Both Romney and Obama have expressed a desire to establish cybersecurity measures which include vast new governmental authority over the functions and operations of the internet.  The ultimate goal?  To gain legal precedence for the right to dictate web content, up to and including the ability to label any website a subversive threat to national security or a recruitment tool for “extremists”.

With the establishment spreading completely baseless accusation of cyberthreats coming from every corner of the globe (but mostly from Iran) it would seem that they are conditioning the public for a future encounter with a cyber event, and telling them who to blame when it occurs.  The problem is, the most prominent cyber security threats to the internet in the past few years have come not from the Middle East, or Russia, or China, but the U.S. and Israel (Stuxnet anyone?).  Keep this in mind when our new president blames the next cyber attack on a convenient political target and then uses the event as an excuse to regulate the web.

5)  He Will Erase American Civil Liberties 

This president will find a reason, or he will create a reason to diminish Constitutional protections including our right to trial and due process.  Both candidates have offered unflinching support for the National Defense Authorization Act and its provisions for indefinite detainment.  Neither man has ventured any sincere concerns over the broad nature of the language involved in the labeling of “terrorists” and “extremists”.  Literally anyone can now be categorized as an enemy combatant and a threat to national security for almost any reason, and this appears to be the way Obama and Romney like it.  That is to say, they both want totalitarian powers, or at the very least, they have made no effort to turn them down.

It is important to note that there has never been a government in history that sought out such powers and did not actually use them.  Only a fool would assume his favorite elitist candidate in 2012 will not utilize the extreme authorities now amassed for the executive branch over the past decade.

6)  He Will Embrace A Globalist Dynamic And Abandon American Sovereignty 

Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are surrounded by “advisers” who are also members of the Council On Foreign Relations, an institution which openly calls for the dissolution of American sovereignty on a regular basis and the creation of a centralized global system dominating the financial, social, and political life of every nation in the world.  With the economic stability of the U.S. on the verge of oblivion, it is very likely that a historic crisis will ensue during the first term of the next president, and that he will in response suggest a new global system as the solution.

This system has already been created, in part, by the IMF and World Bank in concert with member governments and revolves around the issuance of a new world reserve currency (Special Drawing Rights) as the centerpiece.  I can guarantee with absolute certainty that the next president, regardless of who he happens to be, will promote an IMF rescue package coupling the dollar to the SDR and turning over full economic control of America to an international body.  He will make it sound rational, reasonable, and even advantageous, but in the end, he will be selling the globalist snakeoil he was conscripted to sell before his election campaign ever started.

In 2012, it will not be about voting.  It will not be about “winning”.  It will not even be about getting to the next election.  It will be about survival.  As big a joke as the 2012 elections have become even to the generally unaware, I am not laughing.  I do not need to look at the promises of either candidate.  I do not need to weigh their half-assed quick fix policies.  All I have to do is look at the current downward trend and understand that the president, whoever he may be, will continue it.  If anything is to truly change, it will be because we as Americans finally walk away from the game, enacting our own solutions and our own opposition instead of handing over our power to sniveling errand boys wrapped in flags and expensive suits and self-rightousness every four years.  2012 is going to be the beginning of upheaval and renewal, for better or for worse, and it is certain that the guy in the White House into 2013, Republican or Democrat, is going to be a part of the problem, nothing more.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

So, Really, Why Do They Hate Us?

Recent attacks on American embassies and consulates in numerous Muslim countries are claimed to be irrational and undue reactions to a film portraying the Muslim prophet Mohammed in a degraded manner. The film is intentionally sacrilegious and incendiary toward Islamic beliefs and seems intended to add fuel to the rage of a Muslim world already incensed at the U.S. for its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,  for destructive  American drone attacks in Yemen and Somalia and multiple other nations,  and one-sided support for Israel accompanied by platitudes for Palestinians. Thus, the roots of  widespread anti-Americanism are much deeper than can be explained merely by recent events. Instead,  Muslim fury can be traced to the ever increasing intervention by Washington in Muslim countries since the end of World War II.  Prior to that, the U.S. was considered a non-interventionist, even anti-imperialist, friend in much of the region. Yet, even before the war ended President Roosevelt made a secret deal with the Saudi king to provide American protection (and ultimately arms as well, used primarily to suppress his own population) to the Saudis in return for unobstructed American corporate access to the recently discovered Saudi oilfields.

Few today remember American policies during the Iranian crisis of 1946, when the U.S. obliquely threatened to force Soviet Troops out of Iran. American, British and Soviet troops occupied Iran in 1941 because it had tilted toward the Nazis under the father of the later American client, Shah Reza Pahlavi. The Soviets occupied the oil fields of northern Iran with Washington’s approval during the war to prevent them from falling into Nazi hands. The Soviets were supposed to withdraw in March of that year but refused until a deal could be arranged whereby the USSR could purchase Iranian oil in order to begin rebuilding its war-ravaged society. Initially the Truman Administration encouraged the Iranian government to accept the deal. Then when the Red Army did withdraw also encouraged the Iranians to renege on the arrangement. It is worth noting that the Red Army did not then re-occupy the territory, thereby putting the lie to the claim made immediately after WWII that the Soviets were bent on world domination. There was nothing, not even employing atomic weapons, that the U.S. could have done to stop the Red Army had it chosen to reoccupy Iran’s oilfields since that would have destroyed the very resources that were being contested.  The Soviets were only one of the principal obstacles to American post-war plans- though they were trumpeted as the prime mover. Equally important was nationalism, especially the sort of national independence craved by countries possessing vital resources that the U.S. coveted. Few also realize that until WWII the U.S. was the prime exporter of petroleum. By war’s end the U.S. had used so much of its domestic oil, and its hydrocarbon-based economy had grown so exponentially, that from that point on the U.S. was impelled to begin importing oil.

Many do remember the overthrow of the prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeqh in 1953. Exceeding its legal mandate to gather intelligence, the newly minted Central Intelligence Agency, initiated its first successful overthrow of a constitutional and elected government because that government decided that Iranian oil belonged to the Iranians and not to the British oil company that would eventually become British Petroleum. The American scheme was calculated to ensure that American companies would thereafter dominate Iranian oil production and get rid of most British competition in Iran as well. The Shah and his brutal government was then installed to act as Washington’s gendarme in the region. To ensure his rule the U.S. military and CIA then trained his dreaded secret police in the fine arts of torture and terror.

Meanwhile the CIA was active in similar efforts across the planet to undermine any form of nationalism, socialism, or communism that would interfere with the overarching American agenda, which was not the promotion of “democracy” but the installation of friendly clients into positions of power in countries considered strategic for their resources or geographic position. Space does not allow a complete catalog but of importance to current events is certainly the role the “Company” played in the overthrow of the British client king of Iraq in 1958, an intrigue in which Saddam Hussein played a role and that led eventually to his dictatorship, one with which Washington was happy to cooperate after the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979. The famous film of Donald Rumsfeld warmly shaking Saddam’s hand perfectly illustrates the lower depths to which Washington has too often stooped to achieve its ends. The U.S. provided highly technical intelligence to Iraq against Iran, aiding the mass slaughter that ensued, and when he used poison gas made from chemicals provided by American corporations against Iraqi Kurds during the war with Iran, Washington prevented sanctions against his regime. At that point he was assisting the American agenda to weaken Iranian fundamentalism so his crimes could be whitewashed. However, his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 became the perfect rationale to inject what evolved into a permanent American military presence in the Persian Gulf.

At the time of 9-11 Michael Scheur was the CIA’s foremost expert on Al Qaeda. His writings emphasize that Americans had to take seriously the reasons spelled out by Osama Bin Laden for Al Qaeda’s antagonism toward the U.S. One of those principal motivations was the American military presence in Saudi Arabia during and after Operation Desert Storm. Bin Laden said clearly that the presence of “infidel” troops on sacred Islamic soil was a desecration. Thereafter, all American forces were to be driven from all Islamic lands. The widespread perception in the Muslim world that Americans had defiled the holiest sites of Islam and were exploiting Muslim resources while propping up corrupt dictatorial apostates like the rulers of the Arab Gulf states  contributed to the relative ease with which al Qaeda could recruit new Jihadis to its cause.

Scheur also noted that bin Laden said that the attacks on 9-11 were intended to promote further intervention by Washington in the region and thus promote more of the anti-Americanism that he hoped would fuel his movement. To a great extent American actions have worked almost precisely to Bin Laden’s plan and the current explosion of violence around the world toward the U.S. is a direct outgrowth of the increasing resentment and hatred long stored in memory across the Middle East.  Washington is reaping the violent whirlwind sowed by itself.

The so-called “Arab Spring” represented an upwelling of long-simmering opposition to numerous dictatorships in the region, most of them propped up by Washington with a few exceptions that rankled like Libya and Syria. Though President Obama and Hillary Clinton mouthed piously about popular democracy and the “will of the people,” such didn’t help the hapless residents of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, where instantaneous and brutal repression followed, with mere sighs from Washington. Remember that at first, President Obama supported Hosni Mubarak in Egypt until the intensity of the demonstrations in Cairo forced the U.S to abandon him. But not before the Egyptian military high command stepped up to reassure the State Department that it would take his place. Then they threw Mubarak  “under the bus.” Nevertheless, the sheer pressure of popular demand for a voice necessitated an election. Since the Egyptian Army is financed and armed by Washington, and Egypt receives the second largest sum of foreign aid (after Israel) widespread knowledge that the Egyptian Army is a creature of the U.S. led to victory in the elections by the despised Muslim Brotherhood. After the election the Egyptian courts sought to prevent the seating of this Parliament dominated by the Brotherhood and with representation by the even more vehement Salafists, but the newly seated president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi, does indeed represent the Brotherhood.  One reason the Army allowed the elections was because its leadership feared that rank and file troops would not support repression in the face of such an uprising from the depths of their own social origins. Morsi is being very careful now. It remains to be seen how the new configuration of power, of Islamists vs. the Army, will evolve.

