Video: Lifting the Fog – Intrigue in the Middle East

Oil, wars, superpowers. Britain, France, Germany and the US have fought for almost a century to control the vast petroleum wealth of the Middle East. Intrigue unravels a history little known by Americans or Europeans, making striking use of interviews and rare footage. Produced, Directed and Edited by Allan Siegel.

The Anatomy of Entropy

A Short History of the Deterioration of the USA…

Each one of the state governments of the original 13 colonies in Colonial America made the Christian religion a prominent part of their constitutions. Some states made Christianity a requirement for elected office. At the time the Constitution was crafted the fledgling nation was almost entirely Christian.

That label, however, did not properly describe the makeup of the citizenry. There were several Protestant denominations and in the late Eighteenth Century most were Armenian, antinomian, and nominal. When God’s Law and God’s sovereignty are ignored, Christianity is hollowed out and fractured Christianity leads to individual Biblical interpretation, disagreement, and the proliferation of denominations. The First Amendment to the Constitution forbade congress from establishing a religion as the states had already done; freedom of religion opens the door for national disobedience to God’s First Commandment.

There was great excitement, great opportunity and vast lands to be occupied but it was a troubled nation that ventured into the Nineteenth Century. Indian wars marked large portions of the continent as white settlers with aid from the government advanced their settlements westward. America was victorious in the Revolutionary War but the English were still at war with France and since France supported the colonies and continued as a major trading partner, England continued to be a thorn in the side. In 1812 the United States again declared war on England.

The genocidal march to the Pacific involved the extermination of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Indians and the annexation of large sections of land. For two years in the mid-1840s the United States and Mexico fought a war along the Texas border. When U. S. forces advanced into Mexico City, Mexico capitulated. The War ended with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which was imposed by the United States and ceded California, New Mexico and much of Texas for the sum of $15 million. Nearly 14,000 U. S. soldiers died and 25,000 Mexicans. In 1853 the Gasden purchase added parts of New Mexico and Arizona not included in the GH Treaty.

During the Nineteenth Century imperialistic war and killing were constant companions. In 1861 President Lincoln started a civil war in order to impose Northern will on the South and to keep the Southern States from seceding from the Union. The war created a slow-growing governmental cancer in the new republic.

The Lincoln Administration ignored the Constitution, trampled states rights, and was guilty of grievous atrocities. His armies ruthlessly raped the South, cities were burned, and women were violated. Six hundred thousand young men were killed, 470 thousand were wounded and at least 50,000 civilians died in a needless internecine conflict. Families were disrupted, taxes were increased, civility was threatened, government was empowered, and the checks and balances built into the nation were seriously eroded.

Leaders of the more rural South were openly Christian men who fought gallantly against a larger, better equipped army. In the end the brute force of the industrial north overcame the sacrificial resistance of the pastoral south crowning an imperialistic spirit.

President Lincoln cemented an enduring federalism and tyrannical disobedience into United States history.

Barbaric actions birthed in the Civil War carried over into the Indian Wars during the later half of the Nineteenth Century and into the rape of the Philippines which began in 1899. Water boarding was first used by United States forces during the Philippine conflict. It was said to have originated with the Spanish and was called the “water cure”. Of this procedure Mark Twain wrote, “…the torturing of Filipinos by the awful “water-cure,” for instance, to make them confess — what? Truth? Or lies? How can one know which it is they are telling? For under unendurable pain a man confesses anything that is required of him, true or false, and his evidence is worthless.” United States casualties were 4234 with 2818 wounded. Philippine military casualties were put at 12 to 20,000 with civilian dead between 200 thousand and 1.5 million. The war in the Philippines lasted until 1914 and was almost immediately succeeded by the First World War.

It was President Woodrow Wilson who campaigned against becoming involved in the European war who led us into it. His regime was pivotal in shaping the politics of the United States during the Twentieth Century. The Federal Reserve System successfully coiled itself around the government in 1913 and the tentacles of powerful foreign forces began to pull the strings on what became a puppet government. United States joined WW I in 1917. Two years later the war ended with 40 million wounded and 20 million dead. Wilson followed Lincoln’s totalitarian policies by arresting some 170 thousand citizens for opposing the war (some for utterances inside their own homes) and depriving about 60 newspapers of second-class mailing rights. He sanctioned warrantless searches and interrogations by the quasi-public American Protective League which was empowered by the Justice Department to spy on Americans who failed to buy Liberty Bonds or spoke out against the government. He supported Women’s Suffrage, Zionism, and the League of Nations. After several years of being incapacitated by a stroke in 1924 he died “feeling that he had lied to the American people and that his motives for joining the war had been in vain” because the League of Nations had failed.

