Women Without Men: Problems in Iraq and in Berkeley

Recently an African-American friend of mine asked me a rather strange question. “Do you know what really annoys me?” he asked. I don’t know, what? That Obama sold out healthcare? The high price of gold? My current bad hair day? Sarah Palin pretending to be a populist? What? “It’s the way that some African-American women just look at me like I was a piece of fresh meat.” Oh dear. Do we really want to go there?

“Sometimes you can just see their minds working. ‘If I can just convince him that I’m sexy, then he’ll want me for my body and if he wants me badly enough, then he’ll marry me and then we can have children.’ I call it ‘Motherhood Fever’. And it just drives me nuts.”

I can get behind that. Babies are totally cute — and for a very good reason. They are purposely made that way in order to preserve the species. If a baby is cute enough, then you will be more likely to put up with all that diaper-changing and incessant crying and having to walk the floor with them at night.

In fact, I’m even about to bounce up to the local maternity hospital and ask them if I can volunteer in the baby nursery there. Why not? I’m a world record-holder for getting a collicky baby to smile — two minutes or less! You got a collicky one-month-old? Call me! I’m there! But I digress.

“These time-ticking lady baby machines don’t even see me as a person,” continued my friend. “It’s enough to put one off of sex forever. Whenever I see one of those women coming in those tight spandex dresses that show everything, all I want to do is run!” I used to be that way. I used to equate sex with love. Back in the 1960s, almost every man in Berkeley wanted me because I was HOT. But none of them loved me for myself. But then finally it dawned on me. Men DO NOT equate sex with love. Except perhaps for Tiger Woods. I totally understand where these women are coming from. I used to be that way too.

“Will somebody PLEEZE up the supply of eligible Black men so I can just get on with my life!” sighed my friend.

Hey, that’s easy to do. Let’s stop putting so many African-American men in jail for crimes that don’t involve others (such as Lil’ Wayne being jailed for smoking pot and owning guns — where is the NRA when you really need it?) and spend all the tax money we save on better schools and more jobs. Problem solved.

And then I got to thinking about how my friend’s situation might also apply to the men of Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps as many as one million men have been killed over there in the last nine years, plus, to quote a recent article in Yahoo News, “Cancer is spreading like wildfire in Iraq…. The cancer rate in the province of Babil, south of Baghdad, has risen from 500 diagnosed cases in 2004 to 9,082 in 2009.” Just think about that.

What if the women of Iraq and Afghanistan are now developing “Motherhood Fever” too? Then the counterinsurgents will not only have to be out fighting off the U.S. military all the time, but also they will have to be spending every spare moment fighting off prospective brides as well. With all that cat-fighting going on, it’s becoming like an Afghan version of “The Bachelor”.

I got an answer to that problem too. Just ship all the excess women that have been created by “war” in the Middle East off to China. There’s a vast shortage of women in rural China I’ve been told. Arab women would be appreciated in rural China. And I bet that African-American women would be appreciated there too. Heck, ship me off there as well — but I would prefer not to marry a farmer. Plowing ruins the nails.

PS: I think that white American women probably also have the same problem as African-American and Arab women. Apparently the toll on the number of eligible white American males as a result of the “wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan has been fairly high too — much higher than we think. There are a lot less American men than there used to be due to all those unnecessary Bush-Obama administration “wars” in the Middle East. If you don’t just count the soldiers who have died in-country but also count in all those soldiers who died after being evacuated, all the military suicides, all the victims of Gulf War Syndrome, all the violent deaths of victims of returned soldiers with PTSD and all the soldiers who nobody would want to marry anyway because they have already died inside their minds after returning from the horrors of those wars, then you have a significantly lower number of eligible white American men for all America’s desperate “Bachelorettes”.

According to Army Times, “Americans should prepare to accept hundreds of U.S. casualties each month in Afghanistan during spring offensives with enemy forces.” Then they quote Gen. Barry McCaffrey, an adjunct professor of international affairs at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point as saying, “What I want to do is signal that this thing is going to be $5 billion to $10 billion a month and 300 to 500 killed and wounded a month by next summer. That’s what we probably should expect. And that’s light casualties,”

Long-time war correspondent Lori Gricker just published a book entitled, “Afterwar: Veterans From a World of Conflict”. In Chris Hedges’ review of Gricker’s book in the Los Angeles Times, he stated that, “Those who pay the price, those who are maimed forever by war, are shunted aside, crumpled up and thrown away. They are war’s refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them…. The message they bring is too painful for us to hear.” But these huge numbers of American men who are no longer on the marriage market still exist.

“How many?” you might ask.

In 2007, blogger-activist Clive Boustred collected data from a Veterans Administration website and added up the figures. “On page 7 of the official VA report, the number of U.S. soldiers partaking in the illegal invasion of the Gulf is listed as 6,838,541 soldiers. Just below that the VA estimated number of living soldiers is listed at 4,525,865. In other words 2,312,676 US Gulf War Veterans are dead! Not many active duty soldiers serving from 1990 are likely to have died from old age or natural causes by April 2007. The report details deaths in various conflicts as reported to the VA by DoD, utterly contradicting the government and mainstream media number of 4,000 dead.”

With regard to the more recent Middle East “wars,” Boustred supplied the following information: “Total U.S. Military Gulf War Deaths: 73,846,” based on 17,847 deployed deaths and 55,999 non-deployed deaths. “Total number of disability claims filed: 1,620,906. Disability Claims amongst Deployed: 407,911. Total ‘Undiagnosed Illness’ (UDX) claims: 14,874. Disability Claims amongst Non-Deployed: 1,212,995.” And that number has probably risen considerably since 2007.

That’s a whole big bunch of non-eligible marriageable men!

According to journalist T. Christian Miller, there is also a big problem among contractors who worked abroad for such companies as Blackwater and KBR and came back disabled and maimed for life. Are they being counted too? Not according to Miller. In an article entitled, “Injured Abroad, Neglected at Home: Labor Dept. Slow to Help War Zone Contractors,” Miller stated that, “More than 1,600 civilian [contractors] have died and 37,000 have reported injuries.”

I myself wrote an article on the subject of injured returned contractors — regarding an acquaintance of mine named Dave Crow. Dave allegedly committed suicide after returning from Iraq, where he was exposed to toxic waste. Whether he killed himself or died some other way, Dave had become a “Dead Man Walking” from the moment he came home from Iraq. “I was only over there for four months,” he told me. “I was a truck driver for KBR. The money was good. But our camp was located over the site of a former depleted uranium dump and I got really sick. My body started just wasting away and now I’m weak, unhealthy, living in a trailer outside of San Diego and basically screwed up.” Our Dave is now dead. No wedding date for him.

PPS: in Argentina last month, I heard a lot of talk about the mistreatment of both soldiers and veterans of the Falkland Island wars. Apparently Argentina’s military dictatorship had wanted this war as a means of distracting people away from hatred of their totalitarian regime. So the dictatorship sent a bunch of ill-equipped and ill-trained young boys out to the Falklands in sub-zero-degree temperatures to die horrendous, painful and unnecessary deaths for no reason. These boys were not even given warm overcoats. Many — if not most — of them simply froze to death. Argentinians are still really pissed off about that — especially the women.

And if I was a young Afghan, Iraqi or American woman today, I would be pissed off too — and angry enough to put an end to all war!

PPS: If anyone knows how I could volunteer to help out in Haiti, please let me know. And if you want to make a donation, my friend Arla suggests this site:

Since its inception in March 2004, the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund (H.E.R.F.) has given concrete aid to Haiti’s grassroots democratic movement as they attempted to survive the brutal coup and to rebuild shattered development projects. We urge you to contribute generously, not only for this immediate crisis, but in order to support the long-run development of human rights, sustainable agriculture and economic justice in Haiti. ALL MONEY GOES DIRECTLY TO GRASS ROOTS ORGANIZATIONS.

There are two ways to donate: By Pay Pal at: < http://www.haitiaction.net/About/HERF/1_12_10.html>
or Mail — check made out to: “Haiti Emergency Relief Fund/EBSC”. Donations tax deductible. Send mail to:
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Ever Expanding Wars: An Appalling New Year Certainty

A message repeatedly making the rounds on the Internet shows a picture of an American airman, John Gebhardt, holding an injured Iraqi child on his lap and the accompanying text explains about his sympathetic provision of comfort to her and others. [1] In addition, the reason that it is all the rage, especially amongst neoconservatives, is that the senders can, in their minds, use the depiction to “prove” that U.S. military personnel undeniably have magnanimous intentions. Subsequently, the message indirectly substantiates their position that U.S. armed forces are overseas fighting wars solely to improve the lives of foreigners and protect American freedoms at home.

Yes, it is touching to see a kindly man reassure a youngster, but the scene and its description in no way verify anything altruistic about American motives in the Middle East. Indeed, both could serve to remind that the wounded child would not have been hurt with which to begin had U.S. warmongers not chosen Iraq as a site for a comprehensive invasion, one that should never have been initiated in the first place. They, also, stand in stark contrast to other renditions of U.S. troop actions, which run the gamut from selflessly heroic to atrociously horrific.

For example, one graphic and disturbing image sums up the violence that is always at the heart of war. Titled “American Soldier showing a severed Iraqi arm hung in a mosque to terrorize the Iraqi resistance”, it portrays a gloating American youth in fatigues flaunting his prize. [2] The spoils of the hunt, his gruesome human arm, was hung against the wall of a house of worship like a rancid slab of meat.

In response to seeing the shot, I could not resist imagining an invading force coming to the U.S.A. to topple our government and gain control of our oil reserves. As such, I pictured that same mangled limb as the remains of an American resistance fighter, one’s neighbor perhaps, strung up at the doorway of a town’s church or synagogue.

Concurrently, I could conjure up the way that Americans would regard the foreign attackers were they forced to prostitute their children to mercenaries, ones like the Blackwater’s warriors paid by the invading forces’ government, in order to provide food for their families. [3] Similarly, I could imagine the way that U.S. citizens would think about citizens of the invading country, so ‘cozy’ in their own lives, while their own homes, jobs sites, electricity plants, water supplies, schools, hospitals, transportation routes and other critical parts of their lives were blown up and contaminated with toxins, such as depleted uranium delivered from assorted types of projectiles.

Of course, government leaders can convincingly state anything that they want as justification for offensive raids into foreign lands. They can mention the need to destroy weapons of mass destruction (that will never be found) through the use of one’s own weapons of mass destruction, the desire to bring democracy to backwards peoples, the obligation to protect far-away populations from dangerous terrorists, the Orwellian wish to bring peace through war or any number of other outlandish excuses.

Simultaneously, they can give glorious pro-war speeches filled with half truths like Barack Obama’s address at West Point aimed at gaining support for war expansion. (In connection, it is useful to remember Adolf Hitler once stating: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”)

Yet propagandistic talks, regardless of whether they are sincerely stated or even believed, can never undercut the facts as spelled out by Admiral Gene LaRocque: “I hate it when they say, ‘He gave his life for his country.’ Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.” [4] Yes, we kill them in the bid to gain geopolitical control of energy stores and pipeline corridors that deliver the supplies, and we slaughter again and again ever more innocent civilians in the process.

In times to come, finite resources, such as uranium and fossil fuels, will be increasingly used up. Countries that either harbor the remaining supplies or that are en route for their delivery will be posed as hostile and dangerous to Western interests if they do not cave in to Western demands. Accordingly, various bogus reasons will again be fabricated as justifications for invading them and the affiliated costs will again be subsumed by the invading countries’ citizens despite the result as is spelled out by Abraham Flexner: “Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.” [5]

No, indeed, we can’t have both. We simply cannot afford the social, environmental and financial price tag. At the same time, we cannot afford the lost funding for essential programs like universal health-care provision and infrastructure repairs at home. Similarly, we cannot bear the added costs to rebuild whole nations after devastating their landscapes. After war expenditures, there’s just not enough money to spare for much else.

Moreover, we cannot accept the untimely deaths in the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands. They weigh too heavily on the national conscience — that is if one can even exist after so much unbridled wanton carnage.

At the same time, we cannot cope with the nearly permanent poison spreading across the Earth and its waterways from DU tipped weapons. Likewise, we cannot contend with the poisoning of more and more minds of warfare victims who turn into dedicated terrorists as payback.

Besides, why should we be forced to support greedy war profiteers such as are found at Halliburton KBR, Xe, Exxon Mobil and drug cartels, who get kickbacks to leave our troops alone? Why should we be expected to subsume the overall high outlay, such as the recent U.S. $636 billion military spending bill demands, on top of crippling deficits, such as the U.S. public debt that is quickly soaring towards $13 trillion?

Frankly, we can’t afford to destroy region after region while terrorizing their civilians in a bid to put puppet governments in place whose despots will sell off their land’s resources to the highest bidders. Certainly, we cannot, with any scruples involved, use these destroyed places’ petroleum products to fuel further armed invasions in a bid to secure further resources for western corporate, rather than Russian and Chinese, interests.

In short, we absolutely cannot expend lavish amounts on wars — period. We cannot for the sake of the people harmed and killed, we cannot for the sake of the environment, and we cannot when Americans are starving and jobless on homeland soil.

Clearly, employment opportunities could be generated by shifting war funds into creation of work supporting provision of alternative energy as a substitute for fossil fuels. Wouldn’t that be far better than the current expansion of wars in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and other strategic locations? Isn’t it a constructive alternative to building huge bases in countries that abut oil rich Iran and Venezuela?

As long as the response to such questions is always “no”, we can expect ever larger and more greatly drawn out wars. We can anticipate that fossil fuels used in such fights will disappear more rapidly than otherwise would occur. Eventually, we can, also, be assured that the ongoing reckless military rampage will lead to a third world war if Russian or Chinese leaders, finally, reach a limit to the threats that can be endured from western imperial hubris.

In fact, how can anyone anywhere embrace an increasingly extensive war trajectory? If the answer to such an enquiry seems ambiguous at best, it, without a doubt, will become patently clear quite soon enough.

References

The continuing desperate quest to find something good to say about US foreign policy

Not the crazy, hateful right wing, not racist or disrupting public meetings, not demanding birth certificates … but the respectable right, holding high positions in academia and in every administration, Republican or Democrat, members of the highly esteemed Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s Joshua Kurlantzick, a “Fellow for Southeast Asia” at CFR, writing in the equally esteemed and respectable Washington Post about how — despite all the scare talk — it wouldn’t be so bad if Afghanistan actually turned into another Vietnam because “Vietnam and the United States have become close partners in Southeast Asia, exchanging official visits, building an important trading and strategic relationship and fostering goodwill between governments, businesses and people on both sides. … America did not win the war there, but over time it has won the peace. … American war veterans publicly made peace with their old adversaries … A program [to exchange graduate students and professors] could ensure that the next generation of Afghan leaders sees an image of the United States beyond that of the war.”[1] And so on.

On second thought, this is not so much right-wing jingoism as it is … uh … y’know … What’s the word? … Ah yes, “pointless”. Just what is the point? Germany and Israel are on excellent terms … therefore, what point can we make about the Holocaust?

As to America not winning the war in Vietnam, that’s worse than pointless. It’s wrong. Most people believe that the United States lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, the US in fact achieved its primary purpose: it left Vietnam a basket case, preventing the rise of what might have been a good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model; for the same reason the United States has been at war with Cuba for 50 years, making sure that the Cuban alternative model doesn’t look as good as it would if left in peace.

And in all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the millions of Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical care, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology. That’s exactly what the Afghans — their land and/or their bodies permeated with depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bombs, and a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals — have to look forward to in Kurlantzick’s Brave New World. “If the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan eventually resembles the one we now have with Vietnam, we should be overjoyed,” he writes. God Bless America.

One further thought about Afghanistan: The suggestion that the United States could, and should, solve its (self-created) dilemma by simply getting out of that god-forsaken place is dismissed out of hand by the American government and media; even some leftist critics of US policy are reluctant to embrace so bold a step — Who knows what horror may result? But when the Soviet Union was in the process of quitting Afghanistan (during the period of May 1988-February 1989) who in the West insisted that they remain? For any reason. No matter what the consequences of their withdrawal. The reason the Russians could easier leave than the Americans can now is that the Russians were not there for imperialist reasons, such as oil and gas pipelines. Similar to why the US can’t leave Iraq.

[1] Washington Post, October 25, 2009

The Choice Ahead: Entrenched Fossil Fuel Dependence or Climate Change Management

According to Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard economist Linda Bilmes, the Iraq War cost three trillion dollars. While much of the money used to conduct the war was borrowed (most notably from Chinese institutions), ultimately American taxpayers will be responsible for many years to come for footing the bill, including the high interest payments on the funds loaned. This is because the federal budget, especially between the military and big business bailout costs, far exceeded the annual and shrinking amount taken in by taxes.

Was it worth it? The answer partly depends on whether one works for or has holdings in one of the oil companies that made out well in the aftermath.

The final major prize in the war, southern Iraq’s giant Rumaila oil field, was finally awarded on November third with mixed results from an American standpoint. This is because the only successful bidders for it were BP and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and the second organization, it can be assumed, will primarily support Asian interests over ones favoring Western nations.

Nonetheless, plans are moving forward by the BP-CNPC consortium to invest $US15 billion into Rumaila, the fifth biggest known single reserve of oil in the world, to almost triple production from one million barrels daily to 2.85m and, if successful, the field would be the world’s second biggest in existence. While BP will own a 38 percent stake, CNPC will retain a 37 percent share and Iraq will hold 25 percent.

Meanwhile, the US government, that invested so much in the Iraq War, is said to be disappointed in the overall outcome, particularly in that CNPC was awarded another favorable ($US3bn) deal in Iraq — rights to the Ahdeb field in Wasit province in southeastern Iraq. On account, it is by far the largest foreign player.

This being the case is probably above all vexing since the Chinese people did not have to sacrifice lots of lives and taxpayer money into the Iraq war since their focus was concentrated on strengthening the economy in their homeland all the while the USA and its NATO allies remained largely set on trying to gain control of the fossil fuels for themselves through invasion. Even so, the USA and NATO partners, despite an all-out effort to dominate the region, lost most of the reward.