The killing of the American ambassador and three other Americans in Libya prompted an embittered Secretary Clinton to ask how those who owed their “liberation” to the U.S. could be so ungrateful to their emancipators, thereby confirming how little she understands of the circumstances fostering the Libyan uprising, nor those her government has wrought, or the degree to which the planned outcome of U.S. intervention islikely to fail utterly.  The standard interpretation of what transpired in Libya is that the U.S. and its European allies in NATO conducted a humanitarian intervention to rid Libya of another brutal dictator. It is true that Muammar Qaddaffi ruled autocratically but in this he was supported by a substantial majority at least in western Libya, where traditional tribes were loyal.

Libya came into existence as an independent state only in 1951. Before that it had been an Italian colony, or rather three separate colonies cobbled together and given the name the ancient Romans called most of North Africa. In its efforts to subdue these colonies Italy became the very first European empire to use the airplane in primitive bombing runs on resisting tribes. In this they were soon followed by the French in Syria and Lebanon, and by the British in Iraq and Afghanistan, facts still well remembered in the region. Therefore, like so many nations that acquired independence after World War II, Libya was an artificial construct, merging mutually suspicious or hostile ethnic groups and tribes into a configuration designed by former colonial masters to serve their interests. When Qaddaffi overthrew the corrupt king of Libya in 1969, who made sweetheart deals with western oil companies, and hoarded revenues from Libya’s newly discovered oil, he took over a country already riven with tribal animosities. One of his difficulties was that much of Libya’s oil was in the east, where tribes different from his own loyalists dwelled. He suppressed opposition brutally.

Another problem which Quaddaffi dealt with successfully – and which brought him the unending hostility of the west and led to a deadly cat and mouse game that played out over forty years- were those western oil companies that dominated the industry and reaped the greatest share of profits. Qaddaffi  immediately nationalized oil but allowed some companies to remain. However, he imposed significantly higher taxes and royalties on those, like the American company Occidental, resulting in a considerable increase in revenues available to him but he used these to raise the standard of living substantially, mainly for his loyalists, but also to an extent for the entire population. Whether his example stimulated what followed is unclear but the facts are that numerous other former oil producing colonies of the western powers subsequently initiated their own nationalizations, thereby upsetting longstanding and profitable western arrangements. He also refused to peg the Libyan currency, the dinar, to the International Monetary Fund, and refused to submit to the World Bank and International Bank for Settlements. Qaddaffi also styled himself the champion of pan-Arabism, the movement to unify the entire Arab world and funded many nationalist movements hostile to the west.

During all this time the CIA was actively involved with Qaddaffi’s opponents to find a way to overthrow him. This lethal contest led to mutual terrorism (though most American media and scholarly accounts omit the U.S. actions) and culminating in the atrocity of Lockerbie, followed by the bombing of Libya, including Qaddaffi’s house where his adoptive three year old daughter was killed. Qaddaffi  then intensified efforts to acquire chemical weapons, and even undertook a nuclear program. However sanctions led him to submit the Lockerbie suspects for trial in the UK, and later to give up these WMD programs.  At that point western media reports declared that Qaddaffi had “normalized’” affairs with the west.

Whatever he imagined about his new relations with former enemies, the CIA had other ideas. So when the “Arab Spring” erupted in Tunisia and soon spread across the entire region, many Libyans followed suit and Libya descended into the civil war that Washington and NATO then leapt upon in order to accomplish finally what the western governments and energy corporations had desired all along- the overthrow of Qaddaffi and his replacement with an installed government essentially of handpicked clients who would restore Libyan resources to western corporate domination. In the midst of fighting the private global intelligence company STRATFOR published and circulated a detailed map showing most of Libya’s oil was located in the eastern area of Benghazi. It was also well known that the oil Libya produced was of a type that is refined easily into the gasoline required in European automobiles. South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham waxed  feverishly over  the lure of profits, braying “Let’s get in on the ground. There’s a lot of money to be made in Libya. Lots of oil to be produced. Let’s get on the ground and help the Libyan people establish a democracy and a functioning economy based on free market principles.” Even before the “revolution” had succeeded and a new government was installed, the rebel group claiming authority announced the dissolution of Qaddaffi’s national bank and replaced it with a new central bank tied to international institutions, which, of course, are dominated by the western financial establishment.

As media images showed clearly, Qaddaffi still had enormous support. The “rebels” included eastern tribal members long hostile to rule from western Libya, but also ethnic minorities like the Berbers, but also Libyan members of al Qaeda as well as al Qaeda jihadists from around the Arab and Muslim world. Included in the toxic mix were CIA operatives and covert American Special Forces. Without western arms supplied to Qaddaffi’s opponents, and especially the U.S. led bombing campaign it is likely Qaddaffi would have hung on. The result we see today, however, was utterly predictable.

The so-called government installed in Tripoli, in the west of Libya, has no control over anything, especially in eastern Benghazi. In May the interim prime minister’s offices were attacked with four aides killed. In June a bomb exploded in the same consulate building where Ambassador Stevens was killed. The British ambassador narrowly escaped assassination last spring. The January ransacking of the National Transition Council offices provides evidence that factions in Benghazi want independence, not the unified state. What more would it have taken for Washington to realize that its best laid plans were going awry?  Writing in the Guardian, Benjamin Barber notes that at minimum 100,000 militants of one faction or another, all armed with American and NATO weapons (including the rocket-propelled-grenade launchers used  against the American consulate) continue to wage war or jihad upon each other, and that al Qaeda is as much a home –grown faction as any other. Indeed, al Qaeda raised its flag over the Benghazi courthouse the day after Qaddaffi was killed.

On March 2, 2007 Retired General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO forces, and 2004 Democratic contender for the presidency, appeared on Amy Goodman’s televised program Democracy Now. In the interview he revealed that shortly before the invasion of Iraq a highly placed Pentagon officer divulged a secret plan to him to overthrow the governments of seven countries-Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. Speaking in San Francisco the following October Clark repeated this and added commentary about a conversation he had in 1992 with Paul Wolfowitz, a prime architect of  George W. Bush’s policies, who at the time was number three in the Defense department. Quoting Wolfowitz Clark said: “One thing we learned [in the Persian Gulf War] is that we can use our military in the region- in the Middle East- and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got five or ten years to clean up those old Soviet regimes – Syria, Iran, Iraq- before the next superpower comes along to stop us.”

The Neo-Conservatives were supposed to have been swept from power by the new Obama Administration, and yet the withdrawal (that is not really a withdrawal) from Iraq was negotiated by Bush, and the “surge” in Afghanistan ordered by Obama out neo-conned the neo-cons, just as the “liberation” of Libya certainly followed their template if not their foolish expectations. Syria awaits our humanitarian ministrations. But that may prove the most disastrous escapade of all.

Source: Paul Atwood | CounterPunch.org

La Nueva Guerra: Latin Spring Being Sprung?

From protests in Chile to a “coup” in Paraguay, the worrying signs come across Latin America that it may have an Arab Spring of its own, but in fact those are the signs of a new form of war waged against the region.

A specter haunts Latin America

Latin America is undergoing increasingly violent turmoil on many fronts. This often makes it difficult to distinguish between spontaneous, bona fide social protest and covert foreign intervention, just as we see today throughout the Arab world.

In spite of Latin America’s decades of experience with foreign-orchestrated military coups, in today’s world the local military are no longer an option. They were necessary proxies acting as local cops for the US during the Cold War, until they became a redundant embarrassment.

So just as the ’60s and ’70s saw a domino effect of “anti-communist military coups” – graciously applauded by the US and UK – the ’80s and ’90s saw a comeback of “democracy”, riding on the wave of “human rights”. In short: military boots were “out”; corrupt controllable “democratic” politicians were “in”.

Nominally “democratic” governments mean local power no longer managed by guns and bayonets but by tons of money. As the Global Power Masters execute a highly complex planet-wide strategic reset, Latin America is ripe for another turn of the screw: a new bout of “Spring” treatment.

It would, however, be a mistake to think this will be a copy of the Arab Spring, because a key factor behind today’s global Machtpolitik lies in understanding prevailing local conditions, which in Latin America are very different from those of the Arab world.

What makes each country tick?

Last year’s lighting of the Arab Spring fuse depended very much on understanding that fact huge sectors of the local populations – particularly the young – were fed up with authoritarian, long-entrenched regimes: whether Mubarak’s 31 years in Egypt, Gaddafi’s 42 years in Libya or the al-Assads’ 40 years in Syria.

But there’s no way this can be done in Latin America, because all governments here are nominally “democratic”, with corrupt politicians taking turns in mismanaging their countries.

On the religious front, Islam demands active militancy from its followers to defend the Faith, so an important dividing line for the Arab Spring is the centuries-old conflict between Shiites and Sunnis, plus the modern struggle between clerical and secular regimes.

Such highly complex issues have thwarted the Muslim world’s ability to unite under one solid and strong leadership, so fundamental to neutralize decades – centuries! – of Western interference and intervention in that region. Divide and conquer has always been imperialism’s leitmotiv.

By playing one side against the other; by appealing to the naïve young yearning for change whose paradigms are (de)formed by Western pop “culture”, last year’s triggering of social and generational conflict was really a “piece of cake”: from Tunisia to Egypt; from Libya to Syria; from Sudan to Iran.