During the 1920s prohibition spawned speakeasies and Flappers became popular. The roaring twenties roared into a major moral decline.

In 1929 the roaring stopped and the succeeding three years saw a drop in the stock market similar to today’s real estate. Ostensibly to slow the boom the Fed began to raise interest rates and on October 24th investors began to realize that high values had created an over inflated bubble and they began to sell. By November the market had gone from 400 to 145 wiping our $5 billion in share value. By the end of the year $16 billion had been lost.

Since the banks had invested their customer’s deposits in the stock market, the steep decline wiped out depositor funds leaving the banks insolvent. Ten thousand banks failed and billions of dollars in deposits were lost.

The depression brought President Franklin D. Roosevelt, another pivotal leader. Wilson brought us the Federal Reserve, World War One and the income tax and FDR brought us the New Deal, World War II and big government socialism. He confiscated gold, closed the banks, brought in social security, deficit spending, the FDIC (taxpayer bailout for banks), Federal Emergency Relief, the National Youth Administration, Home owners loans, Farm Credit, Federal Housing Authority and several other enduring government programs. He packed the Supreme Court, recognized Communist Russia, sent troops to Europe, and supported the United Nations, unionism, and Zionism. He was loved by those who received government largess in a time of great need and hated by those whose wealth was confiscated to provide it. He created wide popular dependency on the federal government and was an enemy to freedom and free enterprise.

World War II followed the “war to end all wars” in a few scant years and the “city on a hill” leapt into another conflict that was even more lethal than the first. The war not only involved Europe but also Japan and China. The total figures on dead and wounded could never be accurately estimated. As is always the case in modern warfare, more civilians were killed than soldiers and the totals were in multiple millions.

An attempt to entangle United States in the League of Nations failed following WW I but was quickly resurrected following WWII in the form of the United Nations (UN). The UN was successful in gaining US support and, accompanied by a measure of mystery, it almost immediately got involved with the new nation of Israel and the division of Korea. North Korea invaded South Korea in the late 1940s and in 1950 President Truman sent US troops to enforce UN mandates (UN involvement was not publicized). During the next three years the “forgotten war” was responsible for the wounding of over 90 thousand and the killing of close to 40 thousand US soldiers. Casualties on both sides totaled up to a million an a half with even higher quantities of civilians. Read about it here.

The conspiracy to create world government promoted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was the engine behind the United Nations. The vehicle was the United States and the methods were multifarious including wars and police actions. The Federal Reserve System provided needed financing and its shadowy controllers pulled the strings. The result was a continuing series of senseless conflicts that killed our youth and squandered our wealth.

In 1963 the U.S. violated all military wisdom and became involved in a ground war in Vietnam. It was a quagmire that killed and wounded 350 thousand U. S. soldiers and was responsible for the deaths of millions of civilians. Accomplishing nothing, U. S. forces suffered an ignominious defeat.

Most U.S. citizens are not and were not aware that their nation was being used as a lethal weapon to cow the world into accepting the yoke of a hidden financial cabal seeking to gain tighter control over the world. Since the Federal Reserve System was created United States has become the world’s policeman exerting power whenever and wherever they are directed. The goal seems to be two fold: One, to bring the entire world under the same control that now controls the United States, and Two, to create a chaos within the nation that will convince the citizens to give up sovereignty and allow the conspirators total sway.

Between the Vietnam War and the first President Bush’s announcement that his coalition invading Iraq involved a “New World Order”, our military was involved in Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Libya, Grenada, Iran, and Panama.

On September 11, 2001 fuel laden airplanes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and an endless War on Terror was birthed. Between the Bush father’s first Iraq War and the son’s Second Iraq War our military was involved in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Serbia.

In spite of the spate of Biblical stories involving God’s military intervention on the side of His people, it is His intention that His people live in peace. King David was a man after God’s own Heart but he was a warrior and God would not allow His Temple to be built by a man whose hands were stained with blood. There is a time for war and a time for peace but peace is always God’s objective. Blessed are the peacemakers.