“The Chinese are very aggressive here.” According to Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh, “They are very eager to build up their presence in Iraq’s oil industry.” Furthermore, a CNPC-led consortium is one of the three bidders for West Qurna 1, another gargantuan field. A group overseen by Russia’s Lukoil and another conglomerate commanded by Exxon Mobil are also in the running for this field.

In consideration of its tremendous success to date, CNPC has developed, along with another Chinese oil company, a special Iraq-focused joint enterprise, called Al-Wah — an Arabic term meaning ‘the oasis’ — to expand the Chinese presence and work in Iraq. At the same time, the Chinese, along with not having to subsume any of the war costs, do not have to bear any guilt over the heavy human toll — assessed by some groups to be a million and a third Iraqis killed, along with 4,680 American military personnel and additional foreign forces from other nations.

At the same time that various organizations involved with fossil fuels are competing to obtain profitably favorable arrangements for themselves and the respective countries to which they supply fuels, leading climate change scientist around the world are putting out an entirely contrary message. They are indicating that, very quickly, global fossil fuel dependence has to greatly shrink to avoid run-away climate change that would cause much of the world’s surface to be inhospitable to life. In other words, an almost complete cessation of its use must occur fairly soon despite ever increased worldwide demand.

For example, John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the main environmental scientist for the German government, told officials from Barack Obama’s administration that U.S. carbon emissions must fall from its annual 20 tons per person to zero if there is going to be an even slight possibility for the climate to stabilize with a 2C increase.

As Stephen Leahy points out in “Four Degrees Of Devastation”, “Eighteen months ago, no one dared imagine humanity pushing the climate beyond an additional two degrees C of heating, but rising carbon emissions and inability to agree on cuts has meant science must now consider the previously unthinkable.”

He goes on to add:

“A four-degree C overall increase means a world where temperatures will be two degrees warmer in some places, 12 degrees and more in others, making them uninhabitable.

“It is a world with a one- to two-metre sea level rise by 2100, leaving hundreds of millions homeless. This will head to 12 metres in the coming centuries as the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets melt, according to papers presented at the [UK international climate science] conference [recently held] in Oxford.

“Four degrees of warming would be hotter than any time in the last 30 million years, and it could happen as soon as 2060 to 2070.” [1]
As Clive Hamilton, Charles Sturt Professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University, points out in “Is It Too Late to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change?”, “It is clear that limiting warming to 2ºC is beyond us; the question now is whether we can limit warming to 4ºC. The conclusion that, even if we act promptly and resolutely, the world is on a path to reach 650 ppm and associated warming of 4°C is almost too frightening to accept. Yet that is the reluctant conclusion of the world’s leading climate scientists. Even with the most optimistic set of assumptions — the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3 per cent a year for a few decades — we have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change.” [2]

At the same time, his views are echoed by Lord Stern, former World Bank chief economist, who stated, “A rise of 5C would be a temperature the world has not seen for 30 to 50 million years. We’ve been around only 100,000 years as human beings. We don’t know what that’s like. We haven’t seen 3C for a few million years, and we don’t know what that looks like either.”

“Do politicians understand just how difficult it could be, just how devastating rises of 4C, 5C or 6C could be? I think, not yet,” Lord Stern shared with a group of scientists gathered in Copenhagen after which he went on to warn that the risk associated with governments not adequately addressing climate change in time to avert the brunt of the disaster would lead to horrendous consequences. According to him, these involve risking at least a third of the world’s aggregate wealth, including a minimum of a thirty percent reduction in consumption per person worldwide or, put another way, global GDP would drop to at least 70 percent of current output. [3]

Meanwhile, the mainstream media (MSM) in the United States reveals little information about the degree that the public must radically change lifestyle habits and expectations for economic growth. Little is mentioned about the degree that climate change could have catastrophic impacts across the globe and no government or business leaders are suggesting that reduced consumption of material goods, delimitations in fossil fuel use and other major changes should be carried out very soon. Likewise, none are encouraging ecologically friendly, self-sustaining, financially vibrant communities to be strengthened, nor hinting that transnational patterns of commerce drain dollars out of the country.

In a similar vein, none indicate that these very same globalized patterns that enrich corporate tycoons exacerbate our reliance on fossil fuels due to long distance transportation of raw materials and finished products, as well as the extraordinary amounts of energy used in a massive production of lots of unnecessary merchandise. Obviously, their doing so would be run counter to their extraordinary financial gains at the expense of the poorly paid, everyday work force.

So instead, we have “a business as usual” mentality shoveled forth with bailouts for major commercial organizations, policies to purchase cars subsidized by the federal government, happy-go-lucky TV programs that focus on trivial topics and plenty of advertisements informing the populace that it ought to purchase this or that item to have the latest look in fall fashion, the best anti-aging formula or whatever else for which doing so will, obviously, raise one’s personal carbon and overall ecological footprints in most instances.

At the same time, one can assume that there are no immediate plans to direct society into a pattern of living that is regionally self-reliant (so as to avoid carbon footprints from imports derived from other areas) and restricted in terms of the types of goods available from distant locations. In light of the financial recession and the desire for ever more economic growth based on further globalization of transnational industry and fossil fuel use, quite the opposite pattern is emerging despite the disastrous implications in terms of our breaching climate change tipping points, and the fact that, at some point, fossil fuels, themselves, will no longer be available.

On account, a wise program would be to jumpstart an all out effort to put the means for alternative benign energy sources into place while using the larger portion of fossil fuels to build and install these alternatives across the landscape, as well as help communities to transition away from fossil fuel use altogether. Without a doubt, this would especially be positive in light of the fact that almost 71 percent of electricity in the U.S. is currently supplied by fossil fuels while modern agriculture, industry and transportation all have petroleum at their cores.

Meanwhile the largely consensual opinion reached at the annual conference of the U.S. contingent for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO-USA) is that conventional crude peaked in 2005. Further, biofuels are not expected to be any sort of panacea to make up for pending large-scale oil deficits. [4]

Despite the increasing number of indicators that humanity needs to change course in its fossil fuel use, the policy makers sit in their safe government offices planning new dangerous military operations for others to conduct in resource rich regions abroad regardless of the fact that the death toll is rising in these invasions and it seems highly unlikely that the Taliban or any other groups defending their homelands will be easily defeated if at all despite that ever more Pentagon funding is provided toward that aim.

Added up, the expenses to contain Iran, strive to obtain Venezuelan and newly found Cuban oil, fight for arctic fossil fuels, carry out Afghanistan and Pakistan operations, and ramp up covert or military operations via AFRICOM in Africa all together create a recipe for extreme U.S. bankruptcy and assorted other disasters. At the same time, the U.S. undertaking such endeavors merely postpone the inevitable fossil fuel shortfall, anyway, while not ensuring that the country and its citizens are prepared for the huge transition away from fossil fuels. In addition, such ever enlarging, Pentagon run ventures entail an inordinate amount of national sacrifice as money that could be used to support programs at home drains into war costs and the military’s ramped up fossil fuel use.

In relation, is there any question whatsoever as to the reason that there are proposals for greatly diminished funding of certain key social programs, including ones connected to healthcare and public education, in the homeland? How could outcomes be otherwise when 54 percent of every U.S. federal tax dollar goes to plans related to the U.S. military and another 19 percent goes to interest payments on the current federal debt, which leaves 27 percent for all other provisions (excluding the further sums to be borrowed to fund costly bailouts, war expansion plans, etc). Accordingly, the federal budget is at present almost twice the amount taken in from American taxpayers — an irresponsible and disastrous state of affairs with dire repercussions for many years ahead.

In addition, it’s difficult to imagine that, starting with Reagan, U.S. Presidents did not see the long term ramifications in their push for:

Deregulated globalized U.S. industry, which led into greater oil use due to greater reliance on importation, along with offshoring and outsourcing of U.S. jobs so as to effectively hollow out the economic base at home and harm the average American worker. Ultimately financial contraction in the U.S. and tangentially abroad could be the only anticipated outcome.

A lack in adequate oversight of Wall Street activities and the banking industry.

An ever enlarging, expensive war program for obtainment of fossil fuels and other finite resources.

Ratification of many other destructive patterns, such as the huge repeated government bailouts, and acceptance of costly no bid contracts in response to various Pentagon requests.

Just where did they think that such a set of irresponsible orientations would ultimately lead? Could none of them see the consequences, such as the federal deficit reaching a record $1.42 Trillion, representing 10 percent of the economy or the highest amount since W.W. II, along with continuing to rapidly shoot upward? [5]

It’s hard to imagine that they were all of them so ignorant, nefarious or outright stupid so as to not see where their intended trajectories would in combination land, especially when the speed with which rapidly diminishing oil reserves would disappear is thrown into the mix. Likewise, the quest for unbridled economic growth is equally if not ever more calamitous when the long view’s taken.

It’s simply not supportable, as Michael Bond points out in these three sections from “Why Economic Growth Is Unsustainable”:

“The present economy is obliged to grow annually at between 3% and 6%. Too much less than 3% for too long and the economy will collapse from lack of currency. Too much over 6% for too long and inflation will spiral out of control, rendering currency meaningless.

“Below is a table that points out how long it takes for something to double, triple, etc. in size, when it increases at rates of 3%, 4%, 5% and 6% per year. For the last 15 years, the global economy has been growing at an average of about 4% per year. Note that at 4% growth the economy doubles every 19 years, and grows 10 times its size in a mere 59 years.”

“The second problem stems from the fact that in order to sustain 4% annual economic growth, global debt must increase at about 10% annually. Because it is annual growth, this means it is exponential rather than mathematical growth. The difference between the two is shown below.”

“The Global Economy is on course to collapse well before 2030 due to a looming global inability to repay annual interest. The reason why debt outpaces economic growth stems from a fault in global money supply. This fault is described in the article Money – Deadlier Than Plutonium, available from www.eveoftheapoc.com.au.” [6]

Moreover, people collectively can’t keep taking and taking ever more resources from the natural world and expecting that they can keep raising ever higher the human population and the standard of living for all. It just won’t work because the world is largely limited. At the same time, it should be absolutely clear that our current economic programs for the most part do not work either. Anyone who asserts otherwise perhaps needs to be reminded that nearly half of the world comprising of over three billion people live on less than $2.50 a day. How could this possibly seem like any sort of a success, especially when others, parasitically siphoning the wealth towards themselves off the backs of underpaid laborers and through ravage of the natural world, individually make a financial killing in the millions and billions of dollars at the same time?

It’s a killing, all right. The signs of the social and ecological costs are all around us to see.

In truth, an expectation for relentless growth comes with a very high price tag as is well explained at “Interconnectedness of World Problems, a Conceptual Map by Fritjof Capra based on Plan B 3.0, by Lester Brown” — a vision that goes well beyond a simple, barely accurate, linear model. Likewise, the evaluation of Joel Kovel’s “The Enemy of Nature” is a well thought out, comparable assessment, as are Bill Mckibben’s “A Timely Reminder of the Real Limits to Growth” and David Model’s analysis at “The Elephant in the Room. Ignoring Unsustainable Growth”. [7]

Real limits in mind, this excerpt from Wikipedia’s coverage of the Carter Doctrine is particularly dicey. Simultaneously, it shows a fallacious (arrogant?) sense that the U.S.A. can enact any course of action that it pleases, is completely invincible and is impervious to any internal or external influences, whether social or environmental in nature, that would undercut its kingpin position in the world.

The Carter Doctrine:

“Meeting this challenge will take national will, diplomatic and political wisdom, economic sacrifice, and, of course, military capability. We must call on the best that is in us to preserve the security of this crucial region.

“Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

“This last, key sentence of the Carter Doctrine, was written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser. Brzezinski modeled the wording of the Carter Doctrine on the Truman Doctrine,^[1] and insisted that the sentence be included in the speech “to make it very clear that the Soviets should stay away from the Persian Gulf.”^[2]

“In The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, author Daniel Yergin notes that the Carter Doctrine “bore striking similarities” to a 1903 British declaration, in which British Foreign Secretary Lord Landsdowne warned Russia and Germany that the British would ‘regard the establishment of a naval base or of a fortified port in the Persian Gulf by any other power as a very grave menace to British interests, and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal.’^[3]” [8]

All the same, Mamoun Fandy of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University identifies, in “U.S. Oil Policy in the Middle East”, that the U.S. faces some key problems in its quest for oil dominance. These difficulties include:

• Controlling oil access is a cornerstone of U.S. Middle East policy.
• U.S. reliance on imported oil is very high.
• Oil from the Persian Gulf accounts for 10% of the oil used in the U.S.
• Dual containment of Iran and Iraq, along with a broader military engagement policy, is key to U.S. strategy in assuring the flow of oil. [9]

Despite the absolute need to drastically and immediately rein in fossil fuel use for a number of compelling reasons, the U.S. government continues to pursue a forceful and antagonistic policy abroad aimed toward unilateral control over global energy supplies. Using a combination of outright military invasion in an expanding number of countries and threats (i.e., towards Iran and Venezuela), U.S. legislators demonstrate little noticeable remorse over the high fiscal (bankrupting), environmental and social costs of these operations. These include that “The Pentagon Is The Largest Consumer Of Oil In The World” [10], the number of war related deaths continue to rise, there’s depleted uranium (DU) spread across the Middle East, the war efforts and resultant obtained oil ensure that the climate change devastation to come is speeded into place, inadequate funding is allocated for provision of alternative energy supplies and improvement of the electrical grid, public transportation is not sufficiently expanded, and other tragic outcomes will unfold.

There are many ways that humanity can move forward to create “the good life” as long as a plan is sound.  In 1970, Henry Kissinger claimed, “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” However, one group’s domination of oil and food stocks, while denying the needs of other groups, is reckless, unethical and expensive.

Frankly, we’ve had enough of resource wars. More to the point, conflicts can only get worse as fossil fuel reserves increasingly dwindle and the perception of the diminishment merely strengthens that we have to have the dregs regardless of the grave social and environmental consequences.

No, we do not. In fact, we can no longer afford to fight over material supplies — particularly the ones, like oil, that are going run out or, like food, be at risk to largely run out due to climate change effects brought on in large measure by our lust for rich energy sources.

Sometimes it’s rueful to ponder over the way that the present would be different had the U.S. followed Denmark’s example on the same timetable while using the funds that were to become allocated to fossil fuel wars towards development of the self-reliant energy security as Tomas Friedman indirectly suggests in “Flush With Energy” in which he states “Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)” [11]

Meanwhile, there’s growing public awareness that the Pentagon’s worldwide mission IS to get command over oil and gas supplies — as is explained in an elucidating report by Rick Rozoff [12] with many outstanding factual details. Likewise, it is obvious that the IMF and WB goals are en simpatico with the mission and, as a result, are on a disastrously wrong track as “The grave ecological destruction sponsored by the World Bank”, by Eric De Ruest, Hélene Baillot, undeniably indicates. [13]

As an aside, the first TV announcements routinely popped up, several weeks ago, to suggest that the U.S. populace ought to pitch in and cut it energy consumption by 3 percent per person. While the objective is admirable, the recommended curtailment is far too small and the diminishment process is starting around twenty OR MORE years too late. Besides, why don’t we even go a few steps further and take Walden Bello’s advise from “The Virtues of Deglobalization”:

“The aim of the deglobalization paradigm is to move beyond the economics of narrow efficiency, in which the key criterion is the reduction of unit cost, never mind the social and ecological destabilization this process brings about. It is to move beyond a system of economic calculation that, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, made ‘the whole conduct of life…into a paradox of an accountant’s nightmare.’ An effective economics, rather, strengthens social solidarity by subordinating the operations of the market to the values of equity, justice, and community by enlarging the sphere of democratic decision making. To use the language of the great Hungarian thinker Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation, deglobalization is about ‘re-embedding’ the economy in society, instead of having society driven by the economy.” [14]

In tandem, let’s realize, as did Shamus Cooke, that “the industrial basis for an alternative energy superstructure needs to be created. Only by doing this can we seriously address the needs of the planet. Transforming our giant auto plants — many laying idle — into producers of solar panels, windmills, electricity–producing buoy’s, high-speed trains, electric busses and cars, etc., while massively investing in new research and technology to deal with climate change, is the only realistic way to drastically change direction in the time allotted.” [15]

The alternative path to his, of course, is the exact one that we are following. We all know to where it leads — a 4C (or even) hotter world filled with massive loss of human and other forms of life, ruinous economic consequences, devastating weather patterns, an ocean level rise that puts many coastal regions at risk, massive fresh water shortages, food shortfalls, spreading pestilence and invasive species, and an extremely tenuous future for many generations to come.

Like our ancestors before fossil fuel were discovered, we can live without its benefits. Humankind, throughout our history on this planet, has been able to adapt to widely varying circumstances. Anyone who doubts this to be the case simply needs to compare the way that Inuits live in relation to 67 different uncontacted tribes in Brazil.

In other words, we CAN still adjust to widely varying conditions — even ones without fossil fuel. However, we, absolutely, cannot prepare to exist in a world that has states outside of the ranges that gave rise to and support of human life. All the same, we — out of willfulness, wishful thinking or ignorance — are willing to gamble that we can, it seems.

Perhaps we find it just too hard to give up our current ways of life even though our not doing so ensures that a large portion of the Earth will likely become unable to sustain life towards the end of this century. How tragically demented and selfish of us if, indeed, this is the case!

Of course, our drastically relinquishing fossil fuel use as much as is possible right away is not an easy action to endure. Yet, it can and has to be faced despite that the happening will mean hardship, privation and myriad kinds of losses.

After all, the sorts of difficulties that will exist after we forgo fossil fuel will be minor in comparison to the horrific adversities that would definitely be present if we do not deeply cut our collective carbon footprint in the near future. If anyone thinks that this cutting action is simply too hard to bear, he should for a moment picture the harshness that severe and worsening climate change could bring. Then, it becomes quickly clear about which trouble is doubtlessly preferable.

References

Anti-Empire Report

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” — Voltaire

Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.

Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that it can drop bombs on that sad land whenever it appears to serve the empire’s needs. But a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves “Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution”, and remembering just enough of their country’s more civilized past, has filed suit before the nation’s High Court to make the federal government stop American drone attacks on countless innocent civilians. The group declared that a Pakistan Army spokesman claimed to have the capability to shoot down the drones, but the government had made a policy decision not to. ¹

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, behaves like the world is one big lawless Somalia and the United States is the chief warlord. On October 20 the president again displayed his deep love of peace by honoring some 80 veterans of Vietnam at the White House, after earlier awarding their regiment a Presidential Unit Citation for its “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry”. ² War correspondent Michael Herr has honored Vietnam soldiers in his own way: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” ³

What would it take for the Obamaniacs to lose any of the stars in their eyes for their dear Nobel Laureate? Perhaps if the president announced that he was donating his prize money to build a monument to the First — “Oh What a Lovely” — World War? The memorial could bear the inscription: “Let us remember that Rudyard Kipling coaxed his young son John into enlisting in this war. John died his first day in combat. Kipling later penned these words:

“If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

“The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature.” — James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798.

A wise measure, indeed, but one American president after another has dragged the nation into bloody war without the approval of Congress, the American people, international law, or world opinion. Millions marched against the war in Iraq before it began. Millions more voted for Barack Obama in the belief that he shared their repugnance for America’s Wars Without End. They had no good reason to believe this — Obama’s campaign was filled with repeated warlike threats against Iran and Afghanistan — but they wanted to believe it.

If machismo explains war, if men love war and fighting so much, why do we have to compel them with conscription on pain of imprisonment? Why do the powers-that-be have to wage advertising campaigns to seduce young people to enlist in the military? Why do young men go to extreme lengths to be declared exempt for physical or medical reasons? Why do they flee into exile to avoid the draft? Why do they desert the military in large numbers in the midst of war? Why don’t Sweden or Switzerland or Costa Rica have wars? Surely there are many macho men in those countries.

“Join the Army, visit far away places, meet interesting people, and kill them.”

War licenses men to take part in what would otherwise be described as psychopathic behavior.

“Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.” — Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H

“In the struggle of Good against Evil, it’s always the people who get killed.” — Eduardo Galeano

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a Taliban leader declared that “God is on our side, and if the world’s people try to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us.” ⁴

“I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.” — George W. Bush, 2004, during the war in Iraq. ⁵

“I believe that Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him. That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis.” — Barack Obama. ⁶

Why don’t church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from abortion clinics?

God, war, the World Bank, the IMF, free trade agreements, NATO, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, “anti-war” candidates, and Nobel Peace Prizes can be seen as simply different instruments for the advancement of US imperialism.

Tom Lehrer, the marvelous political songwriter of the 1950s and 60s, once observed: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Perhaps each generation has to learn anew what a farce that prize has become, or always was. Its recipients include quite a few individuals who had as much commitment to a peaceful world as the Bush administration had to truth. One example currently in the news: Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres which won the prize in 1998. Kouchner, now France’s foreign secretary, has long been urging military action against Iran. Last week he called upon Iran to make a nuclear deal acceptable to the Western powers or else there’s no telling what horror Israel might inflict upon the Iranians. Israel “will not tolerate an Iranian bomb,” he said. “We know that, all of us.” ⁷ There is a word for such a veiled threat — “extortion”, something normally associated with the likes of a Chicago mobster of the 1930s … “Do like I say and no one gets hurt.” Or as Al Capone once said: “Kind words and a machine gun will get you more than kind words alone.”

The continuing desperate quest to find something good to say about US foreign policy

Not the crazy, hateful right wing, not racist or disrupting public meetings, not demanding birth certificates … but the respectable right, holding high positions in academia and in every administration, Republican or Democrat, members of the highly esteemed Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s Joshua Kurlantzick, a “Fellow for Southeast Asia” at CFR, writing in the equally esteemed and respectable Washington Post about how — despite all the scare talk — it wouldn’t be so bad if Afghanistan actually turned into another Vietnam because “Vietnam and the United States have become close partners in Southeast Asia, exchanging official visits, building an important trading and strategic relationship and fostering goodwill between governments, businesses and people on both sides. … America did not win the war there, but over time it has won the peace. … American war veterans publicly made peace with their old adversaries … A program [to exchange graduate students and professors] could ensure that the next generation of Afghan leaders sees an image of the United States beyond that of the war.” ⁸ And so on.

On second thought, this is not so much right-wing jingoism as it is … uh … y’know … What’s the word? … Ah yes, “pointless”. Just what is the point? Germany and Israel are on excellent terms … therefore, what point can we make about the Holocaust?

As to America not winning the war in Vietnam, that’s worse than pointless. It’s wrong. Most people believe that the United States lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, the US in fact achieved its primary purpose: it left Vietnam a basket case, preventing the rise of what might have been a good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model; for the same reason the United States has been at war with Cuba for 50 years, making sure that the Cuban alternative model doesn’t look as good as it would if left in peace.

And in all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the millions of Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical care, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology. That’s exactly what the Afghans — their land and/or their bodies permeated with depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bombs, and a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals — have to look forward to in Kurlantzick’s Brave New World. “If the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan eventually resembles the one we now have with Vietnam, we should be overjoyed,” he writes. God Bless America.

One further thought about Afghanistan: The suggestion that the United States could, and should, solve its (self-created) dilemma by simply getting out of that god-forsaken place is dismissed out of hand by the American government and media; even some leftist critics of US policy are reluctant to embrace so bold a step — Who knows what horror may result? But when the Soviet Union was in the process of quitting Afghanistan (during the period of May 1988-February 1989) who in the West insisted that they remain? For any reason. No matter what the consequences of their withdrawal. The reason the Russians could easier leave than the Americans can now is that the Russians were not there for imperialist reasons, such as oil and gas pipelines. Similar to why the US can’t leave Iraq.

Washington’s eternal “Cuba problem” — the one they can’t admit to.

“Here we go again. I suppose old habits die hard,” said US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, on October 28 before the General Assembly voted on the annual resolution to end the US embargo against Cuba. “The hostile language we have just heard from the Foreign Minister of Cuba,” she continued, “seems straight out of the Cold War era and is not conducive to constructive progress.” Her 949-word statement contained not a word about the embargo; not very conducive to a constructive solution to the unstated “Cuba problem”, the one about Cuba inspiring the Third World, the fear that the socialist virus would spread.

Since the early days of the Cuban Revolution assorted anti-communists and capitalist true-believers around the world have been relentless in publicizing the failures, real and alleged, of life in Cuba; each perceived shortcoming is attributed to the perceived shortcomings of socialism — It’s simply a system that can’t work, we are told, given the nature of human beings, particularly in this modern, competitive, globalized, consumer-oriented world.

In response to such criticisms, defenders of Cuban society have regularly pointed out how the numerous draconian sanctions imposed by the United States since 1960 have produced many and varied scarcities and sufferings and are largely responsible for most of the problems pointed out by the critics. The critics, in turn, say that this is just an excuse, one given by Cuban apologists for every failure of their socialist system. However, it would be very difficult for the critics to prove their point. The United States would have to drop all sanctions and then we’d have to wait long enough for Cuban society to make up for lost time and recover what it was deprived of, and demonstrate what its system can do when not under constant assault by the most powerful force on earth.

In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the first 39 years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. In the ten years since, these figures have of course all increased. The sanctions, in numerous ways large and small, make acquiring many kinds of products and services from around the world much more difficult and expensive, often impossible; frequently, they are things indispensable to Cuban medicine, transportation or industry; simply transferring money internationally has become a major problem for the Cubans, with banks being heavily punished by the United States for dealing with Havana; or the sanctions mean that Americans and Cubans can’t attend professional conferences in each other’s country.

These examples are but a small sample of the excruciating pain inflicted by Washington upon the body, soul and economy of the Cuban people.

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah”. We don’t hear much of that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the General Assembly on the resolution, which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone:

How it began, from State Department documents: Within a few months of the Cuban revolution of January 1959, the Eisenhower administration decided “to adjust all our actions in such a way as to accelerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which would bring about a change in the Cuban Government, resulting in a new government favorable to U.S. interests.” ⁹

On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” ¹⁰ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo.

Notes

1. The Nation (Pakistan English-language daily newspaper), October 10, 2009 ^↩
2. Washington Post, October 20, 2009 ^↩
3. Michael Herr, “Dispatches” (1991), p.71 ^↩
4. New York Daily News, September 19, 2001 ^↩
5. Washington Post, July 20, 2004, p.15, citing the New Era (Lancaster, PA), from a private meeting of Bush with Amish families on July 9. The White House denied that Bush had said it. (Those Amish folks do lie a lot you know.) ^↩
6. Washington Post, August 17, 2008 ^↩
7. Daily Telegraph (UK), October 26, 2009 ^↩
8. Washington Post, October 25, 2009 ^↩
9. Department of State, “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba” (1991), p.742 ^↩
10. Ibid., p.885 ^↩

Taking Stock of the Republicans

The Republicans have become deficit hawks. It’s more phoniness from a party of phonies. They’ve decided to stake their political future on opposition to Obama’s agenda. It doesn’t matter what it is; they’re against it. Stimulus is bad because extends unemployment benefits and keeps the states on life support. The Republicans have a better idea; let’s build more bombs and slash taxes.

“We must be prudent and save the Republic from penury.” (That’s the GOP mantra) What utter hypocrisy. Mitch McConnell is the worst of them, a corporate toady without a trace of dignity.

Republicans talking about fiscal discipline is like a street-walker preaching about chastity. They have no credibility at all. During the Bush term, they doubled the national debt from $5.6 trillion to $11 trillion in 8 years, the biggest expansion of government spending in US history. All that’s forgotten; down the memory hole. Now they’ve found religion. How convenient.

There should be a vaccine against Republicans. It’s a virus not a party. They lead the nation into 8 years of carnage and disgrace and then dare to show their faces on Capital Hill? It just proves how far the country has slipped.

One million Iraqis killed, over one-fifth of the population displaced. 5 years later and there’s still no clean water, no functioning school system, 1 in 3 children suffering from trauma, tens of thousands slowly dieing from depleted uranium. The invasion was an exercise in premeditated genocide and the Republican party’s bloody fingerprints are all over the murder weapon.

Every Republican senator and congressman who voted for the war should be dragged in front of a tribunal and sentenced. Democrats too.

Iraq is forgotten now. We won. The plan to ethnically cleanse the Sunnis from Baghdad succeeded. The death squad strategy prevailed. Murder works.

Now General “Death Squad” has moved on to Afghanistan. His work is not done, yet.

The Republicans love McCrystal; he’s their kind of guy. He knows how to deliver. More dead civilians, more fatherless children, more blood.

The country has two political parties; two war parties. The Republicans are only worse by degree. In essence, both parties share the same vision of the future; more conquest, more suffering, more bloodletting. America ran out of steam long ago; now it’s fueled by its commitment to violence alone.

Keeping Track of the Empire’s Crimes

If you catch the CIA with its hand in the cookie jar and the Agency admits the obvious — what your eyes can plainly see — that its hand is indeed in the cookie jar, it means one of two things: a) the CIA’s hand is in several other cookie jars at the same time which you don’t know about and they hope that by confessing to the one instance they can keep the others covered up; or b) its hand is not really in the cookie jar — it’s an illusion to throw you off the right scent — but they want you to believe it.

There have been numerous news stories in recent months about secret CIA programs, hidden from Congress, inspired by former vice-president Dick Cheney, in operation since the September 11 terrorist attacks, involving assassination of al Qaeda operatives or other non-believers-in-the-Empire abroad without the knowledge of their governments. The Agency admits to some sort of program having existed, but insists that it was canceled; and if it was an assassination program it was canceled before anyone was actually assassinated. Another report has the US military, not the CIA, putting the plan — or was it a different plan? — into operation, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the program.¹

All of this can be confusing to those following the news. And rather irrelevant. We already know that the United States has been assassinating non-believers, or suspected non-believers, with regularity, and impunity, in recent years, using unmanned planes (drones) firing missiles, in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, if not elsewhere. (Even more victims have been produced from amongst those who happened to be in the same house, car, wedding party, or funeral as the non-believer.) These murders apparently don’t qualify as “assassinations”, for somehow killing “terrorists” from 2000 feet is morally and legally superior to doing so from two feet away.

But whatever the real story is behind the current rash of speculation, we should not fall into the media’s practice of at times intimating that multiple or routine CIA assassination attempts would be something shocking or at least very unusual.

I’ve compiled a list of CIA assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, against prominent foreign political figures, from 1949 through 2003, which, depending on how you count it, can run into the hundreds (targeting Fidel Castro alone totals 634 according to Cuban intelligence)²; the list can be updated by adding the allegedly al Qaeda leaders among the drone attack victims of recent years. Assassination and torture are the two things governments are most loath to admit to, and try their best to cover up. It’s thus rare to find a government document or recorded statement mentioning a particular plan to assassinate someone. There is, however, an abundance of compelling circumstantial evidence to work with. The list can be found here.

For those of you who collect lists about splendid US foreign policy post-World War II, here are a few more that, lacking anything better to do, I’ve put together: Attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected.

After his June 4 Cairo speech, President Obama was much praised for mentioning the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. But in his talk in Ghana on July 11 he failed to mention the CIA coup that ousted Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966³, referring to him only as a “giant” among African leaders. The Mossadegh coup is one of the most well-known CIA covert actions. Obama could not easily get away without mentioning it in a talk in the Middle East looking to mend fences. But the Nkrumah ouster is one of the least known; indeed, not a single print or broadcast news report in the American mainstream media saw fit to mention it at the time of the president’s talk. Like it never happened.

And the next time you hear that Africa can’t produce good leaders, people who are committed to the welfare of the masses of their people, think of Nkrumah and his fate. And think of Patrice Lumumba, overthrown in the Congo 1960-61 with the help of the United States; Agostinho Neto of Angola, against whom Washington waged war in the 1970s, making it impossible for him to institute progressive changes; Samora Machel of Mozambique against whom the CIA supported a counter-revolution in the 1970s-80s period; and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (now married to Machel’s widow), who spent 28 years in prison thanks to the CIA.⁴

• Gross interference in democratic elections in at least 30 countries⁵
• Waging war/military action, either directly or in conjunction with a proxy army, in some 30 countries
• Dropping bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
• Attempts to suppress dozens of populist/nationalist movements in every corner of the world⁶

The Myths of Afghanistan, past and present

On the Fourth of July, Senator Patrick Leahy declared he was optimistic that, unlike the Soviet forces that were driven from Afghanistan 20 years ago, US forces could succeed there. The Democrat from Vermont stated:

“The Russians were sent running as they should have been. We helped send them running. But they were there to conquer the country. We’ve made it very clear, and everybody I talk to within Afghanistan feels the same way: they know we’re there to help and we’re going to leave. We’ve made it very clear we are going to leave. And it’s going to be turned back to them. The ones that made the mistakes in the past are those that tried to conquer them.”⁷

Leahy is a long-time liberal on foreign-policy issues, a champion of withholding US counter-narcotics assistance to foreign military units guilty of serious human-rights violations, and an outspoken critic of robbing terrorist suspects of their human and legal rights. Yet he is willing to send countless young Americans to a living hell, or horrible death, or maimed survival.

And for what? Every point he made in his statement is simply wrong.

The Russians were not in Afghanistan to conquer it. The Soviet Union had existed next door to the country for more than 60 years without any kind of invasion. It was only when the United States intervened in Afghanistan to replace a government friendly to Moscow with one militantly anti-communist that the Russians invaded to do battle with the US-supported Islamic jihadists; precisely what the United States would have done to prevent a communist government in Canada or Mexico.

It’s also rather difficult for the United States to claim that it’s in Afghanistan to help the people there when it’s killed tens of thousands of them simply for resisting the American invasion and occupation or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; not a single one of the victims has been identified as having had any kind of connection to the terrorist attack in the US of September 11, 2001, the event usually cited by Washington as justification for the military intervention. Moreover, Afghanistan is now permeated with depleted uranium, cluster bombs-cum-landmines, white phosphorous, a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals, and a population, after 30 years of almost non-stop warfare, of physically and mentally mutilated human beings, exceedingly susceptible to the promise of paradise, or at least relief, sold by the Taliban.

As to the US leaving … utterly meaningless propaganda until it happens. Ask the people of South Korea — 56 years of American occupation and still counting; ask the people of Japan — 64 years. And Iraq? Would you want to wager your life’s savings on which decade it will be that the last American soldier and military contractor leaves?

It’s not even precise to say that the Russians were sent running. That was essentially Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision, and it was more of a political decision than a military one. Gorbachev’s fondest ambition was to turn the Soviet Union into a West-European style social democracy, and he fervently wished for the approval of those European leaders, virtually all of whom were cold-war anti-communists and opposed the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan.

There has been as much of the same “causes” for wars that did not happen as for wars that did.

Henry Allingham died in Britain on July 18 at age 113, believed to have been the world’s oldest man. A veteran of World War I, he spent his final years reminding the British people about their service members killed during the war, which came to about a million: “I want everyone to know,” he said during an interview in November. “They died for us.”⁸

The whole million? Each one died for Britain? In the most useless imperialist war of the 20th century? No, let me correct that — the most useless imperialist war of any century. The British Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire, and the wannabe American Empire joined in battle against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire as youthful bodies and spirits sank endlessly into the wretched mud of Belgium and Germany, the pools of blood of Russia and France. The wondrous nobility of it all is enough to make you swallow hard, fight back the tears, light a few candles, and throw up. Imagine, by the middle of this century Vietnam veterans in their 90s and 100s will be speaking of how each of their 58,000 war buddies died for America. By 2075 we’ll be hearing the same stirring message from ancient vets of Iraq and Afghanistan. How many will remember that there was a large protest movement against their glorious, holy crusades, particularly Vietnam and Iraq?