At most, the tricky part was keeping FOW’s (Friends of the West) like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain isolated from this process. The West’s ability to slosh trillions of Petro-Dollars, plus the Western Media’s extreme discretion towards “friendly countries”, the ominous presence of the US Fifth Fleet and a little help from our (Israeli) friends seems to have done the trick. So far, anyway…

Latin America is not at all like this. Not a chance of violently pitting Catholics against Protestants…and since all countries are formally “democratic”, people won’t readily take to the streets to get rid of any authoritarian regimes because, officially, there are none. Maybe a Monsanto-coup in Paraguay or an electoral money-for-your-vote hiccup in Mexico, but the US is too busy looking at Chavez in Venezuela to bother.

Where, then, is the war front in Latin America?

War in ‘Spring’ time

When we talk of war, we normally think in terms of World War II-like invading armies. But war has become far more covert and far less overt. Today, more subtle forms are used like engineering financial or social coups or – as Libya and now Syria learned – engineering civil war.

In traditional war, the focus is on military hardware, strategy and territorial logistics. ‘Spring’ wars, however, are remote-planned, and then deployed inside the target country. First you identify dividing lines in local society: what are people’s grievances, which religious fervors and ethnic hatreds are ripe for stirring.

Then comes PsyWar channeling through NGO’s, local militants and lobbies, opposition politicians, paid journalists and, of course, yours truly “The Embassy”. Throughout Latin America, “la Embajada” is an ominous phrase pointing to US, UK and Israeli embassy meddling.

And if they can’t get their desired “Regime Change”, there’s always “Plan B”: escalate to blatant financing, training and arming of local subversives, terrorists and gangs as in Libya and Syria.

Latin America’s war front

The real war in Latin America, where deadly shots are fired and people get killed and maimed, lies in the increasingly huge gap pitting the rich (small numbers, huge power) against the poor (huge numbers, small power).

Latin America’s war is fought in the “villa miseria” slums of Buenos Aires, Bogotá and México; in the “favelas” of Rio de Janeiro; in the shanty towns of Caracas, Guayaquil and every single city in our region.

The poor are becoming increasingly aware of just how poor they are. In today’s global consumer society the rich slap them on the face through TV, the internet and “entertainment” media. The corporate overworld constantly reminds them of just how wonderful life can be if you’re rich and buy their cars, laptops, cell phones, houses, holiday packages. Too poor to enjoy that? Alas, too bad!

Mass social frustration lies at the root of Latin American war. It branches out into street crime, prostitution, drugs, alcohol, gang warfare, pornography. It physically, intellectually and spiritually annihilates untold millions of people in the streets of Mexico, Brazil, Colombia or Argentina.

In contrast to the Muslim world, where religious fervor keeps the rich-versus-poor divide in check, Latin American Catholic and Protestant churches have lost their social appeal and strength. The spiritual vacuum they left has been filled with greedy striving for material wealth.

Not that this is anything new. The big difference now is the unprecedented technological capability available to trigger and control social wars; escalating them to outright insurrection and civil war when it suits the global power masters’ objectives.

But that works both ways, because that same technology is making people more and more politically aware and active. As Trilateral Commission ideologue and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski recently lamented, “people’s growing political awareness” is a threat… to the global elites.

The whole world is being pushed into war mode, where every victory or defeat in one region has far-reaching consequences for the rest of the world. We The People suffered defeat in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. In Syria, Iran and Venezuela, We The People fight ongoing battles.

Given the colossal economic crisis affecting the US, Europe, UK – even Israel – if a “Latin Spring” is unleashed on the Rich-versus-the-Poor Front, then Latin America’s ability to fight back intelligently and effectively could have dramatic and positive global consequences.

Adrian Salbuchi is a political analyst, author, speaker and radio/TV commentator in Argentina.www.asalbuchi.com.ar

Source: Adrian Salbuchi | RT

Act of War? President Obama Ordered Wave Of Cyber Attacks Against Iran

On Friday the New York Times asserted that President Obama, from his first months in office, ordered a wave of “increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks” against Iran and its nuclear program”.
The program, code-named “Olympic Games”, was an acceleration of Bush era attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Reportedly, Obama ramped up the attacks even after the Stuxnet worm, a computer virus directed against foreign nuclear facilities, became public knowledge due to a programming error. The Stuxnet virus jumped from computer to computer, taking out 1000 of the 5000 Iranian uranium centrifuges.
The virus eventually broke free from control and traveled around the world through the internet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed.

Source

The US government has never admitted using so-called cyberweapons, but the Times piece suggests officials are now able to “cripple” infrastructure in a way previously only bombs and troops could achieve.

Source

Stuxnet became public in 2010, but fast forward to today, and this week a new ’super virus’ has hit Iran and the Middle East again. This advanced virus, “can activate a computer’s audio systems to listen in on Skype calls or office chatter. It can also take screenshots, log keystrokes and — in one of its more novel functions — steal data from Bluetooth-enabled cellphones.”

This powerful virus, dubbed “Flame” has already spread between nations, showing up in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, and the West Bank.
Experts are suggesting this virus may have come from Israel, and while Israel hasn’t admitted such a role, those charges aren’t being denied by its government.

While there seems to be mainstream support for the strong-arm tactics of governments and their use of cyber weapons, it appears to be a one-way street.
Should China, Iran, or Russia be suspected of being behind a destructive virus attack on the US or its close allies, the world could expect a dramatic and disproportionate military response.

In fact, in 2011 the Pentagon “concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.”

However, because the Pentagon deems cyber attacks an act of war, how can these attacks against sovereign countries go unchallenged?

“The Rules of Armed Conflict that guide traditional wars are derived from a series of international treaties, such as the Geneva Conventions, as well as practices that the U.S. and other nations consider customary international law. But cyber warfare isn’t covered by existing treaties. So military officials say they want to seek a consensus among allies about how to proceed.”

Former US President Richard Nixon famously said, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” It is almost certain that any attacks made by the US or its allies against sovereign nations in the form of cyber warfare will go unchecked and unpunished.

What complicates the issue further is the repeated declarations coming from experts and officials that Iran is working to further it’s nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, and does not possess the desire, or the facilities, to enrich weapons-grade uranium.

In March of this year, the west placed financial sanctions on Iran, blocking Iranian banks access to international markets. Sanctions are approved by the UN and are not illegal, but they are a move, historically, that teeters on the edge of being an all-out act of war. 

This, combined with the suspicion that western governments are assassinating civilian Iranian scientists related to its nuclear program is yet another provocation in what seems to be escalating into a point of no return for both sides.

There are many downsides to playing with this type of cyber warfare fire. And they seem to all end in a world-wide military conflict. How long before Iran finally retaliates to these unsubtle acts of war against it? What will the outcome be when these super viruses are used either by hackers with malintent, or employed by governments in false-flag operations to frame domestic political activists, ’hacktivists’, or foreign nations?

At what point does the rest of the world stand up and declare these subversive engagements true ’acts of war’, and throw water on this fire before it spreads to consume us all?

Source: Elizabeth Leafloor | RedIceCreations.com

Lebanon’s Oppressed: Domestic Workers, Women, Palestinians

Are They Forming an Alliance?

Beirut - University students surveyed last month in Lebanon on the subject of how to improve their society and move it in the direction of meeting international human and civil rights norms identified three groups most in urgent need of immediate Lebanese governmental action.

Not surprising perhaps, but nevertheless refreshing, were the students’ strongly expressed convictions, regardless of particular sect,  that those most victimized by Lebanon’s government and current laws are the roughly 200,000 migrant domestic workers, woman, who make up half of Lebanon’s population, and the estimated 250,000 Palestinian refugees waiting to return to their country, Palestine.

Last month’s suicide by domestic worker 33 years old Alem Dechasa-Desisa, following a beating in front of her Ethiopian Consulate by Ali Mahfouz and his colleague, whose recruitment agency arranged for Alem to work in Lebanon, was condemned across this country and angered those watching the video of the beating on LBCI TV.

This incident once more raised the near slavery plight of workers from Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Sudan, the Philippines, and Nepal and elsewhere who are excluded from the Lebanon’s labor law. Among the triad of the most wretched in Lebanon, domestic workers suffer the most.

Once again, the Lebanese government issued a seemingly pro forma statement to say it would investigate the despicable abuse of domestic workers.  Few here have confidence that anything will come of the current “investigation” any more than usually results from police or ministry investigations of domestic workers abuse. “The Lebanese authorities only opened an investigation because they found themselves in the media spotlight,” Nadim Houry, the deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, told a news conference, adding that “The government urgently needs to address the root causes that are driving so many migrant domestic workers to despair.”   More than a dozen civil society groups also cited a culture of impunity when it comes to the abuse of domestic workers in Lebanon.

In a 2008 study, Human Rights Watch found that there had been an average of one death a week from unnatural causes among domestic workers in Lebanon, including suicides and unexplained falls from tall buildings. Domestic workers are subject to restrictive immigration rules based on employer-specific sponsorship that puts workers at risk of exploitation and makes it extremely difficult for them to leave abusive employers, The Philippines, Ethiopia and other countries have banned their citizens from working in Lebanon due to the lack of protection from Lebanon yet many still come here in order to work and send money back home to their families.

According to HRW, the most common complaints documented by the embassies of labor-sending countries and civil society groups include mistreatment by recruiters, non-payment or delayed payment of wages, forced confinement to the workplace, a refusal to provide any time off for the worker, forced labor, and verbal and physical abuse. HRW also cited information prepared by KAFA Violence & Exploitation, a Lebanese women’s rights group, concerning nine suspicious deaths in August 2010.