The family is the basic unit of government in God’s order with all other units being responsible for ensuring the family can enjoy peace and safety. Fathers are the source of home government. Wars disrupt this order. When fathers go off to war families are left without headship leaving them less able to groom future fathers and mothers.

Absence of fathers is not the only problem. The barbarities of war tarnish the sensibilities of
Christian men making them like King David, less peaceable and less able to instill the precepts of peace in their families.

Wars are also inimical to God’s social order. Without men, women are thrust into leadership roles and left vulnerable to exploitation. Once the roles of the genders are reversed they are difficult to restore.

Children who grow up without fathers never witness the proper role of men and are handicapped in understanding their responsibilities. Discipline is a problem for women and rebellion becomes more common when men are absent.

Deterioration in the basic culture is not the only malignant result of war. Imperialism and bankruptcy are close friends. Wars are costly and foreign wars are an ultimate extravagance.

The powerful, invisible hand that urged our mothers to enter the work force, put our children in government schools, fomented and financed wars, opened our borders to illegal immigrants, supported debauchery, censored our news, subverted our government, championed multi-culturalism, killed our culture, imprisoned our churches, and controlled our elections may now be poised to create a world financial emergency that will pound a nail in the coffin of our freedom.

Money has always been an essential ingredient in the conduct of warfare but in our time it has a new and more powerful role. In urban societies money sustains life. Without money families starve to death. With millions living in cities, central bankers have power to sustain life or cause death. Money still finances wars but money is now a lethal weapon.

For older Americans who remember the United States during the 1950s it is difficult to correlate what we have become with what we were during those few years of peace and stability.

In a few short years the nation our European ancestors built with sweat, tears, and sacrifice will be controlled by people whose ancestors came from lands that speak other languages and have other cultures. This polyglot knows nothing of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. They know nothing of the individual freedom Christianity brought to the world. Many are products of cultures that do not have a word for altruism. Some have never known an honest government employee. The only interest they have in the United States is in siphoning off as much wealth as their industrious labor can earn. Their presence destroys our culture and weakens our nation.

Congressman Cliff Stearns, our representative in Washington, DC, recently sent out an email lamenting the high cost of gasoline. This is his explanation “The high price of gasoline results from the cost of crude oil, the world demand and supply for oil, our limited refining capacity, and taxes.” Stearns supports the War in Iraq and has a vested interest in keeping the truth from his constituents. Nations that engage in frequent warfare regularly debase their currencies. United States is no exception. Inflation (increasing the number of monetary units in circulation) is the biggest contributor to the high cost of gasoline. Inflation is a hidden form of taxation which amounts to burglary by the Federal Government. Prices are going up because the value of our money is going down.

The foregoing is a condensed history of the incremental deterioration of the United States of America, a nation that, in spite of its many flaws, in its formative years, managed to honor and to a great extent obey the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

A huge majority of the citizens of the United States always claimed to be followers of King Jesus and God’s Word, the Bible, could be found in almost every home. When the Puritans and Pilgrims were overrun by the lawless humanism of heretical religions the Book that contained the formula for halting the slide into darkness was partitioned into a comfortable doctrine that appealed to itching ears. Real Christianity was mortally ill before the Constitution was written and has never recovered.

Yes, gentle reader, it is the Church of Jesus Christ that is vested with the responsibility of confronting evil in God’s creation and its sins of omission that are responsible for our present plight. Partitioning the Bible is blasphemous. The Bible is God’s Word – all of it. Christians whose sins are forgiven and who know God’s ineffable Grace are to obey God’s Laws and seek to bring His entire creation into accord with His Will (His Will is contained in His Law). God’s Word teaches us that confrontation and rebuke are necessary in maintain obedience. Confrontation and rebuke are a bit like proper warfare. The object is to create peace and order. It is the duty of the Church of Jesus Christ to confront despotism with strong and consistent rebuke and clear alternatives. Both the rebuke and the clearly annunciated alternatives are and have been sinfully missing.

Hard times are coming. The wealth of the middle class is being quickly drained away and laws are set in place to enslave the people of the United States in a police state. Concentration camps have been built, Habeas Corpus has been rescinded, and torture has been authorized. Unlike the unconstitutional actions of Presidents Wilson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, the presidents of our era can now commit the same atrocities without breaking the law.

Sinful omissions of the past are coming home to roost and the consequences will not be pretty!