Supreme nonsense

Senate hearings to question a nominee for the Supreme Court are a supreme bore. The sine qua non for President Obama choosing Sonia Sotomayor appears to be that she’s a woman with a Hispanic background. A LATINA! How often that word was used by her supporters. She would be the first LATINA on the Supreme Court! Dios mio!

Who gives a damn? All anyone should care about are her social and political opinions. Justice Clarence Thomas is a black man. A BLACK MAN! And he’s as conservative as they come.

Supreme Court nominees, of all political stripes, typically feel obliged to pretend that their social and political leanings don’t enter into their judicial opinions. But everyone knows this is rubbish. During her Senate hearing, Sotomayor declared: “It’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It’s the law.”

The former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evans Hughes, would not agree with her. “At the constitutional level where we work,” he said, “ninety percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.”⁹

By Sotomayor’s own account, which echos news reports, she was not asked about her position on abortion by either President Obama or his staff. But what if she is actually anti-abortion? What if she turns out to be the swing vote that overturns Roe vs. Wade?

What if she’s a proud admirer of the American Empire and its perpetual wars? American dissidents, civilian and military, may depend on her vote for their freedom from imprisonment.

What does she think about the “War on Terror”? The civil liberties and freedom from torture of various Americans and foreigners may depend on her attitude. In his 2007 trial, Jose Padilla, an American citizen, was found guilty of aiding terrorists. “The jury did seem to be an oddly cohesive group,” the Washington Post reported. “On the last day of trial before the Fourth of July holiday, jurors arranged to dress in outfits so that each row in the jury box was its own patriotic color — red, white or blue.”¹⁰ No one dared to question this blatant display of patriotism in the courtroom; neither the defense attorney, nor the prosecutor, nor the judge. How can we continue to pretend that people’s legal positions exist independently of their political sentiments?

In the 2000 Supreme Court decision stopping the presidential electoral count in Florida, giving the election to George W. Bush, did the politics of the five most conservative justices play a role in the 5 to 4 decision? Of course. Judges are essentially politicians in black robes. But should we care? Don’t ask, don’t tell. Sonia Sotomayor is a LATINA!

Given the large Democratic majority in the Senate, Sotomayor was in very little danger of being rejected. She could have openly and proudly expressed her social and political positions — whatever they may be — and the Democratic senators could have done the same. How refreshing, maybe even educational if a discussion ensued. Instead it was just another political appointment by a president determined to not offend anyone if he can help it, and another tiresome ritual hearing. The Republican senators were much less shy about revealing how they actually felt about important issues.

It didn’t have to be that way. As Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun.org pointed out during the hearings: “Democratic Senators could use their time to ask questions and make statements that explain why a liberal or progressive worldview is precisely what is needed on the Supreme Court.”

NATO and Eastern Europe resource

No one chronicles the rise of the supra-government called NATO like Rick Rozoff in his “Stop NATO” mailings. NATO has become an ever-expanding behemoth, making war and interfering in political controversies all over Europe and beyond. The United States is not the world’s only superpower; NATO is another, as it surrounds Russia and the Caspian Sea oil reserves; although the distinction between the two superpowers is little more than a facade. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the NATO/US 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. On April 23, 1999 missiles slammed into Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in downtown Belgrade, killing 16 employees. The station, NATO claimed, was a legitimate military target because it broadcast propaganda. (Certainly a novel form of censorship; not to mention the fact that NATO could simply have taken out the station’s transmitter.) What apparently bothered the Western powers was that RTS was reporting the horrendous effects of NATO’s bombing as well as passing footage of the destruction to Western media.

To mark the anniversary, Amnesty International recently issued a demand that NATO be held accountable for the 16 deaths. Amnesty asserts that the bombing was a deliberate attack on a civilian object (one of many during the 78 days) and as such constitutes a war crime, and called upon NATO to launch a war crimes probe into the attack to ensure full accountability and redress for victims and their families.

Readers might consider signing up for the “Stop NATO” mailing list. Just write to: rwrozoff [at] . Rozoff scours the East European press each day and comes up with numerous gems ignored by the mainstream media. But a warning: The amount of material you’ll receive is often considerable. You’ll have to learn to pick and choose. You can get an idea of this by reading previous reports at .

Notes

1. The Guardian (London) July 13, 2009 ^?
2. Fabian Escalante, “Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro” (Ocean Press, 2006) ^?
3. William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 32^?
4. William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 23 ^?
5. Ibid., chapter 18 ^?
6. Rogue State, chapter 17, intermixed with other types of US interventions ^?
7. Vermont TV station WCAX, July 4, 2009, WCAX.com ^?
8. Washington Post, July 19, 2009 ^?
9. William O. Douglas, “The Court Years, 1939-1975″ (1980), p.8 ^?
10. Washington Post, August 17, 2007 ^?

Israel’s Dilemma

How to calculate the risks of getting un-Chosen…

Israel’s current hard-liner government is now being forced to face a very real dilemma. At what point does its behavior become so outrageous that it risks pissing God off?

How far can the current government in Tel Aviv go before the Chosen People of Israel start running the risk getting un-Chosen?

If the Promised Land keeps getting trashed with too many high-rise condos soaking up all the natural resources in Eden, too much use of questionable eminent domain over the olive groves where Christ walked, too much depleted uranium used too liberally, too many obnoxious settlers committing hate crimes in the Holy Land, too much saber-rattling intimidation of the meek, too many more false-flag operations than even Samson ever dreamed of and too frequent massacres of Arab and Christian Palestinians in a land where Moses preached that “Thou shalt not Kill” seemed like a pretty good idea — might God begin to start reconsidering His choice?

According to a BBC News report, “The spiritual leader of Israel’s ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs.” When one of the most powerful rabbis in Israel is openly calling for wholesale genocide, perhaps it’s time for Israel to start worrying that it might be pushing too many of God’s buttons?

According to one of Britain’s leading newspapers, The Independent, the latest casualty figures in Gaza “list the names of 1,434 dead of whom they say 926 were civilians….” 926 of the 1,434 dead in the recent invasion of Gaza were simply “collateral damage”? How is God gonna feel about that?

According to a recent AFP report, soldiers invading Gaza were told that they were fighting a holy war. “Many Israeli troops had the sense of fighting a ‘religious war’ against Gentiles during the 22-day offensive in Gaza, according to a soldier who has highlighted the martial role of military rabbis during the operation. The soldier testified that the ‘clear’ message of literature distributed to troops by the rabbinate was: ‘We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the Gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land.’ The [journal of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military academy], which quoted graduates of the college, also cited the case of an elderly Palestinian woman killed as she was walking 100 metres (yards) from her home. Soldiers also spoke of civilians being abused, acts of vandalism and destruction of homes. ‘Those were very harsh testimonies about unjustified shooting of civilians and destruction of property that conveyed an atmosphere in which one feels entitled to use unrestricted force against Palestinians,’ academy director Dany Zamir told public radio.”

I really don’t think that God is gonna be pleased with Israel using His name as an excuse to gun down and/or barbecue innocent women and children.

And then there’s that sticky matter of home demolitions. How is God gonna feel about that one? Is it really wise for the Israeli government to use their illegal eminent domain powers and then claim that these illegal powers are used only according to explicit operating instructions from Him?

According to the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolitions, “In 1948 and for years after, Israeli governments systematically demolished more than 500 entire [Muslim and Christian] villages, towns, urban centers and neighborhoods, both to prevent the return of the Palestinian refugees and to take their lands and properties. Since the Occupation began in 1967, another 24,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished, including 4000 in the latest attack on Gaza. And in 2004, the Israeli government announced the establishment of a Demolition Administration within the Ministry of Interior; targeted for destruction are 20-40,000 homes of Israeli (Arab) citizens….”

Are the Chosen People being foolish to risk God’s wrath by continuing to tear down historic Palestine, the birthright that He granted to His only Son? It might be a good idea for the Israelites to remember what happened when God got pissed off at the Egyptians….

Israel’s YnetNews just reported that “research by an Arab human rights group shows a ten-fold increase in Jewish attacks on the Arab population in Israel over the last year.” Are those pesky settlers at it again? Someone over in Israel seriously needs to ask God what He thinks about hate crimes.
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Like a young child constantly testing the limits of its parents’ toleration, the current government of Israel seems to be constantly skating on the edge of invoking Divine disapproval. Just exactly how far can God be pushed? And at exactly what point is God gonna have to tell the Israelites, “Go to your room!” And if He doesn’t, will He then start to lose respect in Israelis’ eyes — for being too weak? Maybe God should start demanding an eye for an eye — just to show His children that He’s not gonna be manipulated by no uppity kids!

The big debate in the Israeli Knesset right now — or at least should be — is this: “Just exactly how much Ugly can we get away with before God starts to notice?” And another big question the Knesset should be considering is whether or not, once Israelis are Chosen, they will remain Chosen forever — just because they were born lucky? Or do they gotta constantly keep working at obtaining Parental approval?

How far does Israel need to go in order to keep the Promised Land from getting un-Promised? This is a very real dilemma now facing Israel’s government.

Guys, might I suggest that you consider re-reading your Talmud?

PS: “But why do you always just keep attacking the United States and Israel?” asked a friend of mine recently. “Why not Somalia, Sudan or Zimbabwe? Or Rwanda? They’re just as bad — or even far worse.” Why? Because America and Israel are supposed to be CIVILIZED countries, above and beyond such medieval nonsense as torture, genocide, assassination squads, land-grabs, political prisons and major “collateral damage”. We sort of expect that kind of behavior from countries just barely out of the Dark Ages — but not from so-called western democracies with a tradition of encouraging civilized behavior.

Recently the Berkeley Daily Planet printed the following information about Israel: “An Israeli company has developed a simple blood test that distinguishes between mild and more severe cases of multiple sclerosis…. An Israeli-made device helps restore the use of paralyzed hands. This device electrically stimulates the muscles, providing hope to millions of stroke sufferers and victims of spinal injuries…. Young children with breathing problems will soon be sleeping more soundly, thanks to a new Israeli device called the Child Hood. This innovation replaces the inhalation mask with an improved drug delivery system that provides relief for child and parent…. Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees to the population in the world. Israel produces more scientific papers per capita—109 per 10,000—than any other nation. Israel has the highest number of start-up companies per rata. In absolute terms, the highest numbers, except the U.S., are in Israel, which has a ratio of patents filed. Israel has the highest concentration of hi-tech companies outside of Silicon Valley in the U.S.A. Israel is ranked no. 2 in the world for venture capital funds, behind the U.S.A. Israel has more museums per capita than any other country. Israel has the second highest rate of publication of new books per capita.”

Does this description of Israel sound like it is a primitive country run by blood-thirsty dictators? No. This description sounds like Israel is a civilized country that has no business dropping white phosphorus bombs on women and children, destroying thousands of homes solely on the basis of religious intolerance, running what appears to be a medieval Inquisition, and intimidating and terrorizing any of its citizens who do not agree with it.

This description of Israel sounds like it is a country whose citizens should know better than that.

****

From BBC: Rabbi calls for annihilation of Arabs: The spiritual leader of Israel’s ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs. “It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable,” he was quoted as saying in a sermon delivered on Monday to mark the Jewish festival of Passover. Rabbi Yosef is one of the most powerful religious figures in Israel. He is known for his outspoken comments and has in the past referred to the Arabs as “vipers”. Through his influence over Shas, Israel’s third largest political party, he is also a significant political figure.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1270038.stm

Appeasement

Yet another comparison between Gaza & Nazi Germany?

So far, I have compared the Israeli neo-cons’ brutal assault on Gaza with Nazi Germany’s brutal assault on Poland’s Warsaw Ghetto. Here’s another comparison between the Israeli neo-cons and Germany’s Nazis that might also apply.

Remember when Neville Chamberlain made that famous speech announcing his appeasement policy toward Nazi Germany after the Germans seized part of Czechoslovakia? “I can well understand the reasons why the Czech Government has felt unable to accept the terms which have been put before them in the German memorandum,” stated Chamberlain back in 1938. “Yet I believe after my talks with Herr Hitler that, if only time were allowed, it ought to be possible for the arrangements for transferring the territory that the Czech Government has agreed to give to Germany to be settled by agreement under conditions which would assure fair treatment to the population concerned.”

Did Nazi Germany offer “conditions which would assure fair treatment” to the citizens of Czechoslovakia? I seriously doubt that they did. Obviously Sir Neville chose to close his eyes to that one. And are the Israeli neo-cons planning to seize parts of Gaza again just like Hitler seized parts of Czechoslovakia? I hear that Israeli settlers are already poised to move in and take over “parts of ” Gaza — except of course for the places now irradiated with depleted uranium.

“However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbor,” continued Chamberlain, “we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account.” Now which one of America’s leaders is gonna repeat that line with regard to the Israeli neo-cons’ brutal attack on the women and children of Gaza? Will it be Bush? Or will it be Obama? And when they are referring the “big and powerful neighbor,” will they be talking about Gaza as the Goliath who, armed only with homemade rockets and fertilizer bombs, is attacking poor sweet Israel’s David, one of the most deadly and heavily-armed nations in the world?

“For the present I ask you to await as calmly as you can the events of the next few days,” Chamberlain entoned gravely as he wound up his now-famous Appeasement speech. “As long as war has not begun, there is always hope that it may be prevented, and you know that I am going to work for peace to the last moment. Good night.” War had not already begun in Czechoslovakia? Yeah right. Just like war hasn’t already begun on the poor trapped slobs in Gaza.

And how many times have we heard George W. Bush tell us that he is diligently working for “Peace” in the Middle East — at the same time that he is happily appeasing the neo-con bullies who have done everything they can to propagandize and terrify Israeli citizens — who KNOW what it is like to live under Nazis — into supporting Nazi-like abuses, land-grabs, concentration camps and blitzkriegs in Gaza?

And what kind of “Peace” will Barack Obama be working for in the Middle East? Or will he too be working for “Appeasement” of the Israeli neo-cons who, like Hitler, learned early on that wars and threats of wars will get them “peace in our time” — as well as the gift of billions of dollars from the U.S. taxpayers.

Hey, at least Chamberlain had the good sense to not fork over billions of dollars to the Nazis — so perhaps my comparison between Sir Neville’s appeasement and the Bush-Obama appeasement is flawed after all.

U.S. Would Control Profits from Iraqi Oil Exports Under Agreement

There’s been no shortage of controversy surrounding what has been termed the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the governments of the United States and Iraq. After battling away for most of the year at what the terms of the agreement should be, the text was at last finalized this month.

The terms of the agreement effectively allow the U.S. to continue to control billions of dollars of proceeds from the sale of exported Iraqi oil held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It also contains numerous loopholes that could allow the continuing long-term presence of U.S. military forces and would effectively maintain U.S. jurisdiction over crimes committed by American soldiers.

Iraq’s cabinet approved the agreement a week ago with 27 members voting in favor, out of 28 ministers who were present, with nine ministers absent. It is now being debated in the Parliament.

Abdul Qadir al-Obaidi, Iraq’s minister of defense, issued a dire warning that without the agreement and continued presence of U.S. forces, “then what happened in the Gulf of Aden will happen in the Arabian Gulf too. Pirates will start in these ports in a way you can’t even imagine.”

Governments often use fear tactics to push through controversial legislation. Before the U.S. invasion, members of the Congress were told that if they didn’t authorize the President to use military force against Iraq, Saddam Hussein might attack the east coast of the United States with biological weapons from unmanned aerial vehicles, for example. More recently, members of Congress were warned that if they did not pass the highly unpopular bill taking taxpayers’ dollars to bail out banking and investment corporations, there would be martial law in America.

While painting an imaginary threat to frighten the public into supporting the agreement, Obaidi criticized opponents as being conspiracy theorists. The New York Times reported today that Obaidi “batted down conspiracy theories about the agreement”, theories fueled by “anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr” about “the existence of secret deals for a longer American presence.”

And yet Obaidi at the same time seemed to lend credence to the fears of opponents. As the Times noted, without comment on the contradiction, he “held open the possibility that some Americans might be needed after” the deadline of the withdrawal of U.S. troops by the end of 2011.

The agreement has been protested by large popular demonstrations in the streets of Baghdad. Thousands protested during a rally on Friday against the deal in Firdaus Square, where in 2003 U.S. soldiers toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in a staged publicity event that has since been hailed by the mainstream media as “an iconic moment”.

At the rally, demonstrators burned an effigy of President George W. Bush. A man who helped erect the effigy was quoted by the London Times as saying, “Just like Saddam’s statue was brought down, Mr Bush has fallen as well.”

The demonstrations were reportedly organized by Moktada al-Sadr, a highly influential figure whose father was murdered in 1999, most likely by the regime of Saddam Hussein. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he organized a resistance to the occupation consisting of both political and military elements. He commands the al-Mahdi Army, which has threatened to resume armed resistance if the agreement is passed by the Iraqi government.

While the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki initially claimed it could make an agreement unilaterally with the Bush administration, it has since conceded that the measure must obtain Parliamentary approval.

Under the U.S. Constitution, the agreement would also need to be agreed to by the Senate to have the force of law, but the Bush administration has claimed that no Senate approval is necessary, essentially declaring its intention to violate Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. This is not the first time the Executive Branch under Bush has declared for itself the power to govern by fiat, and it is likely to continue to be met with little resistance by the complacent U.S. Congress.

The SOFA agreement, which now has the official lengthy title of “Agreement Between the United States of America and the Republic of Iraq On the Withdrawal of United States Forces from Iraq and the Organization of Their Activities during Their Temporary Presence in Iraq”, while addressing a number of the Iraqi concerns, contains a number of loopholes that would allow, among other things, a U.S. military presence in Iraq beyond the given deadline for withdrawal.

It states in the preamble that both parties recognize the importance of “contributing to world peace and stability, combating terrorism in Iraq”, and “thereby deterring aggression and threats against the sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity of Iraq”. The agreement affirms that cooperation between the two countries “is based on full respect for the sovereignty of each of them in accordance with the purpose and principles of the United Nations Charter”.