A number of factors mean that MDWs often do not file or pursue complaints against their employers, but rather settle on unfavorable terms. These include lack of judicial support, fear of counter charges and being held in detention, and restrictive visa policies that make it hard for MDWs to see through cases that can take months or years to wend through the protracted judicial process.  For many, the need to earn money to support their families, and the impulse of abused workers to return home quickly prompts them to withdraw their complaints rather than seek redress. A Human Rights Watch review of 13 criminal cases that MDWs brought against employers found they took an average of 24 months to be resolved, while MDW complaints for unpaid wages filed in civil courts lasted between 21 and 54 months. Complaints brought before labor courts, which are supposedly faster than regular civil courts because their procedures are simpler, lasted 32 months on average.

The wretched women of Lebanon– half of the population…

Lebanese law prevents women married to a non-Lebanese from passing citizenship on to her children. Much like the right to property, which women in Lebanon, like Palestinians also don’t enjoy fully, the value of citizenship and family rights for women and their children  is meaningless when the state restricts transferability. This means that many children born and raised in Lebanon are required to regularly reapply for permits to continue living in their birth country.

Since Lebanese law does not provide a clear judicial standard, children must deal with the administrative maze of Lebanon’s corrupt and notoriously inefficient bureaucracy. As the children grow into adults, they face restrictions on foreign labor, property ownership and a host of other implications much like Palestinian refugees. While diaspora Lebanese may have citizenship from other countries, they can also claim Lebanese citizenship via paternal consanguinity, but people born and raised in Lebanon depend on the arbitrary decisions of the security services.

Women also remain invisible in positions of formal power such as Parliament. No women serve in Lebanon’s cabinet, while only four women our of 128 MP’s – the usual group of wives, sisters and daughters of high ranking Lebanese officials – are Members of Parliament.

 Some have proposed a quota for women in Parliament. According to lawyer Anthony Elghossain “ in a political culture that derides women for being outspoken and active, a quota would amount to little more than a paper reform. Indeed, without changing other aspects of Lebanese electoral law, a quota system would probably add a bunch of “yes women” to the flock of male sheep that is Lebanon’s legislature.”

The question of “marital rape” also continues to make a mockery of current Lebanese laws.  Male rapists may rape at will since their crime is not defined as rape in the first place just so long as long as they are married to the woman they rape or if they subsequently propose marriage to their victims.

Nearly impossible as it is to believe, some in Lebanon’s Parliament such as Imad Hout told The Beirut Daily Star last month that  “[t]here’s nothing called rape between a husband and a wife,” but only the act of “forcing someone violently to have intercourse.”

Whenever Parliament finally agrees to consider changing domestic relations law, it always ends up postponing serious consideration or a vote on proposals with a press release saying in effect, “This subject requires more study. Legislative action deferred.”

Palestinians need for basic civil rights including the right to work and to own a home

Due to an educational effort on the subject of civil rights for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon over the past few years, this issue is perhaps better known than the situation of domestic workers and women. But the urgent need to change Lebanese to grant Palestinians elementary civil rights is currently no closer to being achieved than are the above cases.

However,  given the recent increase in activism among all three communities and their increasing inclination to collaborate, there is reason for some optimism for all three segments of Lebanese society which are organizing with international and increased domestic support

Currently the most dynamic action at organizing and working for change is coming from women in the Palestinian community. Long marginalized from key roles in the refugee camp “popular committees” Palestinian women in several of the 12 camps are challenging the male domination of the camps.  This is particularly true in Bedawwi and Nahr al Bared camps in north Lebanon where Palestinian NGO’s such as Najdeh (“help”) are training and supporting women’s empowerment and urging them get involved in camp management since women best know the needs of the families and how to relate to them.

This dynamism is encouraging domestic workers to organize as well as offering support for women’s groups to demand their rights.  The coming months may see more formal alliances among Lebanon’s most marginalized and wretched groups–domestic workers, women and Palestinian refugees. With growing civil society support for their efforts they may finally achieve the dismantling of archaic Lebanese laws and attitudes.

Rick Warren Once Again Caught Up In Controversy, Part 2

Plastic pastors transparent enough to see through, like Joel Osteen, are not as dangerous as Rick Warren. Modalistic moguls of the painfully-obvious-money-hungry prosperity movement, like T.D. Jakes, are not as dangerous as Rick Warren. Self-serving sorcerers of the false signs and wonders movement, like Todd Bentley, are not as dangerous as Rick Warren. No. None of the before-mentioned personalities or groups are all that dangerous because what you see is what you get. They all lack the ability to change their appearance to accommodate a change in environment. They lack the chameleon-like ability, the self-serving ability, to say what needs to be said in order to keep people in every camp liking them.—Tony Miano

In part 1 I brought you up to speed on what some “watchbloggers” refer to as “Kingsway-gate.”  I’m guessing we haven’t heard the end of this mess.  However, this matter and many others commented on in part 1 have helped to earn Rick Warren the title: Teflon Pastor.  So we shall see what happens with Kingsway-gate.

Common ground in the love of God…or god?

Most likely Saddleback Church congregants are unaware that their pastor signed a controversial document produced by the Yale Center for Faith and Culture titled Loving God and Neighbor Together: A Christian Response to a Common Word Between Us and You.  In July 2008 Christian and Muslim leaders gathered at Yale University for a conference to promote understanding and peace between Christians and Muslims. The letter urged the two faiths to find “common ground” in the love of God.   Since Christians and Muslims do not believe in the same God, one wonders which God we’re to find common ground with.

The Christian Post reported that Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “disagreed with key points raised in the letter because he felt they compromised the Christian faith [and] amid calls for love in a common God, the letter ‘failed to clearly define the Christian understanding of God as the trinity.’”

So why would any serious Christian sign a document that did not clearly define the Trinity?

Rick Warren claims he believes in the Trinity and we must take him at his word on this.  But to what extent does his belief in the Trinity come through in his ministry to Muslims?  Does he keep his Trinitarian belief close to the vest so as not to offend them?  Or is he forthcoming in his belief that there is one true God who exists in three co-equal, co-eternal, and co-existent Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?  If his Muslim friends cannot understand his view of the Godhead, perhaps he’s not bothering to explain it to them.

The Christian Post report revealed some of the notable leaders at the conference:

Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad of Jordan; former Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi of Sudan; Geoff Tunnicliffe, CEO and international director of World Evangelical Alliance; Leith Anderson, president of NAE; and Antonios Kireopoulos of the National Council of Churches. A handful of Jewish leaders will also attend the conference.

Scroll through the list of signatories and you’ll discover several other notable leaders (theological liberals) such as Emerging church proponents Brian McLaren, Tony Jones and Scot McKnight; prosperity evangelist David Yonggi Cho; one of the “seeker-sensitive” architects, Bill Hybles; Richard Mouw, President, Fuller Theological Seminary; David Neff, Editor in Chief, Christianity Today; gospel of self-esteem sageRobert Schuller; Marxist sympathizer Jim Wallis (mentioned in part 1); and of course Rick Warren.

Certainly biblical unity can be a good thing, but as Phil Johnson reminds us:

The concept of “unity”  commonly touted today has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘being in full accord and of one mind’ (Philippians 2:2). Instead, it is a broad, visible, ecumenical homogeneity without boundaries.  And that is nothing like the biblical concept of unity.

What did Jesus say regarding unity?  “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34).

Global peace, at last

April 17, 2005 speaking before 30,000 at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Rick Warren breathlessly proclaimed his plan:

The bottom line is that we intend to reinvent mission strategy in the 21st century.  As I stated, this will be a new Reformation.  The First Reformation returned us to the message of the original church.  It was a reformation of doctrine – what the church BELIEVES.  This Second Reformation will return us to the mission of the original church.  It will be a reformation of PURPOSE – what the church DOES in the world.

Our goal will be to enlist one billion foot soldiers for the Kingdom of God, who will permanently change the face of international missions to take on these five ‘global giants’ for which the church can become the ultimate distribution and change agent to overcome Spiritual emptiness, Self-serving Leadership, Poverty, disease and ignorance . (Online source)

Warren put forth his program for global Christian dominion.  He also encouraged the crowd, the majority of them Christians, to adopt the same sort of dedication shown by followers of Hitler, Lenin, and Mao.

The New Apostolic Purpose Driven Reformation

As Rick Warren reveals the details of his global agenda, more and more Christians are expressing concern over it.  And so are liberals.  In fact liberals are so uneasy over what he and other dominionists are doing that the New Apostolic Research Group was formed.  Far-left blogger Bruce Wilson is part of it.  In a 2009 column Wilson declared:

Both C. Peter Wagner and Rick Warren want to transform the world, and both [1,2] have proclaimed the advent of a second Reformation. Wagner calls it the New Apostolic Reformation, while for Rick Warren this is a “purpose driven” effort powered by Warren’s global P.E.A.C.E. Plan. In Uganda both visions for societal transformation appear to include the categorical elimination of homosexuality – by any means.

By any means?  Hyperbole, I presume. As a committed lefty, Bruce Wilson fully supports the radical homosexual agenda to normalize sodomy and other aberrant behavior.

Wilson continues:

Rick Warren wrote his 1993 dissertation for a Doctorate of Ministry from Fuller Theological Seminar, under Wagner’s supervision. It is titled New Churches For a New Generation: Church Planting to Reach Baby Boomers. In his 2008 book “Dominion”, C. Peter Wagner describes the process through which this brand of Christianity can take dominion over government and society, and Wagner claims that this can be done within a democratic framework. Wagner clearly states that Rick Warren’s global P.E.A.C.E. Plan is an example of “stage one”: 

Wagner is the Convening Apostle in a movement of charismatic “relational networks” which has extended its reach from the United States to Uganda, and worldwide. Under its umbrella of authority are virulently anti-gay apostles in the United States and Uganda including Lou Engle of TheCall, who led thousands of young people in a twelve hour November 1, 2008 stadium rally in support of California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition Eight. The San Diego event closed with Engle, a member of Wagner’s inner circle of “prophets,” calling for Christian martyrs. Wagner’s plans include reorganizing charismatic Christianity under the authority of these apostles and prophets. (links in original) (Online source)  

Wilson has done his homework on the NAR.  Unbelievably, most Christians have not taken this movement seriously even though these false teachers have united with the Christian Right, politicians, rock-star pastors, entertainers, radio personalities, and a host of Christian leaders.  Likewise, New Age Mormon Glenn Beck has weaseled his way into these groups.  (Learn more about the NAR here.)

Growing a church

In Break Through These 3 Barriers to Growth “Coach” Warren outlines three essentials for breaking through the barriers to church growth. Following is barrier #2:

You must change the primary role of the pastor from minister to leader.

What’s the difference? In leadership, you take the initiative; in ministry, you respond to the needs of others. When someone calls and you pick up the phone, that’s ministry. When you pick up the phone and call someone, that’s leadership. Typically, you learn ministry skills in seminary, but you learn leadership skills in seminars. Pastoring is a balance. Here are five skills you must learn if your church is going to grow:

…Learn to communicate your vision.

…Learn the ability to motivate through messages.

…Learn how to equip for ministry. If you don’t learn how to coach, you will not be able to equip. And, if you do not equip, you will burn out in ministry.

…Learn how to raise money. Those who write the agenda must also be able to underwrite it.

…Learn the skill of managing your time and energy.

What about Rick Warren’s view of growing a church?  In Ordinary Pastors, part 2: A Biblical Definition of Ministry C. J. Mahaney defines pastoral ministry thusly:

Pastoral ministry that is pleasing to God is not ultimately about gifting, influence, or even fruitfulness. It is not about how many books you have written, which conferences invite you to speak, or how many of your sermons are downloaded on iTunes. It is not even about whether your church membership numbers grow or shrink. Pastoral ministry that is pleasing to God is about faithfulness to the charge of 2 Timothy 4. You and I are called to be faithful to this charge.

For the record, here’s what Paul said in 2 Timothy 4:1-5:

I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry.

Peace + unity = universalism

In part 1, I pointed out that Rick Warren serves on the advisory board of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and that the foundation’s goal is to unify the world’s major religions.  Following is Warren’s explanation for serving:

The vision and values of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation are desperately needed today…. In any effort to help people learn to live and work together, we must engage the vast networks, resources, wisdom, and influence of the faith communities. My friends, [Roman Catholic] Tony Blair is uniquely prepared with the gifts of temperament, knowledge, experience, leadership, and global respect essential for a task this great. I honestly don’t know of anyone better suited for this challenge. It’s why I agreed to serve on the Advisory Board. The Tony Blair Faith Foundation’s potential for doing good is staggering.

What is staggering is that a Protestant pastor has no problem with a Catholic’s plan to unite all religious faiths.  In a piece I wrote titled Damnable heresies invading the church I touched on the push for unity:

What Warren is purporting is ecumenicism. Actually, we are moving beyond ecumenicism intointerspirituality (interfaith spirituality) or interdenominational cooperation.  “In the name of peace and unity,” says Ray Yungen, “the world’s religions are more and more joining together. And with that joining together will come a consensus that it is narrow minded and even hateful to say there is only one way to salvation.”

Peace and unity has a nice ring to it. But traditional, historic, evangelical Christianity holds that there is only one path to God, one door to enter through. Peter left no doubt when he said, “Salvation is found in no one else” (Acts 4:10). (Also see John 3:16, John 6:66-68, John 14:6, Acts 16:30-31, 1 Tim 2:3-6, 1 John 2:1)  The Bible clearly teaches that all paths do not lead to God.  Those who take a different path will spend eternity in hell.  So the loving thing for a committed Christian to do is to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the lost.  In fact, Jesus commanded His followers to go out into the world and spread the good news.   Those who keep the good news to themselves fail to understand that God gives no second chances.  Jesus said, “Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Mat. 7:22).

My reason for this article (part 1&2) is to highlight some very concerning issues related to Rick Warren.  Each of the concerns that were identified could have been substantially expanded upon and if that is the readers’ desire there are links and references that will help one to do that.  My purpose has been to urge his followers and supporters to be like the Bereans who “were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11).

In these dark days ahead, God’s people must be watchful and discerning. We must “Prove [test] all things; hold fast that which is good” (1Thes 5:21).

Recommended articles and videos:

Read Part 1
Articles by Joseph Farah of Worldnet Daily:
The purpose-driven lie—11/16/06
Rick Warren on Syria: ‘A moderate country’–11/26/06
Listen to what Rick Warren said about Syria in an audio version of the video message his church pulled down from YouTube after it was exposed by Farah
There you go again, Rick Warren–12/26/06
Rick Warren’s distortions of reality—12/13/07
“One wonders if Pastor Warren’s discussions with President Assad about peace included a presentation of the Gospel of peace through Jesus Christ, as promoted in the author’s new P.E.A.C.E. Plan. The opportunity for an evangelical leader to meet with the head of a terror regime is rare.” –Lawrence E. Ford, Sr., Institute for Creation Research
Videos
John MacArthur on the Purpose Driven Life
Who’s Driving the Purpose Driven Church
Rick Warren’s SHAPE acronym is explained
Articles
Articles on the New Apostolic Reformation—On Solid Rock Resources

Palestinian Children: Born In Captivity

Suppose that you are a cute little baby panda or an adorable newborn lion cub that has been born inside a zoo.  What happens to you next?  Most likely, you will grow up in a zoo and die in a zoo.

But human babies are different from animal babies.  It is against the law to keep human babies caged up in a zoo.

Even homeless poverty-stricken American pregnant women who have been sent to jail for whatever — after giving birth behind bars, even their children aren’t forced to remain in captivity and caged up like their moms.  Americans are much more humane than that.

Even the poor Sudanese refugee Lost Boys weren’t allowed to be caged.  Thousands of them were given good educational opportunities and offered good homes in the United States.

Even the approximately seven million Afghan and Iraqi orphans created by Bush, Cheney and Obama are still being allowed a modicum of freedom once in a while http://www.afceco.org/.

But Palestinian children?  No such luck.  They are born in captivity, they grow up in captivity and they die in captivity — just because someone else wants their land.

But even sadder still is the fact that most zoo animals are treated more humanely than Palestinian children.  Palestinian children’s keepers think nothing of shooting, bombing, starving and siccing dogs on these captive kids, housed in open-air prisons such as Gaza and Ni’lin.  Captive baby lions and pandas never have to endure anything even remotely as horrible as this.

A lot of folks in America are currently very upset right now because of Joseph Kony’s war crimes against children in mineral-rich Uganda http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-march-12-2012/my-little-kony – but am I the only person on FaceBook today who also gets upset when Bush, Obama, AIPAC, the U.S. Congress and Netanyahu commit war crime after war crime against the captive children of Palestine?

Perhaps we should make a viral video that will make Bush, Obama, AIPAC, the U.S. Congress and Netanyahu famous for their war crimes against children as well.

America’s Addiction to War and Madness

Some historians say the brutal Russian dictator Joseph Stalin said, “God is on the side of the biggest guns.”

Stalin killed something on the magnitude of 24 million people by various means during his reign of terror.  Hitler killed six million along with untold wreckage of humanity.  Estimates show Mussolini killed around 11 million people.  Some African brute in Sudan named Kony killed tens of thousands as announced by Facebook followers trying to stop him.

In the Muslim world, men execute 5,000 women annually for dishonoring the family.  Honor killings can be committed if a woman in anyway displeases her husband or wears jeans or steps out of the house on her own or in any way angers her father or husband. Thousands of other Muslim women suffer from acid being thrown in their faces.  In other words, methodically killing people ensures dominance.

Ten years ago, our own “brutal” President George W. Bush “snapped” and sent, thus far, over two million U.S. soldiers into Iraq and Afghanistan to give goat herders and tribesmen a piece of “shock and awe.”  Results:  over 100,000 civilians killed, hundreds of thousands of children left without families, 2.5 million Iraqi refugees and a completely devastated civilization left in tatters.

Last week, after four deployments in Afghanistan, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales “mentally and emotionally snapped.” He executed 16 women and children.  When the inquiry finishes, it will be found that Bates lost his mind, went insane, or suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and transitory brain injury. He’ll be executed or sent to prison for life.

Yet who really stands on the guilty platform for these wars and all their atrocities?  Answer: George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, the Military Industrial Complex, bankers and the apathetic American people.  That’s who!

Do Bush, Obama or the U.S. military junta care about the individual carnage they perpetrate on millions of Iraqi people or  third world countries like Afghanistan,  filled with tribesmen and sheep herders?

No! Why? Answer: money! Loads and lots of it lining a bunch of corporate and banker pockets!  If the big money people had their way, they would carry on the wars for another 10 to 20 years ad infinitum.

How can they do that?  Answer: they feed off the apathy and non-involvement of  the American people.  The “Great Silent Majority” of the 60s continues today.  With a volunteer Army, the MIC enjoys a never ending supply of naïve and gung-ho kids for their cannon fodder.  Without conscription, no one complains. That’s why Bales as well as millions of combat veterans, in varying degrees, suffer mental and emotional illness brought about by war. (200,000 Vietnam vets committed suicide upon returning home. And counting!)

Why did Bales kill all those people?  I remember my own U.S. Army Infantry training at E82 at Fort Benning, Georgia in June, July of 1968.  My drill instructor, Sgt. Pierce screamed into our ears, “What is your call as an infantry soldier?”

“To kill drill sergeant,” we screamed back.

“I can’t hear you,” he screamed at us.