This must be considered rather Orwellian language, given the fact that the invasion of Iraq was an act of aggression, defined at Nuremberg as “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”; and that the invasion was itself a breach of the peace in violation of the U.N. Charter and other applicable international treaties comprising the body of international law, resulting in instability and bringing terrorism to Iraq. It’s also quite meaningless language given some of the actual contents of the agreement itself.

Article 3 of the agreement contains a clause apparently intended to prevent the U.S. from including Iraqis in its extraordinary renditions programs by barring the U.S. from transferring any non-U.S. persons into or out of the country “unless in accordance with applicable Iraqi laws and regulations, including implementing arrangements as may be agreed to by the Government of Iraq.”

There is thus a loophole that might allow the U.S. to do precisely that, and any such “arrangements” could be interpreted, if the record of the Bush administration is any gauge, to mean approval from the Iraqi President without advice of consent of the Parliament. The U.S. could also, of course, simply violate the agreement and spirit disappeared persons out of the country as it has under the CIA renditions program.

Article 4 states that the U.S. military presence is requested “for the purposes of supporting Iraq in its efforts to maintain security and stability in Iraq”, which is belied by the fact that most Iraqis want the American troop presence to end and consider the continuing occupation to be the most significant causal factor of the violence that, while having ebbed over the past two years, continues to plague the country.

A survey taken last year for the U.S. military, for example, revealed that “Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of ‘occupying forces’ as the key to national reconciliation”, as reported by the the Washington Post.

The agreement states that any such operations “shall be fully coordinated with Iraqi authorities” and “overseen by a Joint Military Operations Coordination Committee (JMOCC)”, and that it is “the duty of the United States Forces to respect the laws, customs, and traditions of Iraq and applicable international law.” It then adds that both nations “retain the right to legitimate self defense within Iraq, as defined in applicable international law.”

This itself represents a major loophole because, of course, the right to “self defense” under international law is very broadly interpreted by the U.S. For example, the invasion of Iraq itself was painted by the Bush administration as an act of self defense against a perceived threat and thus, according to the administration, legitimate. As another example, the U.S. continues to bomb Pakistan despite growing protests from both the public and the government. In one incident that is particularly revealing as to the U.S. interpretation of “self-defense” under international law, a U.S. airstrike in June targeted and killed 11 members of the Pakistani Frontier Corp within Pakistan. Despite having killed allied forces within their own borders, the Pentagon described the attack as a “legitimate” act of self-defense.

The agreement sets the date of June 30, 2009 as the deadline for “the withdrawal of combat forces from the cities, villages, and localities.” U.S. forces would then be located on bases within Iraq and would ostensibly only be able to leave those bases on combat operations executed with the full cooperation of the Iraqi government. Use of such bases would be granted to the U.S. for the purpose of the ongoing foreign military presence within Iraq.

The agreement states that its implementation must be “consistent with protecting the natural environment and human health and safety” and that “Each Party shall provide the other with maps and other available information on the location of mine fields and other obstacles that can hamper or jeopardize movement within the territory and waters of Iraq.”

But it’s highly unlikely that the U.S. will engage in efforts to clean up areas contaminated with depleted uranium (DU), a still radioactive and chemically toxic isotope that is leftover from the process of enriching uranium. The dense metal is used as a weapon for penetrating armor by the U.S. military, but aerosolizes upon impact, and thus presents the risk that DU particles could be spread by the wind or contaminate drinking water. While the Pentagon has denied publicly that DU poses a health risk, it has privately acknowledged in internal documents and studies that inhalation of DU represents a serious health risk and may lead to cancer.

The Pentagon acknowledged after the Gulf War that at least 320 tons of DU remained on the ground from that conflict. Cancer rates in southern Iraq rose significantly after that war, with many Iraqi doctors attributing the increase to DU, claims that have been dismissed by the Pentagon as “propaganda”. Dr. Doug Rokke, a former US army colonel sent to the Gulf by the Army as a health physicist in 1991 to advise on cleanup procedures involving depleted uranium, has said that 30 members — nearly a third of his entire team — are now seriously ill, himself included, and that several have since died from cancer.

One estimate puts the amount of DU used in the first couple months of the Iraq war following the March 19, 2003 invasion at 1,100 to 2,200 tons.

It’s equally unlikely that the U.S. will make any effort to clean up “dud” cluster munitions that still litter Iraq from both wars. Estimates from the Gulf War put the number of unexploded submunitions, which effectively become landmines, at more than one million. These weapons continued to kill a decade after the war. According to a Human Rights Watch estimate, in 2001, cluster submunitions caused an average of 30 casualties per month. In its World Report 2004, the group reported that the U.S. and U.K. “dropped nearly 13,000 cluster munitions, containing an estimated 1.8 to 2 million submunitions” in just the first three weeks of combat. Even assuming only a conservative 5% “dud” rate for the weapons (many of which were not bombs but ground-launched munitions with a dud rate of up to 16%), that would translate into 100,000 unexploded munitions.

Another controversial aspect of the SOFA agreement has been the question of jurisdiction for crimes committed by U.S. forces in Iraq. While the U.S. has backed down from its insistence that private Pentagon contractors, such as mercenaries from the infamous Blackwater group, be under U.S. jurisdiction, the final agreement still maintains that U.S. soldiers themselves will primarily be.

The agreement states that “Iraq shall have the primary right to exercise jurisdiction over members of the United States Forces and of the civilian component”, but only for “premeditated felonies” and only “when such crimes are committed outside agreed facilities and areas and outside duty status.” Thus, for Iraq to have jurisdiction, any crimes committed by American soldiers would have to be shown to be “premeditated” and committed while off duty.

Were a soldier to kill an Iraqi civilian, for example, while not on duty, it would have to be shown that he had contemplated the killing in advance and acted with intent to kill. If the soldier therefore claimed that he had been threatened by other Iraqis and discharged his weapon only to deter an assault, and that any collateral damage that resulted was accidental, then the case would fall not under Iraqi, but U.S. jurisdiction.

Moreover, the pact adds that any member of the U.S. armed forces who is found to have committed a premeditated crime while off duty would “be entitled to due process standards and protections consistent with those available under United States and Iraqi law.” Any such incident would thus still fall under U.S. legal jurisdiction, with only what might perhaps be described as special consideration for Iraqi law — but not full Iraqi legal jurisdiction, as has been misreported by some of the mainstream media.

On top of that, the text adds that “United States Forces authorities shall certify whether an alleged offense arose during duty status”, which essentially gives the U.S. the power to define any service member’s “duty status” at the time of any given incident — yet another loophole that might prevent Iraq from having jurisdiction over crimes committed against its own people by foreign occupying military forces.

The agreement also stipulates that “each Party shall waive the right to claim compensation against the other Party for any damage, loss, or destruction of property, or compensation for injuries or deaths that could happen to members of the force or civilian component of either Party arising out of the performance of their official duties in Iraq.”

In other words, if the U.S. destroys Iraqi property or injures or kills Iraqis, the Iraqi government may not seek any compensation or reparations. Of course, this clause is mostly one-sided since there is no risk of Iraqis destroying the homes of U.S. citizens. Iraq isn’t bombing U.S. cities, towns, and villages, and Iraqis aren’t killing U.S. civilians within their own borders. So this clause may in effect be read as an Iraqi waiver of any right of the government to seek reparations from the U.S. for damages, injuries, or deaths resulting from the continuing foreign military occupation.

There is a recourse for “third party claims” — meaning from Iraqi citizens as opposed to the government — under which the U.S. would “pay just and reasonable compensation” for “meritorious” claims. But the U.S. apparently gets to decide what claims are “meritorious” or not, and all such claims “shall be settled expeditiously in accordance with the laws and regulations of the United States.” In other words, claims of damages, injuries or deaths from Iraqi citizens seeking compensation for actions of the U.S. military would not fall under Iraqi jurisdiction.

The SOFA agreement stipulates that detentions must be carried out only with Iraqi cooperation and that detained individuals must be turned over to Iraqi authorities within 24 hours of their arrest, which represents a shift from the U.S.’s earlier position that it be able to detain Iraqi citizens when and however it chooses.

The most commonly reported statement in the agreement, reflected in many headlines, is that which reads, “All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.”

In addition, “All United States combat forces shall withdraw from Iraqi cities, villages, and localities no later than the time at which Iraqi Security Forces assume full responsibility for security in an Iraqi province, provided that such withdrawal is completed no later than June 30, 2009.”

The agreement also states, “The United States recognizes the sovereign right of the Government of Iraq to request the departure of the United States Forces from Iraq at any time.” (Notice it doesn’t recognize the sovereign right of the People of Iraq, who overwhelmingly want the U.S. forces gone and whose government is seen by many as a puppet regime for colluding with the U.S. in arranging for its occupying forces to remain. Of course, Iraqis who recognize this have fallen prey to “conspiracy theories” — at least according to the Iraq’s minister of defense.)

In return, the U.S. does offer a few incentives for the Iraqi government. It pledges, for example, to “Support Iraq to obtain forgiveness of international debt resulting from the policies of the former regime”, which the U.S. supported throughout the 1980s.

The agreement also states: “Recognizing and understanding Iraq’s concern with claims based on actions perpetrated by the former regime, the President of the United States has exercised his authority to protect from United States judicial process the Development Fund for Iraq and certain other property in which Iraq has an interest. The United States shall remain fully and actively engaged with the Government of Iraq with respect to continuation of such protections and with respect to such claims.

“Consistent with a letter from the President of the United States to be sent to the Prime Minister of Iraq, the United States remains committed to assist Iraq in connection with its request that the UN Security Council extend the protections and other arrangements established in Resolution 1483 (2003) and Resolution 1546 (2003) [sic] for petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas originating in Iraq, proceeds and obligations from sale thereof, and the Development Fund for Iraq.”

Resolution 1483 noted “the establishment of the Development Fund for Iraq to be held by the Central Bank of Iraq” and that funds “shall be disbursed at the direction of the [Coalition Provisional] Authority”.

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), then headed up under Paul Bremer, proceeded to establish the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) in an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. To get around the terms of 1483, the DFI was held on the books of the Central Bank of Iraq and a portion of the fund located in Baghdad. But the U.S. nevertheless remained in control of the money and held most of it in New York.

The fund consists of assets seized from Iraq under the regime of Saddam Hussein as well as proceeds from the export of Iraqi oil.

While 1483 stipulates that these funds should be used “to assist the people of Iraq in the reconstruction and development of their economy and to facilitate assistance by the broader donor community”, the system has been plagued with charges of corruption and lack of accountability, with billions of dollars reportedly unaccounted for. Billions more have been paid out to corporations contracted by the Pentagon for ostensible reconstruction. One such corporation has been Halliburton. Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995 until 2000.

A further resolution on June 8, 2004, Resolution 1446, stated that “upon dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the funds in the Development Fund for Iraq shall be disbursed solely at the direction of the Government of Iraq”, but that proceeds from export sales of oil and natural gas would continue to be deposited in the fund.

As a January 2004 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York noted, in March 2003, “President Bush issued an executive order directing the transfer of funds controlled by the Iraqi government and its financial and oil institutions to the U.S. Treasury.” The Federal Reserve Bank then created a “Special Purpose Account” for the funds on behalf of the Treasury.

According to a Congressional Research Service report from October, about $10 billion is currently still being held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, accounting for a third of Iraq’s total reserves of foreign currency and gold.

If the agreement is approved by the Iraqi Parliament, it will thus effectively acquiesce to continued control over these proceeds from the export of Iraqi oil by the U.S., with merely a recognition of Iraqi “concern” over this money and a veil of Iraqi control over only the disbursement of the money for reconstruction and development. This aspect of the proposed pact has received little — if any — attention in U.S. mainstream media reports that have focused instead on the date set for withdrawal.

Jeremy R. Hammond is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Jeremy R. Hammond is the editor of Foreign Policy Journal (www.foreignpolicyjournal.com), a website providing news, analysis, and opinion commentary from outside the standard framework offered by government officials and the mainstream corporate media. His articles have also been featured in numerous other online publications. He can be reached at:

Good-Bye and Good Riddance Mr. Bush

According to the New York Times, 524,000 Americans lost their jobs in September and October. Unemployment spiked at 6.5 percent. Additionally, 28 million Americans subsist on food stamps. Millions maintain heat and lights with assistance from ‘energy banks’ subsidized by other Americans who still enjoy jobs.

“The economy is slipping deeper into a recessionary sinkhole that is getting broader,” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “The layoffs are getting larger, and coming faster. We’re likely to see at least another six months of more job reports like this.”

For the past eight years, George Bush watched, and assisted as some eight to twelve million illegal migrants crashed U.S. borders to displace American workers while they wreaked chaos in American schools, hospitals and prisons. At press conferences, he said, “They do the jobs that Americans won’t do.” While reports show illegal aliens killed more Americans via drunk driving, murders and rapes than combat soldiers suffered death in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Bush no longer speaks about illegal migrants doing the jobs that Americans won’t do. Gees! Can’t figure that one out now, can we?

At the same time, Bush and Congress gave away jobs by pushing for millions of H1-B and H2-B visas for foreign workers to displace American jobs. Bush worked hardest at outsourcing and offshoring American jobs. He and Congress killed U.S. manufacturing. He finished the job that Clinton started!

But Bush’s most ominous act as president remains his lie of “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” He created it to foment the Iraq War that killed 4,300 young men and women while it lacerated 32,000 into lives fraught with pain, anguish and missing limbs. While an estimated 150,000 Vietnam veterans committed suicide after service in Vietnam, twenty years from now will bring chilling statistics of how many lives suffered irreversible emotional damage and suicide from war time service in Iraq. The personal carnage already piles up across this country.

Benjamin Franklin, one of our founding fathers, said, “A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang.”

Bush’s odious ego, unbalanced emotions and lack of rational thinking—brought the planet an immoral-unethical war that degrades the United States in the eyes of the fellow nations. Bush promoted senseless slaughter with depleted uranium bombs and left millions as refugees.

When the door slams behind him as he walks out of the White House, the world rejoices.

“Bush single-handedly destroyed America’s image as a beacon of freedom,” said Simon Schama in Britain’s Guardian. “His administration inflicted mutilations on internationally agreed standards of humane conduct for prisoners—and on the protection of domestic liberties enshrined in the American Constitution. If the Statue of Liberty were alive, she would weep tears of blood.”

“It’s hard to fathom the damage bush has inflicted upon the planet,” said Jean-Claude Kiefer in France’s Dernieres Nouvelles d’Alsace. “He bequeaths the world the Iraq War, stalemate in Afghanistan, oil imperialism, financial crisis, U.S. debt weighing on the entire planet, and withdrawal from the Kyote Protocol—and the list is not exhausted.”

Raghida Dergham of Dar al-Hayat said, “The Bush strategy was based on undermining stability in the Gulf region. The result has been tragedy for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the rise of Iran as a regional power.”

What does Bush’s time in power mean to regular American citizens? I, for one, pity the man who killed enormous numbers of humanity and ruined so many lives. Beyond unconscionable depicts his legacy upon American and Iraq families. The global tragedy he created exceeds 9/11 by a factor of 100 and more.

He fought a “War on Terror” by getting our soldiers killed 10,000 miles away but left our borders as wide open as a 24-hour mall. The irony and insanity of Bush’s actions leave me breathless.

Bush usurped our sense of right and wrong as well as our ethics and morality. Instead of leading us toward employment and full exercising of the American Dream, he drowned us with millions illegally crashing into our country without warrant. Instead of solving our $700 billion annual trade deficit, he did nothing to stop our manufacturing base as it slipped off shore. He failed to take the lead on energy conservation or a plan for the Post Oil era.

Instead of paying down the national debt, Bush grew it to $9.4 trillion. We stand nostril-deep in a cesspool of debt, exacerbated by the Iraq War killing our kids and bank account for decades to come.

Instead of solving the “War on Drugs” costing us $70 billion annually, by placing troops on the border and fencing, he undermined the Border Patrol and ICE with ‘token’ enforcement. Worse, he jailed, with his political assassin Johnny Sutton, Border Patrol officers Campeon and Ramos for stopping a drug dealer by shooting him in the butt. Those two courageous agents languish in jail while their families suffer loss of their husbands and fathers. Yet the drug traffic increases into a miniature war as reported by the LA Times:

Mexico Under Siege: A Times Special…

While 400,000 illegal migrant mothers birth their instant ‘jackpot babies’ annually, our hospitals and medical systems collapse from lack of funding and non-payment by millions in this country illegally. Bush’s incompetence along with Congress exceeds comprehension.

Instead of enforcing our immigration laws to rid us of 20 million illegal aliens, he promoted the McCain-Kennedy Amnesty to not only give criminals a free ride and equal citizenship, he bragged, “I’ll see you at the signing!”

Instead, grassroots Americans collectively beat their sitting president by overturning the amnesty by sheer force of voices and numbers. Had Bush, Kennedy and McCain succeeded in passing their seven proposed amnesties, our situation would have worsened by a factor of 20 to 30 million more people leeching into our financial services paid for and meant for American citizens.

While Bush failed to enforce our laws, 350,000 convicted illegal aliens sit in our federal, state and city jails from horrific acts of violence, rapes, thefts, drunk driving and other killings of American citizens.

With our civilization facing horrific energy shortages, he failed to promote even a single plan for fuel efficiency, conservation or a strategic plan for our future.

Finally, with our schools overrun by 4.3 illegal alien children and our national language staggering via assault of the Spanish language, Bush accelerated our country into a fractured and Balkanized nightmare—yet to see its full destructive power upon our culture.

Bush’s level of incompetence and duplicity leaves our country staggering into the 21st century–cut, bleeding, drained, exhausted, without borders and without a rudder. We face Hobson’s Choice on a scale unprecedented in modern times.

Frosty Wooldridge is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece.