“To kill drill sergeant,” we screamed back louder.

The U.S. Army teaches young men to kill.  It does not teach or support mental, emotional or moral health techniques.

After the Korean, Vietnam, Desert Storm and Iraq wars, is there any question that the United States of America and her people suffer addiction to wars?  Give any excuse such as the “Dominos effect” or “Gulf of Tonkin” or “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and our citizens cheer our military onward to killing and destroying some supposed enemy 10,000 miles away.

American presidents, through their soldiers, have killed millions of Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis and Afghans.

It’s really immoral and unprincipled on SO many levels.

It’s like the spurious “War on Drugs” for the past 41 years.  The U.S. government has thrown  37 million kids into jail for smoking a joint.   That’s 37 million ruined lives. In the meantime alcohol and cigarettes kill over 500,000 Americans a year for the past 41 years.  Example: 460,000 annually from lung cancer and 40,000 from traffic and liver deaths give or take a few, not to mention the wife beatings and child abuse from alcohol.   It’s absolutely insane how utterly thick we are as a people to carry on such madness.

Sgt. Bales’ wife, Karilyn Bales, bringing up two kids on her own, wrote a poignant diary of her tribulations as an Army wife.  Her gripping story should be told, but it will be forgotten while the Main Stream Media feeds off Sgt. Bales’ tragedy . (Look for “GI wife’s blog captured worry and sacrifices” by Karilyn Bales in the New York Times by Matt Flegenheimer, March 18, 2012.)

In the meantime, George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama enjoy their wealth, families and their status.  They will remain “untainted and untouched” from the wars they started and continue.  The lives of millions will suffer death and destruction not to mention ongoing misery and mental illness by Iraqis and Afghans.

As to our U.S. Army veterans, who will undo the slogan “To kill drill sergeant!” from their minds and hearts?  Those veterans were once some mother and father’s precious children just like yours—each important by their very essence.

Finally, we, the American people stand guilty with our disinterest and apathy to these 10 year wars.  I haven’t seen any mothers and fathers marching on Washington DC to stop these wars.  In the 60s, the college kids marched to stop Vietnam because they didn’t want to die for nothing.  Today with volunteers, nobody gives a ******.  That’s why these wars continue for 10 bloody years.

How many of us have called up our senators demanding that we exit Iraq and Afghanistan?  Phone your senators:202-224-3121

Otherwise, Obama continues to conjure a war with Iran and the Military Industrial Complex licks its chops while the bankers smack their lips.  Once again, we will send millions of our kids into yet another combat zone via jingoistic fervor to create yet another Staff Sgt. Robert Bales who will kill because that is what the Army trained him to accomplish.   Ironically, we (you) the American people helped him.

How about a new way?  How about talking and listening to one another?  How about a “Department of Peace” to balance our “Department of Defense”?  How about the American people take a deep assessment at what the past four wars have accomplished?  Did those wars stop terror?  Did those wars create peace that we proclaim we desire?  Did those wars bring humanity to a higher moral and spiritual level?  If not, let’s intend peace.  Once we move toward peace, watch the “war paradigm” evaporate as we shift humanity to its highest and best.

“High principle is not bound adhering to low precedent,” said Dr. Ernest Holmes.

Changing Our Country Into Several Countries

Make no bones about it; America continues changing itself right before our eyes as we add another 125,000 third world immigrants every 30 days.  One to two million annually!  Our culture changes from its intelligent, rich and vibrant former self into a polyglot culture of illiteracy, violence to women and other aspects of “multiculturalism.”

A reader Helen related, “I live in Bridgeport, Connecticut and I feel I am in a foreign country.  I have lived here since I was 11 years old and am now 82 years old.  We have been invaded by the enemy.  This is not America anymore.  Every time I go to the market or to Burger King all the food is  foreign.  Clothes here are sexy looking and deep, stark colors for Hispanic women not tailored or feminine anymore for American women.  There are many changes here.  I notice that we also have a lot of Asian people here.  Naturally they are drawn to America because they can have more children here than the one allowed in China.  It is madness here.  White people are moving out of Bridgeport and the government that demanded that we integrate with the blacks cannot force whites to live with them because of all their violence and black culture.  Our taxes are building them new homes.  They are born here yet many cannot be understood when they speak.  Multiculturalism is a sham.”

In Detroit, Michigan, immigrant women suffer mistreatment from their husbands.  Arranged marriages grow while this new American tribe covers up honor killings as “domestic abuse” incidents.

In the latest edition of Newsweek’s My Turn (March 12, 2012), Pakistani immigrant Sabatina James said, “When I was 18, my parents threatened to kill me.  And they meant it. If they had their way, I would probably be dead today.  My parents shipped me off to Islamic school to “get educated” as my mother said. I lived in a room with 30 other girls, no chairs, not beds and no ventilation.  In that room, we did nothing all day but study the Koran, pray and listen to lectures on the prophet from a mullah, who stood behind a curtain. If a girl spoke out of turn, she would be publically caned in the courtyard.  Flies and vermin swarmed the washrooms. There were no sanitary napkins, just blood stained towels. The toilet was a hole in the ground.

“When I refused an arranged marriage, I sparked a violent war with my mother and a threat to my life.  When you’re becoming a mature woman and your mother is beating you, it’s very damaging.”

This kind of violence is happening in Germany, Uk, France, Norway, Sweden, Holland and now in the United States with recent immigrants from the Middle East.

Last week, in southern California, now known as Mexifornia by Victor Davis Hanson, one writer Priscilla said, “’We are creating a polyglot society where we will essentially be strangers in our own land.’  This is how I feel driving into Perris, California!  The new foreigners won’t even look me in the eye. They are probably all illegally here! Driving in our freeways and living in our cities. I am so angry! We Americans can tell who is who! Do these leaders think we are blind?”

Priscilla reported to me about a race riot at a local high school where the Mexicans and blacks pounded on each other. Over 30 cop cars arrived to quell the riot.  She said, “It at first was reported to be a racial fight and then the media changed it to a tagging fight. These are usually fights between blacks and Latinos.  For more details:

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/los_angeles&id=8572595

In his book, Suicide of a Superpower by Patrick Buchanan, he said, “America is disintegrating. The centrifugal forces pulling us apart are growing inexorably. What unites us is dissolving. And this is true of Western Civilization…. meanwhile; the state is failing in its most fundamental duties. It is no longer able to defend our borders, balance our budgets, or win our wars.”

When he said, “What unites us is dissolving,”  he means that we were once “one” people with a shared and common history—meaning blacks, whites and browns. 

Today, we continue injecting endless millions from places like Somalia, China, India, Brazil, Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan and hundreds of other cultures that possess nothing in common with Americans.

Buchanan said, “We are trying to create a nation that has never before existed, of all the races, tribes, cultures and creeds of Earth, where all are equal. In this utopian drive for the perfect society of our dreams we are killing the real country we inherited — the best and greatest country on earth.”

If you want this deformation of our country to continue, simply do nothing. Take no action. Demand no moratorium on all immigration.  Do not stand up. Do not speak out.  Remain in your “Illusion of Permanency.”

Within the next 38 years, with an added 100 million immigrants, you will get your wish and America will no longer be America.

Is Kony 2012 The Right Thing To Do?

By now, most people who pay attention to the news are likely aware of the Kony 2012 film and campaign. Launched by the non-profit organization Invisible Children (IC), the campaign shines a light on Joseph Kony, a leader of the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group that has terrorized Uganda since 1986. The LRA kidnapped children from their homes, and turned the girls into sex slaves and the boys into child soldiers. According to Wikipedia, “[a]n estimated 66,000 children became soldiers and two million people have been internally displaced since 1986″ under Kony’s brutal reign in Uganda.

In 2005, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Kony for war crimes, but he has yet to be captured. Kony is believed to currently reside in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, or Southern Sudan.

Through the Kony 2012 campaign, IC hopes to raise Kony’s profile worldwide in hopes of finding him and bringing him to justice. And opinions on this tactic are diverse.

Some are criticizing the campaign as being another case of the white man trying to save black people. (The filmmaker and narrator is a white man, with his prominently featured little blond-haired boy.) IC addresses this by pointing out that 95% of IC’s leadership and staff on the ground are Ugandans, not white people from America.

Raising other issues is Victor Ochen, director for the African Youth Initiative Network (AYINET) – Uganda, and himself a survivor of the LRA’s war in Uganda. In a recent article, Ochen suggests that the problem is not as straightforward as IC’s film might imply. He says that “much more needs to be done.”

“In particular,” says Ochen, “there is a need for much greater protection of civilians in South Sudan and the DRC and Central African Republic where the LRA is now active. Furthermore, many of the devastating effects of the war between the LRA and the Government of Uganda have still not been addressed in northern Uganda, even though the LRA has not been active here since 2006. These include the most serious physical and mental health effects, the weakening of key social and protective services, the nearly complete absence of remedy for harms suffered, and an utter lack of accountability.”

“Second,” Ochen continues, “as someone whose brother and cousin were abducted and who are among the thousands of disappeared whose fate is unknown, I join with other Ugandans who hope our relatives are still in captivity and will come back home alive. Any advocacy aimed at military bombardment of the LRA rebels remains therefore very sensitive throughout northern Uganda, and I imagine the DRC and South Sudan and Central African Republic as well, because thousands of children and adults have been abducted and have still not come home yet. My own father is deeply traumatized due to my brother and cousin’s abduction, and every time he hears about any report of killing LRA rebels he is not sure whom they have killed and wonders if people are celebrating his beloved son’s death. These are the feelings many families have. I agree that Kony must be stopped as soon as possible. However, it must be done in a way that avoids further civilian casualties and the loss of the lives of innocent children. Raising potentially false expectation such as arresting Kony in 2012 will not rebuild the lives of the people in northern Uganda. Rebuilding communities and rehabilitating victims is what we need. The stronger survivors become, the less Kony remains an issue. Restoration of communities devastated by Kony is a greater priority than catching or even killing him.”