He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at his website: www.frostywooldridge.com

Listen Up, Eye Rollers! – Part 2

Eye rollers, people who condescendingly roll their eyes when confronted with truth, share common characteristics: apathy, naivety, and of course blissful ignorance. In addition, some eye rollers can be very dispassionate, as exemplified in the following separate scenarios:

While attempting to explain the illegalities of unwarranted surveillance, a friend replied – “As long as I am not doing anything wrong, I don’t care if they listen to my conversations.” While describing the potential tyrannical controls of Codex, another person responded – “I’ll just stop taking vitamins.” A friend borrowed a copy of Afghanistan After Democracy which photographically illustrates the horrendous birth defects caused by the ongoing use of depleted uranium by the U.S. government. Upon returning the book, that person said – “Well, lots of people have birth defects” implying that the cause is inconsequential and oh well, too bad! Rejection of these and other circumstances does not exempt media-dumbed-down American citizens from culpability or relieve victims from the consequences. What affects one citizen’s liberty eventually affects all citizens.

Eye Rollers who read the daily papers assume they are well-informed. Thomas Jefferson warned: “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. It is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood.” It is currently legal to falsify or fabricate “news.” “Media propaganda tactics include blackouts, misdirections, expert opinions to echo the Establishment line, smears, defining popular opinions, mass entertainment distractions,” and the proliferation of the so-called conservative and liberal positions.[1]

According to a decision by the Florida Appeals Court on February 14, 2003 in the Jane Akre whistleblower lawsuit, the court agreed with Fox News who asserted that it is not against the law to distort or falsify the news in the United States. “The Court held that Akre’s threat to report the station’s actions to the FCC did not deserve protection under Florida’s whistle blower statute, because Florida’s whistle blower law states that an employer must violate an adopted ‘law, rule, or regulation.’”[2] “Fair and balanced” Fox News, citing the First Amendment, asserted that there is no rule against distorting or falsifying or deliberately distorting the news on public airways in the United States. The Bill of Rights was designed to protect individual human rights, not the government or corporations. Apparently, corporations (inanimate entities) have appropriated those liberties due to the deliberately ambiguous Fourteenth Amendment.

The Florida Appeals court, in a questionable interpretation of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) policy against falsification of the news, claimed that the FCC policy was not law but merely policy. Consequently, corporations decide what to “report,” without consideration of truth.[3] Currently it is a crime for a private citizen to lie to a government official, but it is not a crime for a government official to lie to the people.[4] Lying is not a crime unless one “contracts” by their oath to tell the truth; that is why government officials resist testifying under oath. Bush and Cheney refused to testify under oath to the 9/11 Commission. With few exceptions, lying politicians are rarely prosecuted. Yet, citizens who perjure themselves often suffer harsh consequences. Despite high-priced lawyers and public support, Martha Stewart was jailed for lying, not for questionable stock transactions. She unwittingly entered into a “contract” with the court to tell the truth. The intimidating media-overkill sent a fearful message to the masses. “When the people fear their government, there is Tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is Liberty.” Thomas Jefferson

“Five major media outlets filed briefs of Amici Curiae (friend of FOX) – to support the FOX position: Belo Corporation, Cox Television, Inc., Gannett Co., Inc., Media General Operations, Inc., and Post-Newsweek Stations, Inc.” Highly profitable corporate broadcasters, through government complicity, and with the protection of the court, have seized the public airways and erroneously, but conveniently, shield themselves with the First Amendment. Well-compensated, often arrogant and belligerent, persuasive “pundits,” without impunity, feign sincerity, propagate the party line and increase profits for their corporate employers. Contrary to the myth, they are not government watchdogs.

The airways belong to the people, not the government or corporations who are intimate partners. Corporate monopolization of the public airwaves will further increase with the FCC decision on December 18, 2007 to allow even greater media consolidation. Bush nominated Kevin Martin as an FCC member on April 30, 2001. Martin served as the Deputy General Counsel for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000 and participated in the Florida recount. Bush then designated Martin as the FCC chairman on March 18, 2005.[5] Martin wants to end limits on media ownership by removing the “cross-ownership ban.” This plan takes effect shortly if unimpeded. Since 1983, the number of corporations owning most newspapers, magazines, book publishers, recorded music, movie studios, television and radio stations has decreased from fifty to five.[6] Prior to his FCC position, Martin was Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy. His wife, Catherine, was a spokeswoman for Cheney during the Valerie Plame fiasco and now works on Bush’s communications staff.[7]

Media corporations share board members with “other large corporations including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health care, pharmaceutical, and technology companies.” Media systems, until the 1980’s, were domestically owned, regulated, and national in scope. Together with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the U.S. government deregulated and privatized all communications media which “resulted in a global commercial media system dominated by a small number of super-powerful transnational media corporations (mostly U.S. based), working to advance the cause of global markets and the CIA agenda.”[8]

The 1934 Communications Act, and later the Fairness Doctrine (1949) [9] allowed equal time to opposing opinions. Mark S. Fowler, a communications lawyer appointed to head the FCC by President Ronald Reagan, aggressively opposed the Fairness Doctrine as well as the First Amendment. “He set about pruning, chopping, slashing, eliminating, burying and deep-sixing fifty years of regulations that guarded against monopolistic practices and excessive commercialism and protected the public interest standard.” The Fairness Doctrine, along with diversity, fairness, equal time and objectivity was rescinded in 1987. Television and radio stations were no longer required to present both sides of important or controversial issues nor give equal time to candidates.[10] Networks have called early election results affecting western voters and a whole plethora of issues. Elite-selected candidates are promoted while constitutional candidates are ignored and ridiculed.

For decades U.S. “news” has been fabricated. Radio Free Europe and the Committee for a Free Europe were big priorities for Truman and his crony, Frank Wisner. Wisner, a Wall Street lawyer, was a Navy censor, head of Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operations in southeastern Europe at the end of World War II, and the head of the Directorate of Plans (clandestine chief) of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1950s. He was the OSS liaison to the Gehlen Organization, was a senior CIA official (from 1947 until 1965) and was involved in the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala (1954) and Mossadeq in Iran (1953). He was the first Director of the CIA’s covert action wing called the Office of Policy Coordination (created 1948).

Wisner, along with Allen Dulles, Richard Helms and Phillip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post and husband of CFR/Trilateralist Katharine Graham) established Operation Mockingbird, the CIA program designed to completely control the U.S. media. The CIA collaborated with media-skilled Nazi war criminals who conveniently escaped the gallows after Nuremburg.[11] General Reinhard, Klaus Barbie, Otto von Bolschwing (Eichmann’s crony) and SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny joined the CIA’s perception management efforts. “There’s even evidence that Martin Bormann, Hitler’s second-in-command at the end of the war, faked his own death and escaped to Latin America, where he worked with CIA-linked groups.”[12] “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” William Casey, CIA Director (staff meeting, 1981).

A real chip off the old globalist block, Wisner’s son, Frank G. Wisner, Jr. (CFR, Bilderberger), was ambassador to the Philippines from August 1991 until June 1992. He is Executive Vice President of the American International Group (AIG), the world’s third largest capital investment pool and a leading member of the World Trade Organization. Maurice Greenberg is the former chairman. AIG’s insurance operations, including the entire period under Greenberg’s leadership, have been connected to CIA covert operations. AIG purchased those six ports from Dubai. You remember those ports – U.S. citizens demanded that the government not sell the ports to Dubai. Well, they did anyway and then Dubai sold them to AIG.[13]

“Directly relevant to the post-9/11 events, current members of AIG’s board of directors include former US ambassador and CFR member Richard Holbrooke, a major post-9/11 war advisor to the Bush administration and business partner of George Soros.” The board included Frank Wisner, Jr., a former Enron director. Wisner Jr., then U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines, helped Enron win contracts to operate two Subic Bay power plants despite “fierce local opposition.”[14] While in India, Wisner secured numerous “deals” for Enron. He left India only after Enron was firmly entrenched.[15]

Wisner preceeded Paul Wolfowitz as United States Department of Defense Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from January 1993 to June 1994. In 2003, Frank Wisner, Jr. was co-chairman of a new independent task force report on Afghanistan cosponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.[16] He, along with Richard Armitage, is on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development.[17] Wisner is also a trustee with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.[18] Families that prey together get richer and accrue power with each generation.

Truman and Eisenhower were the first two presidents to introduce and mobilize propaganda as an official peacetime institution. It was a “war of words” and an “integral component of the government’s foreign policy operation.” Both Truman and Eisenhower employed propaganda and psychological strategy in order to promote the “Cold War” operation. In fact, much of the planning for the “Cold War” took place during the administration of these two presidents.[19]

The unrestricted propaganda operation, without congressional oversight, was controlled by the president. This, along with unconstitutional treaties, increased presidential power while decreasing constitutional checks and balances. Presidential influence (intervention) metastasized outside of the country, especially with Reagan who was perfect globalist material. The “great communicator” was a “trustworthy” spokesperson who Americans supported. The perfect “persuader” led the U.S. into the highly profitable military buildup. He got help from abroad. Former Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos donated $12 million dollars to Reagan’s 1980 and 1984 presidential campaigns. That money, according to rumor, was used, in part, to “sabotage Carter’s negotiations to free 52 U.S. hostages held in Iran.[20]

The National Security Council (NSC) was created by Public Law 80-253, approved on July 26, 1947, a reorganization of the U.S. security apparatus. Its function was to advise the president (chairman of the Council) on “integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to national security and to facilitate interagency cooperation. At the President’s direction, the NSC also assesses and appraises risks to U.S. national security, considers policies and then reports or makes recommendations to the President.”[21] This legislation also provided for a Secretary of Defense, a National Military Establishment, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Resources Board.”[22]

The NSC was organized with the following seven permanent members: the President; the Secretaries of State, Defense, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force; and the Chairman of the National Security Resources Board. The CIA Director reports to the NSC and can attend meetings and advise but is not a NSC member.[23] The Amendments Act of 1949 removed the three military services from NSC membership and added the Vice-President. Additionally, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was added as an advisor.[24]

Harry S. Truman replaced the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), created June 13, 1942, with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947. Truman struggled to regularize U.S. psychological warfare and the CIA which is not an intelligence-gathering operation – that misconception is one of the agency’s greatest propaganda triumphs.[25] “Despite its name, the Central Intelligence Agency’s main purpose is, and has always been, carrying out covert operations involving economic warfare, rigged elections, assassinations and genocide. “The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that 6 million people had died by 1987 as a result of CIA covert operations.”[26] The CIA distorts intelligence to justify its own goals. This “disinformation” deceives policymakers and has resulted in organized terror throughout the world. Using the CIA, our government breaks national and international laws in the name of national security.[27]

In addition to the CIA, Truman, careful never to use the word “propaganda” bypassed the wrangling National Security Council and, through a Presidential Directive [28] (addressed to The Secretary of State, The Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence) founded the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), on April 4, 1951 as suggested by Gordon Gray, a CFR member, who was the Board’s first director.[29] Henry Kissinger was Gray’s consultant. Gray worked for Frank Wisner’s Wall Street Law firm, was a State Senator and also became a newspaper publisher – The Winston-Salem Journal and the Twin Cities Sentinel. He was the son of tobacco baron, Bowman Gray, chairman of the R. J. Reynolds Corporation.

There were two major purposes of the PSB: legitimize and institutionalize propaganda during peacetime and as a war of words during the orchestrated “Cold War” and to enable a president to commandeer congressional responsibility at the expense of the American republic. The Psychological Strategy Board was chaired by the CIA and consisted of the following: (1) Undersecretary of State, (2) The Deputy Secretary of Defense, (3) Director of Central Intelligence, (4) A representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, (5) An appropriate representative or head of any department or agency of the Government as determined by the Board.[30]

On Thursday 26 July 1951, President Truman told the media that the Psychological Strategy Board was a part of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Board was terminated by Executive Order 10483 of September 3, 1953. Its functions were transferred to the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB). These agencies, without any congressional oversight, would assist in the ideological “war of words” against communism. The CIA has published and disseminated hundreds of books promoting the official Cold War party line. Their newspapers and magazines throughout the world provides cover for their agents and allows the implementation of misinformation that consistently reaches U.S. audiences via the wire services which also “employs” CIA agents who prevent problematic facts from public exposure.[31]

In 1977, Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein (exposed Watergate with Bob Woodward) declared that over 400 US journalists were CIA employees “who have secretly carried out assignments according to documents on file at CIA headquarters, from intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens.” A high-level source told Bernstein, “One journalist is worth twenty agents.”[32] CIA media assets include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, and Copley News Service. The CIA had infiltrated the nation’s businesses, media, and universities with tens of thousands of on-call operatives by the 1950’s. CIA Director Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, like George H. W. Bush, from Yale’s infamous Skull and Bones (Brotherhood of Death) Society.[33] So, who provides your perceptions? For part one click below.

Footnotes:

1, Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation By Mary Louise
2, The Media Can Legally Lie, Project Censored by Liane Casten, Spring 2003
3, Court Ruled That Media Can Legally Lie by Liane Casten
4, John Zube On Law, Donald M. Fraser
5, Biography of FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin
6, More Media Disinformation? FCC Proposes Greater Media Consolidation by Stephen Lendman, Global Research, December 13, 2007
7, Ibid
8, Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation By Mary Louise
9, Communications Act of 1934
10, The Republican Noise Machine, Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy by Steve Brock, p. 294-95
11, The CIA and Nazi War Criminals, National Security Archive Posts Secret CIA History Released Under Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 146, Edited by Tamara Feinstein, February 4, 2005
12, The Gehlen Org, The CIA’s Greatest Hits by Mark Zepezauer
13, Dubai firm sells US ports to AIG, December 11, 2006
14, A six-part series, The United States in the Philippines: post-9/11 imperatives By Larry Chin, Online Journal Contributing Editor
15, Frank Wisner, Source Watch
16, Wisner: ‘Pivotal Moment’ in Afghanistan, June 23, 2003
17, Middle East Peace and Development
18, Frank G. Wisner, NNDB
19, The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945-1955 by Shawn J. Parry-Giles, Praeger Series in Presidential Studies, 2002, Introduction
20, A six-part series, The United States in the Philippines: post-9/11 imperatives By Larry Chin, Online Journal Contributing Editor
21, National Security Council (NSC), Truman Administration (1947-1953)
22, Harry S. Truman Library & Museum, Papers of Harry S. Truman, Staff Member and Office Files: National Security Council File, Date Span: 1947 – 1953
23, Ibid
24, Ibid
25, Safe For Democracy, The Secret Wars of the CIA by John Prados, 2006, Chapter 5, The Covert Legions
26, Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation By Mary Louise
27, The CIA’s Greatest Hits by Mark Zepezauer, Odonian Press, Accessed December 14, 2007
28, Safe For Democracy, The Secret Wars of the CIA by John Prados, 2006, Chapter 5, The Covert Legions
29, Harry S. Truman Papers Staff Member and Office Files: Psychological Strategy Board Files, Dates: 1951-53
30, Ibid
31, The Mighty Wurlitzer (the CIA’s propaganda machine) from the book The CIA’s Greatest Hits by Mark Zepezauer
32, Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation By Mary Louise
33, Ibid

Deanna Spingola is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Deanna Spingola has been a quilt designer and is the author of two books. She has traveled extensively teaching and lecturing on her unique methods. She has always been an avid reader of non-fiction works designed to educate rather than entertain. She is active in family history research and lectures on that topic. Currently she is the director of the local Family History Center.

She has a great interest in politics and the direction of current government policies, particularly as they relate to the Constitution. Her website is at: www.spingola.com
email:

Everybody Knows

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
Everybody knows the war is over.
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
Everybody knows the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.
That’s how it goes. Everybody knows. ~~Leonard Cohen

The fate of millions was sealed the moment Dick Cheney selected himself as The Destroyer whose charge to keep for the next eight years would be — as Capitol Hill Blue’s Doug Thompson so succinctly described George W. Bush — a “criminally insane, pill-popping dry drunk.” I don’t know about that. I’ve seen some drunks in my time — even dry ones — and George Bush appears to be more than a little moist.

Bush was the perfect foil for Cheney. The Scalia-driven 2000 election coup catapulted Bush to the top of the political heap. For the first time in his worthless, impotent, cruelly indifferent life, Bush was suddenly important — the most powerful man on the face of the earth — and all because he had been told to scream, “Jezus! Jezus is my philosopher!” to the swooning masses. Makes one wonder at the rigid consent of those same “believers” for the ensuing slaughter of so many innocents — when murdering even one in the name of Jesus should have sent a collective shriek reverberating throughout the religious universe. (See Matthew 18:14; Mark 9:42; Luke 17:2)

Everybody knows that Bush isn’t remotely qualified to be at the helm of the world’s superpower. He can neither think nor speak coherently, can recognize little other than Texas on a map, has completely torpedoed every business venture he attempted, and admittedly was a hard-partying sot until he was 40. Cheney was another matter. He was a household word. He had been a public servant throughout his career. He served as President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, earned six terms in the House of Representatives where he ascended to the position of minority whip and, finally, was the elder Bush’s Secretary of Defense.

We trusted Cheney to keep Bush from making rash decisions. Was it not Cheney who, at the conclusion of the 1991 Desert Storm assault, made the assessment that to expand the exercise to include regime change in Iraq was not morally sustainable because of the chaotic bloodletting — the needless toll on our uniformed military?

We were wrong. Had we bothered to check the “other priorities” that allowed Cheney to dodge the draft five times on his rise to power, his chilling congressional voting record, his efforts to enrich the military industrial complex by privatizing defense duties and granting massive contracts to Halliburton, we would have known that Cheney was consumed with lust for power and money. We would have known Cheney had been champing at the bit for more than a decade to impose a new order wherein the American Empire controls the world and its resources.

Had we checked, we would have known Dick Cheney was the wrong babysitter for a kid who gets his jollies by blowing things up.

Cheney Unbound

In 1991, Cheney was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the upheaval of the following decade, the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, and the expanding manipulative power of the corporate media created the axis of corruption necessary for a Cheney reign of terror. Cheney was ready, as were the militant warmongers of the Project for the New American Century who had been demanding Saddam Hussein’s head for years. At least 12 of the 18 co-signers of the January 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, and another letter four months later to then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, demanding the overthrow of Saddam were given key positions on Cheney’s destructive team.