On the other hand, Human Rights Watch makes the point that “[a]rresting Kony and other LRA leaders would reaffirm that those who commit mass atrocities will face justice, and it would end the scourge of one of Africa’s most brutal groups.”

Amnesty International has addressed one of Ochen’s concerns by stating that any efforts to arrest Kony must respect human rights. “Anyone joining the Kony 2012 campaign should insist that efforts to arrest Joseph Kony must respect human rights,” said Erwin van der Borght, Amnesty’s Africa director. “It is also vital to make sure that any action ensures the protection of civilians in the surrounding areas.”

So clearly there is more to the problem than just finding Kony by making him famous, as IC hopes to do. But, if finding him and bringing him to justice are done carefully and properly, supported by recovery efforts to aid his victims, it would be a huge step forward for the people of central Africa who have suffered long enough.

Is Kony 2012 FRAUD? Just Asking Questions!
Kony 2012 Video is Misleading
KONY 2012 ~ A Powerful SCAM?

The Butchers’ Ball: Dancing with NATO, Gaddafi, Assad & Jesus

Poor Muammar Gaddafi.  That man was an idiot and deserved what he got.  Why?  Because Gaddafi had put all his eggs in one basket — and actually believed that the use of extreme violence would always win in the end.   The man had learned NOTHING from history.

Historically, the use of violence has only and always led to the constantly-escalating use of even more violence, more killing and more money being spent on guns instead of butter — resulting in a severely down-graded “homeland,” with more decayed infrastructure, more uneducated school children, more rotting teeth, more unhappy citizens, less security and, eventually, the decline of civilization as we know it.

Whenever your average citizen sees his or her nation’s leaders regularly spending over a million dollars just on the purchase of only one tank — while the citizens themselves get no benefits from said violence except for crumbling schools, no jobs and no dental plans?   Then these people eventually do tend to get rather pissed off.  Plus isn’t it committing a big sin to kill?

As one Sudanese general — who killed thousands in southern Sudan so he could willingly hand over his country’s oil properties to Pappy Bush — once said, “The best way to catch a fish is to drain the pond.”  Fine.  So then you drain it and you catch a few fish.   But now that pond is totally gone forever and no more fish will ever grow there again.  Ever.

And now even individual American cities are buying tanks instead of keeping their infrastructures safe and their schools open.  Is this really the best use of our funds?  In the long run, violence is never the best solution to problems.  Jesus was right after all.

Gaddafi obviously didn’t properly consider the possibility that violence will always lead to more violence — until nothing is left.  And now Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is also neglecting that simple equation as well.  Apparently Assad learned nothing from Gaddafi’s tragic end.  And apparently America, Britain, Israel, Saudi Arabia and NATO haven’t learned anything from it either.   The escalation of violence always eventually brings down the man behind the gun.  Always.  It may take years, decades or perhaps even centuries.  But that’s what always eventually happens.

That’s why we have presidents in Washington now and not Caesars.

Scottish journalist David Pratt just wrote a very interesting first-hand report about the rebellion against Assad in Syria,  and guess what?   Those rebels are totally pissed off at Assad.  According to Pratt, one rebel told him that, “I will keep fighting until we win or I am dead.  If Assad steps down and offers free and fair elections, then I would happily put down my gun.”

So Assad is now falling exactly into the same trap that Gaddafi fell into — by butchering dissenters and fueling the flames of violence.  Get a clue, Assad!  Hold the freaking elections!

America and NATO have no more business escalating violence in Syria than Assad has.  They seem to be acting like idiots too.  And it’s also idiotic for the corporate Goliahs who currently control Washington to escalate violence against their own dissenting American citizens as well.  However, that’s a whole other story — but one that will eventually end badly too.  Just ask Gaddafi.  Or Jesus.  Or the last Roman emperor.

According to British journalist Ziauddin Sardar, Bashar al-Assad, like Saddam Hussein before him, thinks like a Ba’athist — and Ba’athists basically believe in the establishment of an elite upper class that practices socialism for the rich and welfare for the wealthy.  Sound familiar?  Sound a lot like the corporate dudes who are now running Washington DC?  American Ba’athists.  Saddam would be so proud of us.

Let Your Life Be A Friction To Stop The Machine

Transcript

Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine…

Nightmare and insanity are akin: mysterious and involuntary states that skew and distort objective reality. One wakens from nightmare; from insanity there is no awakening.

Whether Americans live in the one state or the other is the paramount question of this era.

For two hundred years Americans have been indoctrinated with a mythology created, imposed and sustained by a manipulating cabal: the financial elite that built its absolute control on the muscle and blood, good will, ignorance and credulity, of its citizenry.

America began with the invasion of a populated continent and the genocide of its native people. Once solidly established, it grafted enslavement of another race onto that base.

With those two pillars of state firmly in place it declared itself an independent nation in a document that nobly proclaimed the equality of all mankind.

In that act of monumental hypocrisy America’s myth had its beginning.

* * *

A Constitution was written that came to be regarded as American Holy Writ. Its central purposes were to defend private property and suppress mass democracy. It has fulfilled both those mandates beyond the wildest dreams of its creators.

Once the existing oligarchy was secure in law and native people largely exterminated, the ruling class increased its wealth and power fantastically in the 19^th century, using the government as its enabler, exploiting to the limit the device of chartered corporations.

With its phenomenal money power, the financial elite began to use the military to expand its sway beyond the continent. Regions, territories, islands, and whole countries were annexed, invaded, and possessed outright, their peoples crushed, suppressed, and ruled.

Because ordinary Americans, like any people, need to believe that whatever the ruling elite undertakes in their nation’s name must be essentially benevolent, noble in purpose and justified in fact, the myth had to be radically modified for imperial expansion.

The foundational story was that Americans had come to a howling wilderness teeming with godless savages and, through invincible strength of character and purity of purpose, had tamed the land and honorably earned the right to possess their bountiful home.

In the era of extra-territorial expansion that version was polished to justify and ennoble imperialism. The new corollary was that America could not ignore colonialist brutality but was obliged, by the Manifest Destiny that led us to civilize our own continent, to carry our mission into barbaric darkness wherever tyranny created abuse and suffering.

A national myth that absolutely binds the loyalty of a people to its government must be a subtle and powerful elixir that elevates and aggrandizes that people’s self-regard. National policy will then appear to be an extension of its superior citizenry’s inchoate will, and the basis for a justified arrogance toward the lesser world.

The simple, powerful myth of America’s altruistic and heroic benevolence, shaped and maintained by the financial/political power elite, infused Americans with a deep and outrageously hubristic sense of racial superiority that, mobilized behind various imperial enterprises, has given all such adventures the character of a quasi-religious crusade. In this way insatiable imperialism acquires the apparent moral perfection of a syllogism.

* * *

With WWII, the world was reconfigured. American Capitalism emerged supreme from the horror that had virtually wrecked its capitalist partners. The Soviet Union, though, having absorbed by far the greatest devastation from Nazi Germany, had astonishingly risen above its ruin to become the leading challenger to America as a world power.

This challenge was not competitive, it was systemic: Soviet Communism was a direct threat to American hegemony in that it categorically refuted the philosophical basis of Predatory Capitalism. Grounded in Marx and Lenin, it attacked Capitalism’s inherent evils, monstrous inequities and flagrant injustices that, exacerbated by speculation, exploitation and fraud, would destroy it. And it promoted world revolution to that end.

This face-off of giants in the Cold War necessitated further refinement of the American myth. Now, instead of simply intervening in situations where despotism or tyranny required America to forcefully implant our just and ethical democracy, America had to become the shield and bulwark of the sacred capitalist system in which “free enterprise” was magically and increasingly identified with democracy and equally to be defended.

This version prevailed through many surrogate confrontations around the globe in the era of Mutually Assured Destruction and survived even the debacle of Vietnam, lasting until the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the propaganda stream became ever more intense and pervasive. On radio and television Americans were subjected to an unrelenting barrage of hyper-patriotism in which American moral superiority was a given, and America’s self-touted courage, generosity and decency were its unchallengeable proofs.

The implosion of the Soviet Union left America, in its own terminology, the “Sole Superpower in a Unipolar World”. This, however, did not result in diminution of the myth. The practical effect of having no doomsday enemy–China couldn’t plausibly be cast in that role then–was to supercharge it by increasing its element of pure, hubristic ego. America was no longer just called upon to defend the “Free World” from monstrous heresy; it was now, by virtue of its universally acknowledged, beatific “exceptionalism”, required to oversee and police it in the interests, and for the benefit, of lesser nations.

* * *

“Power corrupts”, said Lord Mahan, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

When the only rival and counterweight to American power disintegrated there was a sense within the American power elite that the opportunity existed, for the first time in history, for one country to absolutely dominate and effectively control the entire world.

This consensus was expressed in a policy statement composed by a cadre of major right-wing political players representing massive corporate capitalist interests called the Project for a New American Century. This triumphalist manifesto laid out a plan for absolute American access and control of essential resources and raw materials worldwide, to be guaranteed by the military which would enforce Full Spectrum Dominance.

The American Myth, which had seemed to have lost momentum and its animating principle in the totally unexpected so-called Cold War “victory”, was now re-energized with a less defensive and reactive essence, and given the glowing radiance and patina of a true and, for the first time, self-professed and articulated, imperial mission.

The attack on the Towers, an unimaginable provocation, was the trigger mechanism for the explosive launch of the effort to impose that imperial model in practice on the world.