The fix was in. Four days before the 2001 inauguration, PNAC’s deputy director, Thomas Donnelly, wrote a memorandum to “Opinion Leaders,” reminding them that “the task of removing Saddam Hussein’s regime from power still remains…Many in the incoming Bush Administration understand this challenge…”

Four months after the inauguration, the White House issued a warning that the threat of terrorist-nations using weapons of mass destruction against the American “homeland” was very real. To counter this danger, Cheney put himself in charge of the entire government — departments of Defense, Justice, Health and Human Services, Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, FEMA, and “other federal agencies,” which would naturally include both FAA and NORAD. A new department — the Office of National Preparedness — was created so Cheney could protect us from catastrophic harm and deal with “consequence” management.

The next four months were busy ones. With malicious indifference, Cheney set about screwing the American people; destroying 225-year Constitutional protections, passing secret laws to seize unlimited executive power, and locking both Congress and the public out of the legislative process. Bush provided cover by regaling us with hilarious “Benny Hill” bits of linguistic derring-do, strutting from one presidential photo op to another, falling off couches and bicycles, choking on pretzels, and attacking brush with a chainsaw at his Crawford ranch.

Cheney in Charge

Then it was 9-11. Suddenly Bush was no longer a spoiled, bumbling, schizophrenic little president. In an instant, he was transformed into a loaded codpiece — The Commander in Chief, The Decider of life and death — a modern-day Caligula towering above mankind with lighted depleted uranium firecrackers gripped in both fists. Cheney could not have picked a more willing accomplice to export death and violence to the four corners of the earth…

With smoke still rising from the ashes of Afghanistan, the drive to topple Saddam, who was demanding Euro for his oil, quickly turned into a crusade. It was Cheney-orchestrated and Cheney-driven. Under the deepening shadows of mushroom clouds, administration neoconservatives teamed up with ecstatic corporate media co-conspirators to terrify an already traumatized public. Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith launched a separate intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, to create the propaganda needed to invade Iraq.

Since Bush can’t be trusted to maintain a single train of thought in one-on-one interviews, he hit the campaign trail with a prepared speech he delivered over and over — is now delivering about Iran — frantically catapulting the propaganda that Saddam was ‘threatening America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons.” Bush convinced a majority of Americans that the Iraqi dictator was allied with Al Qaeda and provided a “safe haven” for terrorists, and if we didn’t wipe him out, he would strike us again without leaving any fingerprints.”

Cheney’s fingerprints are all over every aspect of the drive for war. For a year and a half, Cheney bullied the entire intelligence apparatus, especially the CIA, into making a false case that Saddam was an immediate nuclear threat. He denigrated the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report that there was no evidence, sneering that the intelligence was faulty, and IAEA Director-General Mohammed El-Baradei had no credibility where Iraq was concerned.

But it was Secretary of State Colin Powell who rolled the loaded dice at the UN Security Council on February 8, 2003, in a presentation even he admitted was “bullshit.” Powell, who is adept at leaving no fingerprints, but whose shadow lingers over decades of slaughtered innocents, carried the water for his masters one last time. When Powell completed his somber charges that Al-Qaeda was in Iraq running “poison camps” full bore, that Saddam was obtaining magnets for uranium enrichment — charges backed up with photos and vials of poison — we were sold. Because we trusted him.

A Moral Fork in the Road

I don’t want to go off on an Aristotelian rant here, but thanks to Cheney and those around him obsessed with world government, this nation appears to be running on empty where morality, or ethos, is concerned. Values such as compassion, sympathy, prudence, virtue, decency, ethics — cannot thrive in a nation controlled by war criminals who force its citizens into submission through fear, violence and propaganda. How can a society be “just” when natural laws have fallen by the wayside and nobody is held accountable for crimes against God and humanity?

We are under the control of the criminally insane. Cheney has turned the greatest democratic republic ever conceived into a world corporation and anointed himself its Chief Executive Officer (CEO). He has supplanted two centuries of protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights with executive orders and secret laws. In their lust for power and riches, Cheney and Bush have managed in just seven grueling, sadistic, morally corrupt years to destroy entire nations, including their own. And they accomplished this in the only way possible. Because we permitted it. Because we lost our moral compass.

So we stand here in the blood-sodden mess of two lost wars. Millions — millions — have been displaced, destroyed, dishonored in Cheney’s quest for oil. Tens of thousands of our own citizens are injured, maimed — 4,077 dead — an entire generation of Americans lost in a depleted uranium wasteland. “So?” Cheney says, “They were all volunteers.” He admitted that losing sons or daughters could “be a burden” on families, but reminded us sternly that “the biggest burden” is on the President, who has to send even more to their deaths.

We’re at the crossroads. We can no longer remain neutral nor mill around in confused acceptance of the genocidal madness into which we have been swept. Thomas Jefferson said, “When once a republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.”

Everybody knows the folly of the treasonous “corrections” made to counter the Iran-Contra evil in the 1980’s and early ’90’s — the flurry of Presidential Christmas-Eve pardons allowing convicted criminals to recede into the shadows only to return and metastasize throughout the current Cheney/Bush administration.

Cheney, Bush and their co-conspirators throughout the three branches of government must be removed. Indicted. Convicted. Imprisoned. Voting records of the 435 members of Congress and 33 Senators up for re-election in 2008 must be vetted, and those who do not reflect the will of the people must go. No exceptions. The remaining 17 Senators must either stand or fall on their voting records. If those who are guilty of the same breach of trust as their cohorts refuse to budge, they must be impeached and removed from office.

They have left us with but one choice, and one last chance to make that choice. We have reached a point in the “course of human events” where it is not only our “right but our duty” to throw off this destructive government and institute one which remembers it “derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The time has come for Americans to blink. Because the Abyss is staring back at us.

Sheila Samples is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at:

Video: Beyond Treason

What causes Gulf War Illness? Some believe these illnesses are caused by exposure to depleted uranium munitions used on the battlefield. Others believe chemical and biological exposures are the prime suspect. While yet an even larger group argue that experimental vaccines given to our troops, without their knowledge or consent, may have lead to the demise of many of these soldiers.

Beyond Treason
Producer: The Blum Group

U.S. military targets Southeast Colorado (Part 1 of 3)

Property seizures in other countries are considered totalitarian. When they occur at the hands of the corporate-controlled U.S. government they are apparently condoned and even facilitated by the courts whose job it is to reign in this kind of abuse. The monopoly media, including “conservative” talk radio, is an information filtering system masquerading as “news.” They habitually conceal government land grabs and other privatization schemes like the current controversy in southeastern Colorado. The army is attempting to seize property, claiming they need extra land to better prepare the troops. What’s really behind this patriotic-let’s-help-the-troops endeavor? Call it what they will, land seizure is land seizure and violates the public trust.

What is it about Colorado and the military? In 1989, George H. W. Bush’s administration wanted to store dangerous radioactive waste at the Pueblo Army Depot but the state wisely objected. [1] Toxic waste disposal is no longer an unmanageable issue — well-connected arms manufacturers use it for bombs and bullets — kind of a double whammy — if the bullets and bombs don’t kill them, the lethal residue causes widespread cancer and horrific birth defects for future offspring of those who absorb, inhale or swallow the deadly dust. The Pentagon and their private contractors suppress the noxious nature of depleted uranium. Earlier, they didn’t tell troops about Agent Orange. And the citizens of Anniston, Alabama weren’t told about PCBs. [2] There are thousands of such examples. The government consistently protects corporate profits rather than citizens.

Even though the Pentagon owns/occupies 31,700,692 acres in the U.S. and its territories and another 32,408,262 acres in foreign countries for a total of 64,108,954 acres, they claim to be strapped for a training area. The Department of Defense Base Structure Report (221 pages) dated September 30, 2006 (last report available) reveals that the Pentagon owns 577,519 structures worth over $712 billion situated on 86 bases in U.S. territories, 823 bases in foreign lands and 4402 military bases and/or military warehouses in the U.S. Their report boasts — “the Department of Defense remains one of the world’s largest ‘landlords.'” [3] As a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, we have added at least 13 new military bases in the Middle East, ostensibly for the Global War of Terrorism (GWOT). The U.S. has literally surrounded Iran. There are about 63 countries with U.S. bases and thousands of U.S. military personnel (out of about 1.5 million) in 156 countries. [4]

According to another report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, dated April 10, 2008, the army claims they need to restructure and rebuild which will require at least $190 billion for equipment through fiscal year 2013. [5] In 2007 alone, in order of rank, the Pentagon paid the following, often no-bid contracts: (1) Lockheed Martin Corp. $12,679,523,202; (2) Boeing Co. $7,300,000,000; (3) Northrop Grumman Corp. $6,821,000,000; (4) KBR Inc. (a spin-off of Halliburton) $5,517,070,621; (5) Science Applications International Corp. $4,412,146,628; (6) Raytheon Co. $4,068,752,346. [6] Given these massive figures, one would justifiably trust that America is well-armed, impenetrable and protected.

However, trust is not a word that one would associate with any government function. There are “151 current members of Congress” who have personally invested millions of dollars in companies that have received large defense contracts. Some of those companies are probably listed above or in any of the other top 100 companies. This provides some evidence of why “our representatives” favor corporations; it pays better and that’s in addition to hefty campaign contributions. [7]

Currently, the military (all branches) occupies 483,440 acres in Colorado. [8] Fort Carson, an army post on 137,412 acres of range land located in southeast Colorado, is considered one of the world’s premier locations to train and prepare soldiers for battle. [9] The post had a total population of 10,566 in the 2000 U.S. Census and is located in both Pueblo County and El Paso County, Colorado. The census also revealed that there were 1,679 households and 1,620 families residing on base. There were 2,663 housing units. [10] During World War II, the base functioned as a prison camp for non-threatening German, Italian and Japanese-American citizens whose lands had been seized. [11]

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) was previously located one mile west of Fort Carson at the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center. NORAD provides selective response to air, missile, and space attacks over U.S. and Canadian airspace. A faulty system must have failed miserably on 9/11 because no one was reprimanded or fired for incompetence. But wait; there was an upgrade in 1987 at a cost of $968 million and another one by Lockheed in 1993. [12] Lockheed also received NORAD upgrade contracts in April 1999. [13] Then after 9/11, the government spent about $700 million to upgrade the early warning systems at Cheyenne Mountain. [14] By March 2005, thanks to Lockheed, NORAD had a newly refurbished, $14-million state-of-the-art control room — NORAD now “includes a station that receives Federal Aviation Administration data, flight plans and access to 50 FAA radars and 20 air-traffic control stations. NORAD can even tune into commercial airline radios and listen to chatter about unruly passengers.” [15] On July 28, 2006, it was announced that NORAD would relocate from Cheyenne Mountain to Peterson Air Force Base, also in Colorado. After the move, the government awarded another upgrade contract to Lockheed worth about $800 million. [16] Meanwhile the levees, the bridges and thousands of America’s roads are dangerously riddled with deepening pot-holes.

With the implementation of the Department of Defense’s Military Housing Privatization Initiative of 1996, [17] Fort Carson was selected as the Army’s model for the development of the privatization initiatives. [18] Privatization is the process of transferring ownership of resources and land from the public and private sector to fat-cat corporations who usually pay no taxes. [19] Congress privatized the people’s money with the treasonous Federal Reserve Act of 1913, placing the control of money into the hands of international banking families who have deliberately debauched our currency. The FED, a private corporation and a complicit Congress, wishing to retain power and popularity, have spent America into bankruptcy — paid for by the people’s labor, land, resources and blood.

On February 10, 1998, the Defense Department, the enforcement arm of Wall Street [20] notified Congress that they were transferring $15.82 million to the Fort Carson Family Housing Limited Liability Corporation, a division of J. A. Jones, a subsidiary of Philipp Holzmann AG, a Germany-based construction company that used concentration camp labor during World War II. The Fort Carson Family Housing Limited Liability Corporation of Charlotte, N.C. “won” this whopping contract worth more than $3 billion over the span of the contract. [21] See how much Philipp Holzmann AG and others were gifted just in 1999. Between October 1, 1997 and September 30, 2003, out of $900 billion authorized expenditures, Philipp Holzmann AG received pentagon contracts amounting to $1,723,275,972. “Half of all the Defense Department’s budget goes out the door of the Pentagon to private contractors.” [22] Other funds, 25%, apparently cannot be accounted for.

The private corporation built 840 new single and multifamily structures and revitalized existing structures. Rent for these ‘privatized” units, now paid to the contractor is set at the soldier’s Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH). Philipp Holzmann AG also built and maintains the roads, day care centers, schools, parks, picnic areas — literally all the infrastructure. The 50-year contract came with a renewable option of 25 years. [23] The new and refurbished housing would provide housing for a total of 2,663 Fort Carson military families. Additionally, the Department of Defense has other privatization projects worth billions. [24]

Even before 9/11, expansion of the military as well as increased corporate take-over of public military facilities was part of the game plan. “Since 1997, Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) has directed each of the Services to develop an installation-level plan to respond to the growing need for quality affordable housing for military personnel by the year 2010. The Army’s initial plan, completed in September 1998, called for the privatization of about 85,000 Army Family Housing (AFH) units over 5 years at 43 US locations.” The army’s billions-of-dollars housing privatization program is known as the Residential Communities Initiative (RCI) and is worldwide. [25] See the entire program here, scroll down to view the full implications.

Located 150 miles southeast of Fort Carson is the Piñon Canyon Manuvere Site (PCMS). The $26 million dollar “purchase” was completed on September 17, 1983 through the government’s use of eminent domain. It was opened in the summer of 1985 to provide critical maneuver lands for larger units. [26] The relocation of 11 landowners who refused to sell required an additional $2 million. Their land was acquired through the detestable process of condemnation, aided by the very people who are supposed to make us “secure in…our “houses.” [27] [28]

The government’s eminent domain power, the Takings Clause (or the Just Compensation Clause), is part of Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — …”nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation..” This clause is not a positive power grant allotted to the government. Instead, it imposes a strict limitation on the government. The Constitution was designed to protect individual rights from an abusive government. The founding documents clarify that “the government’s only legitimate power is to secure the rights that are guaranteed to the people.” [29]

Just compensation means fair market value, moving expenses, and any “losses incurred while you establish yourself elsewhere.” “The victim must be ‘made whole’ meaning that he is economically no worse off as a result of the taking.” For decades, “public use” meant just that — use by the public. However, the Takings Clause has been “transformed and perverted. Today, ‘public use’ means ‘public benefit.'” [30]

The eminent domain floodgate of abuses opened early in the twentieth century with the 1936 New York City Housing Authority v. Muller case which forever changed American property rights — public use became public benefit. The court, ignoring private property rights and apparently biased against the poor, decided that “slum clearance” was a public benefit. This “sociological experiment” established an “acceptable means of perverting the Takings Clause.” This was a “front for violating private property rights to acquire land for their pet projects.” [31]

This led to the despotic condemnation process which later enabled the Rockefeller (one of the Federal Reserve banking families) land grab of a thirteen-block tract of Manhattan which was unlawfully condemned in order to erect the World Trade Center Complex. Read about it here. The Port Authority issued tax exempt bonds which would completely fund the project. [32] The Port Authority privatized the Center on July 24, 2001 for a fraction of its value by leasing it to Larry Silverstein’s private corporation — lucky for him that he heavily ensured them against terrorist attacks. [33]

In 1981, General Motors, another wealthy corporation, directed the government to condemn the 465-acre community of Poletown, a suburb or Detroit, Michigan so they could build an assembly plant. GM got their plant while “3,468 people were displaced and had their homes confiscated by the government. The Constitution’s public use requirement was intended to protect against just this sort of usurpation.” [34] One thousand residences, six hundred businesses and numerous churches were bulldozed. [35]

About half of the land for The Piñon Canyon Manuvere Site (PCMS) was seized through the condemnation process. “In 1983 the unwilling sellers were pretty much on their own, battling to hang on to their homes. They wrote letters and attended meetings for the procedurally required Environmental Impact Statement. But in the end they were just a handful of ranchers, forced to move off of their land by the power of the United States Army.” [36]

Victims of eminent domain rarely receive “just compensation” and often face endless litigation fighting for the constitutional rights the government is supposed to regularly protect. Private property abuse is rampant! According to the Castle Coalition, there were 10,382 governmental attempts to condemn private property in the last ten years. [37]

Apparently, because of the money-siphoning (626 billion dollars in 2007) [38] Global War of Terrorism, the Department of Defense wants to greatly expand the Piñon Canyon Manuvere Site (PCMS). In June 2007, the Army released the Phase I map identifying the first 418,000 acres they want to acquire. “When combined with the current 235,896 acres of training space there, the Piñon Canyon site would become the Army’s largest training ground.” [39] The Army indicates that they want as much as 2.5 million acres, the entire southeast corner of Colorado because it simulates some of the terrain in Afghanistan and Iraq. [40]

On May 3, 2007 Governor Bill Ritter signed Colorado House Bill 1069 withdrawing the state’s consent to the federal government in their quest to acquire land through eminent domain for their expansion of Piñon Canyon Manuvere Site (PCMS). [41]

Constitutional statutes were designed to “protect the citizens against the abuse of power” by government agents. Unfortunately, a majority of elected officials have shirked their constitutional, decision-making responsibilities to highly-paid private contractors, who have taken over much of the government’s responsibilities. The problem is, these contractors are not covered by constitutional laws — therefore they are not culpable. Federal agencies do not exercise oversight, demand accountability or set performance standards for federal contractors. Effective Congressional investigations are rarely convened. [42]

This is a much bigger problem than the dedicated ranchers of Colorado. But for them, it is their life and their livelihood. The next time you are enjoying a hamburger or a steak (if you can still afford one), thank a rancher, the government didn’t produce it. If the government can target Colorado’s ranchers, they can target anyone! Oh and that land grab — it has nothing to do with training soldiers! Stay tuned for parts two and three.

NOTES:

[1] U.S. Seeks to Store Nuclear Waste at Army Bases to Save Plutonium Plant, By Keith Schneider, November 10, 1989

[2] Monsanto Knew About PCB Toxicity For Decades

[3] Department of Defense, Base Structure Report, FY 2007

[4] U.S. Military Troops and Bases Around the World

[5] Restructuring and Rebuilding the Army Will Cost Billions of Dollars for Equipment but the Total Cost Is Uncertain, Highlights, April 10, 2008, United States Government Accountability Office, testimony before the Subcommittee on Air and Land Forces, Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives

[6] Top 100 Federal Prime Contractors: 2007

[7] Congress members invest in Defense Earn Millions From Companies With Military Contracts By Anne Flaherty

[8] Department of Defense, Base Structure Report, FY 2007

[9] Fort Carson

[10] Fort Carson

[11] Fort Carson

[12] Cheyenne Mountain Complex

[13] Spacecom Upgrades for the Future by Daniel Verton, April 8, 1999

[14] Military to Idle NORAD Compound Operations Will Move to Nearby Base, But Cold War Bunker to Stand Ready By T.R. Reid, July 29, 2006

[15] Colorado Springs Independent, NORAD touts readiness Officials show off new control room, March 10, 2005

[16] Seabrook, MD — Lockheed Martin Team Wins Primary Role on NORAD-USNORTHCOM Contract Vehicle, July 9, 2006

[17] The Residential Communities Initiative (RCI)

[18] Military Housing Privatization Initiative: A Guidance Document For Wading Through The Legal Morass by Capt. Stacie A. Remy Vest, and Chapter 169. Military Construction And Military Family Housing, Approved February 28, 2008

[19] How to earn $3.5 trillion and pay zero taxes By David R. Francis, April 19, 2004

[20] The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order by Michel Chossudovsky, pg 11

[21] Fort Carson Awards Housing Privatization Contract

[22] Outsourcing the Pentagon, Who benefits from the Politics and Economics of National Security? By Larry Makinson, March 31, 2006

[23] Office of Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Military Housing Privatization Initiative

[24] Fort Carson Awards Housing Privatization Contract

[25] Assistant Chief of Staff for Installation Management, Army Family Housing Master Plan, February 2003

[26] Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site (PCMS)

[27] Bill of Rights

[28] Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site (PCMS)

[29] Constitutional Chaos, What Happens When the Government breaks its Own Laws by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, pgs. 65-78

[30] Ibid

[31] Ibid

[32] Bonds: Port of New York Authority to Raise $100-Million by John H. Allen, The New York Times, February 28, 1968.

[33] Killing Several Birds With One Stone By Deanna Spingola, February 12, 2006

[34] Constitutional Chaos, What Happens When the Government breaks its Own Laws by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, pgs. 65-78

[35] Landmark Eminent Domain Abuse Decision, July 31, 2004, John Kramer or Lisa Knepper

[36] Army Threatens the Seizure of Private Property by Doug Holdread, June 29, 2006

[37] Constitutional Chaos, What Happens When the Government breaks its Own Laws by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, pgs. 65-78

[38] The Worldwide Network of U.S. Military Bases by Prof. Jules Dufour, July 1, 2007

[39] Squeeze over a Colorado canyon, October 29, 2007

[40] Army Threatens the Seizure of Private Property by Doug Holdread, June 29, 2006

[41] Ritter Signs Piñon Canyon , school safety bills, Rocky Mountain News, May 3, 2007

[42] Shadowboxer by Jason Peckenpaugh, 11/15/03 who was quoting The Shadow Government by Dan Guttman and Barry Wilner, 1976

Deanna Spingola is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Deanna Spingola has been a quilt designer and is the author of two books. She has traveled extensively teaching and lecturing on her unique methods. She has always been an avid reader of non-fiction works designed to educate rather than entertain. She is active in family history research and lectures on that topic. Currently she is the director of the local Family History Center.

She has a great interest in politics and the direction of current government policies, particularly as they relate to the Constitution. Her website is at: www.spingola.com
email:

The Power Elite Playbook, Oil War One, 1914-1918

Part Thirteen

Most Americans, a large percentage of whose ancestors were German, were neutral until propagandized by a barrage of German atrocity stories through pamphlets produced by the U.S. government. The U.S. resisted war, even after the devised Lusitania incident on May 7, 1915 when 785 out of 1,257 passengers perished, 128 of them Americans. [1] Several months before that ill-fated voyage, Winston Churchill, a Rothschild minion, described the Lusitania as “45,000 tons of live bait.” [2] Were the 3,000 in the Rockefeller-built twin towers in Manhattan on September 11, 2001 also “live bait” leading to yet another genocidal assault?

Because of Britain’s illegal blockade of Europe, and “British violations of international law and neutral rights on the high seas,” Germans retaliated. [3] On February 4, 1915, Germany declared the waters around Great Britain and Ireland a “war zone” and warned that all enemy ships in that area after February 18 would be sunk. The Lusitania then deceptively flew the U.S. flag. In February 1915, the British Admiralty ordered British merchant ships, like the Lusitania, to ram German submarines on sight. Germany was aware of those orders by February 15. On April 22, 1915, Germany, through its U.S. Embassy warned Americans not to travel on British ships in the “war zone.” [4] That warning was not published by the elite-owned media until the day of departure — May 1, 1915. [5] On that day, there was a two and a half hour delay due to passengers being transferred from the Cameronia. [6] A number of prominent passengers were alerted anonymously not to sail on the Lusitania. [7] Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt (Skull & Bones) received a telegram the morning of the sailing which said: “The Lusitania is doomed. Do not sail on her.” The telegram was signed Morte (death). [8] He ignored the warning; his body was never recovered.

That night, the Lusitania, allegedly because of fog, was “not running at full speed” or even resorting to an “evasive zigzag course. The British had withdrawn the military escort from the ship as it approached England. It was literally “a sitting duck and was headed straight into the sights” of a German submarine. They converged at about 2 PM. The U-20 commander, Captain Walther Schwieger released one torpedo after observing the Lusitania for an hour. There was an immediate suspicious “second explosion.” [9] The powerful ship surprisingly sank in just eighteen minutes which contributed to the great loss of life. German submarines had torpedoed ships much smaller than the Lusitania, some never sank and others sank only after several hours. Explosions in ships and buildings appear to be the Elite’s modus operandi!

Germany, unlike her European neighbors, had a more peaceful, less aggressive history and had participated in “less than one quarter of the wars” that Britain had engaged in. Yet, Germany was targeted for “the biggest ethnic assault in history. Almost overnight, Germans were transformed into pariahs through intense propaganda expertly crafted by forces eager to involve the United States in a foreign war.” [10] The vilification of Germany occurred about a decade after Britain constructed concentration camps and incarcerated and slaughtered thousands of Boers, without respect for age or gender which apparently went unnoticed by the selectively observant media. Read more here and here.

Like today, propaganda was rampant! The Times of London declared that “four-fifths” of the Lusitania’s passengers were U.S. citizens instead of the actual proportion. That fabrication was calculated to ignite American outrage. Additionally, the British produced and circulated a medal purportedly created by the Germans which they claimed had been presented to the submarine crew for their actions. A French newspaper published a photo taken much earlier, under different circumstances, of German crowds supposedly “rejoicing” over the news about the sunken Lusitania. Americans vehemently objected to Germany’s “submarine warfare” while ignoring Germany’s justifiable opposition to the illegal starvation-generating British blockade. [11] America didn’t enter the war to “protect the freedom of the seas” from British supremacy.

The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, negotiated in July 1915 and concluded on May 16, 1916, would, at the end of “the bloodiest, most destructive war in modern history,” [12] divide the oil-rich Ottoman Empire between Britain and France, with the assent of Russia who would be compensated with territory in northeast Turkey which was later rescinded due to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. [13] See division map here. Lenin later discovered a copy of this real-reason-for-the-war agreement among Russia’s state papers and made it public.

After the Sykes-Picot Agreement had been negotiated, the British promised Sharif Hussein of Mecca that they would support Arab independence as a single unified state if the Arabs would agree to join the British, under T. E. Lawrence, in their fight against the Ottoman Empire, Germany’s ally in the war. This promise was contained in a letter dated October 24, 1915 from Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, to the Sharif and later became known as the McMahon-Hussein correspondence. Hussein assumed that the promise included Palestine. “Thus, by a stroke of the imperial pen, the Promised Land became twice-promised.” [14] Even after the exposure of this double dealing-duplicity, France and Britain issued a statement on November 7, 1918 proclaiming that they were nobly, altruistically fighting (Britain was bankrupt at the war’s inception) for the freedom of those peoples who had been so horribly oppressed by the Turks for such a long time.

Sharif Hussein’s objective was the establishment of a single independent, unified Arab state stretching from Aleppo (Syria) to Aden (Yemen). Based on this vision, the Arabs gave the British troops “invaluable military assistance” during which 100,000 Arabs were killed. [15] The Sykes-Picot Agreement actually internationalized the bulk of Palestine and divided the land into protectorates, vehicles for exploitation by imperialists. British politicians reneged on every promise. [16] The mandate system, “a thin disguise for colonial rule,” would later be created under the League of Nations. “Mandate territories, earlier the possessions of the Ottomans, were to be ‘guided’ by the victorious imperialist powers until they had proved themselves capable of self-rule. Britain was awarded the mandate for Iraq.” [17]

While thousands of ordinary French and German citizens-turned-soldiers were slaughtering each other in Germany, Britain, allegedly concerned about the Suez Canal’s (oil route) security, removed 1,400,000 British soldiers and scarce materials to the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf area. This angered the French who lost almost 1,500,000 soldiers; 2,600,000 were severely injured. Those British troops remained after the end of hostilities. A million soldiers occupied the Middle East, even in the French area, to protect those petroleum resources. France’s leader, Clemenceau, agreed to British Prime Minister George’s request to allow the British complete control of the Mosul wilayet (in Iraq) and Palestine from Dan to Beersheba. France would control Greater Syria and receive “a half share in the exploitation of Mosul oil and a guarantee of British support in the postwar period in Europe, should France ever have to respond to German action on the Rhine.” [18]

When Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton, he had an affair with Mary Peck, a married woman. Bernard Baruch purchased Wilson’s love letters to his lover for $65 thousand. [19] Samuel Untermeyer, a prominent New York City lawyer, later the president of Keren HaYesod (The Foundation Fund, established in London in 1920) and a generous contributor to Wilson’s presidential campaign, approached Wilson shortly after the inauguration with that packet of love letters. Untermeyer had been retained by Wilson’s ex-lover to bring a breach of promise action against the president. She had remarried (now Mary Hulburt); her stepson, a bank employee, desperately needed $40 thousand keep him out of jail. She was willing to drop the legal action for $40 thousand. Wilson didn’t have the money. Untermeyer paid off the blackmailer on the condition that Wilson would appoint pro-war Zionist, Louis Dembitz Brandeis as a Supreme Court Justice when the next vacancy occurred. [20] Brandeis was sworn in on June 5, 1916. Wilson was a morally compromised relatively “cheap” investment for the bankers! In a New York Times article dated December 8, 1922, Samuel Untermeyer, apparently an individual with diverse interests, was mentioned as the financial supporter of “American” claims in the Mosul oil fields. [21]

With Brandeis’ encouragement, Wilson, the “man of peace,” poignantly pleaded with Congress on April 2, 1917 to declare war against Germany. [22] Wilson got that declaration on April 6, 1917. He took us into Oil War I “to save the world for democracy.” The U.S. entered the war when Britain was close to defeat. The real reasons include the division of the oil-rich Ottoman Empire and the seizure of Palestine for the creation of the Zionist state of Israel, a prospective military presence in the oil-rich gulf. [23] J. Pierpont Morgan (1867–1943) was the American agent for all Allied countries. He also financed France’s participation in the war. [24] Britain owed millions to the U.S. banks and businesses who sold Britain war-related components, some of which were transported on the Lusitania. Aiding Britain, our debtor nation, protected the bankster’s loans and business profits. [25] The U.S. actually “had a minimal affect on the military outcome of the European war.” [26]

Standard Oil agents needed to “participate in the drawing up of the Treaty of Versailles.” That would only occur if the United States participated in Oil War I. Therefore, the U.S. suffered 320,518 casualties. [27] Standard Oil had representation in the oil plunder process. The American delegation included Bernard Baruch, Paul Warburg, ‘Colonel’ House, with attendees Walter Lippman, and brothers Allen and John Foster Dulles among others.

Vladimir Lenin, Russia’s Bolshevik “leader,” announced an armistice and sent Trotsky to Brest-Litovsk in November 1917 to negotiate a peace deal with Germany and Austria. No agreement was reached after nine weeks of negotiation. Consequently, on March 3, 1918, German troops moved towards Petrograd to ‘encourage’ Russia to accept the Central Power’s (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire) terms defined by the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. [28] Because of this treaty, the Treaty of Versailles could not be imposed on Russia. The Bolsheviks controlled a huge quantity of untapped oil which would not fall under the control of Standard, British Petroleum or Royal Dutch Shell, the world’s first oil cartel. [29] Thus, another war would immediately be planned!

The Bolsheviks “renounced most of their rights in Iran and canceled all Iranian debts to Czarist Russia.” With Russia out of the way, Britain and their Anglo-Persian Oil Company took control of oil exploration and development in Iran. Britain extracted huge quantities of oil from Iranian soil. Winston Churchill called it “a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams.” [30]

Millions of Americans participated in Oil War I including Smedley Butler who went to France as commander of the 13th Marines. They arrived at Brest on September 24, 1918. The Marines in Oil War I operated under U.S. Army command. [31] Butler’s marines moved on after two weeks and Butler was promoted to brigadier general on October 7, 1918 [32] and given charge, by A.E.F. Commander General John J. Pershing, of the Army debarkation camp at Pontanezen, France, a filthy, seventeen hundred acre pestilence-infested mud flat, akin to a concentration camp, where seventy-five thousand American soldiers were crammed together trying to share inadequate sanitation facilities.

Sixteen thousand of those soldiers suffered from influenza. An average of 25 individuals expired each day from influenza or other diseases. After other lesser men had failed, in usual Butler fashion, he turned the camp into a model of efficiency. His most significant action was his treatment of the troops — he gave them double rations of food, an adequate number of blankets and provided them with a dry sleeping area. He cared more about the men than the regulations he broke to make them comfortable. “He was always on the side of the powerless against the brass.” [33] Despite recruiting propaganda, the military have been and are underpaid, used as medical guinea pigs, exposed to death, disease, toxic depleted uranium, and when not left behind as POWs or MIAs are discharged and regularly left to battle the inevitable emotional ordeal without assistance.

Butler was torn as he witnessed “the wounded and maimed pass through Pontanezen, some with their nervous systems irreparably shattered.” “Gradually it began to dawn on me to wonder,” he related later, “what on earth these American boys are doing getting wounded and killed and buried in France.” Butler began to doubt “the ethics of his chosen calling.” [34] The total number of Oil War I casualties, both military and civilian, was over 40 million — 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded. [35] Resource acquisition and the arbitrary carving up of the world into three primary areas (trilateralism) and then ultimately into a one world government were the real reasons for the catastrophic profit-producing genocide from 1914 to 1918. [36]

NOTES:

[1] Tragedy & Hope, A History of the World in Our Time by Carroll Quigley, pgs. 250-51

[2] America’s Entry into WWI by Walter Smoter Frank

[3] Tragedy & Hope, A History of the World in Our Time by Carroll Quigley, pgs. 250-51

[4] The Lusitania Timeline

[5] German Embassy Issues Warning; Advertises Notice of Danger to Travelers in the War Zone. Building Up A Defense? Suggestion That Notice May Be Cited Against Possible Claims for Damages — Cunard Agent Says Travel Is Safe. New York Times, May 1, 1915

[6] S. S. Cameronia, The Ship and List of Transfers

[7] The Lusitania Timeline

[8] Mr. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Saloon Class Passenger

[9] The Sinking of the Lusitania, 1915

[10] Hysteria Part 1. Before They Sprouted Horns and Fangs

[11] Tragedy & Hope, A History of the World in Our Time by Carroll Quigley, pgs. 251

[12] A Century of War, Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order by William Engdahl, pgs. 35-45

[13] Sykes-Picot agreement text

[14] The Balfour Declaration And its Consequences by Avi Shlaim

[15] The Great Arab Revolt

[16] Behind the War on Iraq: Research Unit for Political Economy, Monthly Review. Volume: 55. Issue: 1. May 2003. Page 20

[17] Ibid

[18] A Century of War, Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order by William Engdahl, pgs. 35-45

[19] The Greatest Story Never Told, Winston Churchill and the Crash of 1929 by Pat Riott, pg. 20

[20] How Does Samuel Untermeyer Fit Into The Scheme?

[21] New York Times, December 8, 1922

[22] John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, Santa Barbara, California: University of California

[23] World War I

[24] 1914-1915, US Policy on Loans to the Belligerents

[25] Tragedy & Hope, A History of the World in Our Time by Carroll Quigley, pg. 250

[26] Secrets Of The Federal Reserve — The London Connection by Eustace Mullins

[27] Casualties in World War I

[28] Russia and the First World War

[29] Black Gold Hot Gold , The Rise of Fascism in the American Energy Business by Marshall Douglas Smith, 2001

[30] All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer, Publisher: Wiley. Hoboken, NJ. 2003. Pg. 39

[31] Paths to Glory: Medal of Honor Recipients Smedley Butler and Dan Daly by David T. Zabecki

[32] Who’s Who in Marine Corps History

[33] The Plot to Seize the White House by Jules Archer, Hawthorne Books, Inc., New York 1973, pgs. 77-80

[34] Ibid

[35] World War I Casualties, Wikipedia

[36] Black Gold Hot Gold , The Rise of Fascism in the American Energy Business by Marshall Douglas Smith, 2001

Deanna Spingola is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Deanna Spingola has been a quilt designer and is the author of two books. She has traveled extensively teaching and lecturing on her unique methods. She has always been an avid reader of non-fiction works designed to educate rather than entertain. She is active in family history research and lectures on that topic. Currently she is the director of the local Family History Center. She has a great interest in politics and the direction of current government policies, particularly as they relate to the Constitution. Her website is at: www.spingola.com
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