* * *

It has been without question the most spectacular failure in the history of American misadventure. After a decade marked by the waste of trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives, the stunning bankruptcy of our internally burglarized nation, and a consequent recession more fundamentally damaging than the Great One, Imperial America has nothing to show for the botched folly of its arrogant overreach but unequivocal disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, with no end of madness in sight.

An impartial observer would have to say that the hypnotic hold of the American Myth on the loyalty of the people has led only to disgrace and disaster, and set a direct course to inevitable imperial decline and ruin. That would be inarguable on any rational basis, but it entirely mistakes the motive for, and the purpose of, the myth. The American Myth was never intended to serve the interests either of our country or of our people: it was created solely to buttress, shield, and exalt the ruling financial class. It has done that with astonishing and unbroken success that staggers the imagination from our earliest days.

The massive looting of Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan war funding to enrich the Corporate Tyranny—for that is what it has become—is on an unique scale of its own, without anything remotely comparable to its flagrant obscenity in the whole long history of war.

Neither the Pentagon nor any branch of the U.S. government can give any accounting whatever of the many billions of tax-generated dollars that have vanished, evaporated. There is no doubt but that beyond the outrageously inflated, no-bid contracts handed to giant corporate favorites with their preposterous guaranteed profits, much of the money was simply stolen in bulk by, through, or in spite of the military, and distributed among thieves and accomplices, some of it on huge pallets… for convenience, presumably.

* * *

While this wholesale robbery was going on under the oversight of the military abroad, the Corporate Tyranny had evolved a whole set of impenetrably complex devices for the generation of money without any economically productive source or result at home.

The sole driving force and purpose of Capitalism is the realization of profit. According to that calculus, reducing production costs increases profit margin. This leads to the obvious conclusion that as production costs near zero, profit is maximized.

There is no provision for social good in Capitalist theory. Corporations, created to optimize business opportunity through efficient specialization, were originally required to operate for public benefit but that provision was quickly finessed and forgotten.

American law courts have always favored corporate concentrations of wealth since they, like the Congress, exist to serve the moneyed interests. The American Myth was created to provide cover for the financial oligarchy to exploit the country and the citizenry, and the judiciary has consistently cooperated in ruling for corporations against the people.

Indeed, without ever considering the question in law, the Supreme Court long ago endowed corporations with “personhood”, that is with all rights of human beings under our Constitution. The way this travesty occurred–the slipshod by-product of an obliquely related case–shows that the court preferred to incorporate this perversion of the plain intent of the 14^th amendment as an unexamined assumption rather than risk an eventual test which would unquestionably have created violent public outrage.

Given the collusion of Congress and the courts in securing legal invulnerability for the Corporate Tyranny and the principle that the only duty of corporations is maximization of profit, it was not surprising that megabanks, huge brokerage houses, giant insurance conglomerates, gilded hedge funds and the credit agencies pretending to certify their work, all engaged in massive and systemic fraud and deception for just that purpose. The result was the crash of ’08, the recession, and the stunning and unprecedented rescue and bailout of the biggest banks, investment houses, and insurance and credit conglomerates with taxpayer dollars. So much for the hallowed Invisible Hand of the Free Market…

* * *

The last decades have seen two related megatrends in American geopolitical mechanics, both with dire effects on the power of the American Myth. First, what belief the world at large had in it has been shattered by a catastrophic series of imbecile and irretrievable military failures and disasters, which has caused erosion of its efficacy at home. Second, in response to this, the State has made increasingly crude efforts to boost the Myth’s waning power by the imposition of totalitarian methods of surveillance, intimidation and coercion on the American people to a degree unprecedented in scope and scale.

The whole clanking, medieval apparatus of Homeland Security that has sprouted like an enormous poison fungus since 9/11 with its brutal police state mindset; the odious Patriot Act with its flagrant subversions of the Bill of Rights; the endless, fantasy-based terror-peddling of the prostitute corporate media with its clowns and harpies churning irrational fear and anger in the uninformed: all this grim, repressive endeavor is a concerted attempt to distract Americans from the real causes of their injury, abuse, and oppression.

And yet, even with the American Myth now totally and irreparably blown full of holes and exposed demonstrably for the tissue of lies, deceptions and frauds that it has always been, it somehow keeps its phenomenal hold on the great mass of the American people. The tragic reality is that, for the majority, their own identities have been so deeply and thoroughly infused with the myth that to disbelieve it is to disbelieve in themselves.

* * *

So the American Myth is dead, and yet it lives on in its deadness, horribly masking our crapshot economy, our bankrupt debtors prison of a society, our Ghost Dance charade of kabuki democracy, while typhoons of impending social, economic and ecological disaster build their enormous, lightning-charged thunderheads above the dark future before us.

And what is it that the dead Myth still imperfectly obscures for Americans? What is outside and beyond the opaque wall of faltering, failing dishonesty and deception? What is the horror that the shoddy, tattered Myth has so long and so effectively concealed?

It is the world that has suffered unrelieved exploitation by the violence of our imperialist mania. It is the many wrecked and pillaged economies financially looted by our imposed predatory capitalist austerity regimes. It is the teeming hundreds of millions of starved, deprived and dying children sacrificed to Wall Street commodities gaming. It is the multitudes of humble, innocent, ignorant people, barely surviving in absolutist and dictatorial regimes propped up in their barbaric cruelty by our military while our banks siphon off the profits left after arming their brutal police and armies and bribing their ruling Kings, Sheikhs or Generals. It is the millions of dead and maimed in the raped populations of simple tribal people whom our indiscriminately murderous juggernaut has left in its bloody wake in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It is the appalling legacy of hate and repulsion, disdain and fear, that America has earned with its appalling hegemonist villainy in every corner of the world.

And at home, what is it we Americans have been so complicit in hiding from ourselves in our devotion to the perverse legend that has come to inhabit our souls like a succubus?

It is the millions of us with no work and no hope in middle age whose jobs and homes have been devoured by the heartless fraud machine of Wall Street. It is the trashed and demolished weedlots of our major cities eroding in crumbling, fire-gutted ruin. It is the many towns and cities with industries shut down and factories deserted or dismantled and shipped overseas. It is our decaying, disintegrating public schools, our bankrupt states and counties, our overtaxed, antiquated public transportation systems, our obsolete, dissolving infrastructure, our bloated, irrational prisons complex, our punishing and inadequate health care disaster, and over it all, the repressive mechanism of our police state, armed and empowered, ready for use against the American people themselves.

* * *

This is where we are. The great question now is whether we as a nation can awaken from this long historic nightmare and face the terrifying and exhilarating prospect of living in the full light of reality without the false props and dishonest constructs of a hoodwinked, herded and dishonored people or, whether we have internalized the falsity and disease to such an extent that it has become an organic, overmastering form of insanity?

In 1846, Henry David Thoreau, offended to his soul by the injustice of the American government’s invasion of Mexico, protested it and went to jail for his convictions. Later, in his essay On Civil Disobedience, he said this:

“If injustice is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

To attempt to break the hold of the American Myth will be a titanic, daunting challenge. To even begin to openly rebel against the might of the National Security State will require the courage to face much more than official disapproval and denunciation. Imperial America will not respond to even the most peaceful and orderly protest with anything less than hard police repression and the level of punishment will rise in relation to the scope and seriousness of the action undertaken.

Small protests will have no effect and will be meaningless. Organized mass events, when they occur, will draw the whole fiercely and brutally motivated National Security State apparatus down upon themselves. Americans, excepting those of our underclass who have felt it, have no experience with violent police or military repression. Those who commit peaceful civil disobedience, a first and innocent tactic of serious protest, will swiftly find out to their cost how it works. In a National Security State that has excised and eradicated all defensive laws and regulations intended to prevent abuse of the public, whatever the State does is legal. To such a pass have we in America come as a result of our long historic indoctrination in serving our financial elite, our Ruling Class.

To achieve any redemption for Americans, to make possible any more just, humane and life-honoring society, will require complete abandonment of the system of Predatory Capitalism. If offers no prospect of reform or improvement and we have all been witness to the idiocy of the so-called “democratic process” in action for generations now.

America is nearing the greatest crisis point in its history and the terrific cataclysm, when it happens, will determine the future our country is to have. If we cannot, in dominating numbers, rise to reject the heartless, mindless, soulless machine of Imperial Predatory Capitalism, we will be condemned to a fascistic command and control horror in which human beings are mere possessions of the State, units of production or service, and then perhaps not even that, as excess population in that brave, new world nay be eliminated.

That end is not inevitable. We are not lost. We are not even defeated because to this moment we have not engaged. We have not honored our responsibility as human beings. We have not risen to defend our humanity. We have let ourselves be ruled.

All around the world the thunder of vast and immeasurable discontent can be heard and felt. In Egypt and Spain, Jordan and Greece, Iraq and Sudan, Afghanistan and Ireland, Latin America, the Far East and Africa, the legitimate anger of humanity is expressing itself against the dead and killing hand of Predatory Capitalism and its agencies of violence. And here, in America, so long trapped and encapsulated, frozen like a fly in amber in a false religion of state idolatry, the anger is deep, widespread, and growing.

It is up to those who know and care to lead. As Thomas Paine said, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Nothing is guaranteed us. That can’t matter. We cannot be concerned with odds or outcomes. We cannot let the Machine of Injustice grind on. We must oppose it with all the moral force we own. We must act with quiet courage to confront a vicious tyrannical system that is destroying the earth, its life, and its people. We must put our lives on the line to oppose it.

The Nightmare Machine of rapacious exploitation has overthrown humanity’s decency and reason and its bloody inhuman treason flourishes over us. This must be ended.

Let your life be a friction now to stop the Machine.

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