Al Cronkrite is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Al Cronkrite is a writer living in Florida, reach him at:

Video: End of Nations – EU Takeover & the Lisbon Treaty

We set out to make a video about the pros and cons of the Lisbon Treaty and found out to our horror the lies, manipulations and deceit behind the EU. From MEPs, legal experts and EU researches the true nature of the EU unfolded, how it really operates from behind closed doors and away from prying eyes. We discovered the massive power grab away from citizens and nations to the elites that is being proposed in this treaty. Most shocking of all was how our elected representatives are willingly handing us over to this emerging Totalitarian Superstate by deception , propaganda and outright lies. This video details how the structures of the EU really operate, what the full significance of the Lisbon Treaty is and how it is the end of Nations within in the EU. MEPs describe their experience in Brussels and how they are undermined by the real power of the unelected and unaccountable Eurocrats who run the organization. How the politicians are working together for their own selfish needs while being used for a bigger agenda.

Video: Super Rich: The Greed Game

As the credit crunch bites and a global economic crisis threatens, Robert Peston reveals how the super-rich have made their fortunes, and the rest of us are picking up the bill.

Video: Gulf War Syndrome

Independent experiment on depleted uranium testing with blood samples from five veterans of the first Gulf War. The results reveal chromosome damage that could have been caused by exposure to depleted uranium.

PromaOne Productions – Gulf War Syndrome

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Video: Jon Snow’s Hidden Iraq

Five years after the invasion, Jon Snow examines the brutal reality of life inside post-invasion Iraq.

Video: War Made Easy

War Made Easy reaches into the Orwellian memory hole to expose a 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. The film exhumes remarkable archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations.

Barack Obama and the “End” of Racism

By Juan Santos

“What life has taught me
I would like to share with
Those who want to learn…

Until the philosophy which hold one race
Superior and another inferior
Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war, me say war

That until there are no longer first class
And second class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man’s skin
Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes
Me say war

That until the basic human rights are equally
Guaranteed to all, without regard to race
Dis a war

That until that day
The dream of lasting peace, world citizenship
Rule of international morality
Will remain in but a fleeting illusion
To be pursued, but never attained
Now everywhere is war, war

And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique,
South Africa sub-human bondage
Have been toppled, utterly destroyed
Well, everywhere is war, me say war”

– Bob Marley –

Barack Obama deeply troubles me. As a Mexican who grew up in a Black neighborhood in the U.S. at the height of the Black Power era, I absorbed Black people’s rage- their righteous rage with the aim of justice and, ultimately, with the aim of healing – until it had sunk into my very bones. It was not a rage aimed at me; and no one “taught” it to me, no one schooled me in it. School was just everyday life in a Black senior high, for example; school was having my own personal cop who stopped me every time he saw me, the first pig who ever took me to jail. I didn’t try to act Black; I didn’t try to talk Black; I never tried to walk Black or dress Black; I didn’t even particularly listen to Black music outside of Motown and funk – the crossover stuff.

So, I was a little stunned and more than a little confused when, as I entered my 20’s, I had to confront how different I was from people in the white world and in the Mexican world. I didn’t realize it as a teenager, of course; It was just natural. But as I came into deeper contact – and sharp conflict – with the world I had not grown up in – the world outside of the working class area that people now would call the “ghetto,” I came to realize that while I had not adopted Black culture, I viewed the world through a Black lens; and since I had only been a kid when I developed the lens, there was little about it I could articulate, and almost nothing I could find to help me illuminate my experience of what post modernists and other people who long to go slumming these days now call “the borderlands”- a phrase they ripped out from under Gloria Anzaldua, a Chicana lesbian feminist writer, poet and cultural theorist. They talk about “alterity” and “difference,” and it’s nothing more than chic poses and impotent cultural elitism by those who have no authentic experience of what difference really is.

Growing up on the border I grew up on was not exotic; nor did I think of it as a kind of crucifixion or torment. It was just normal. The Black world and my odd presence in it were just normal. The sense of torment would only come later, when I learned that I reacted to white middle class bullshit – the “polite” evasions of naming the daily realities of power and pain that characterize the white middle class – just the way any Black youth of my time would have reacted. They dumbfounded and enraged me. It took a long time to get that they are not just outright phonies, straight-up deliberate hypocrites, almost every one of them – but that they don’t see – and that for that reason, they are very dangerous to those who do. My reality was not their reality.

Today, I am blessed to have a radical white friend, Tim Bennett, who gets this clearly. He calls white people like this “Not-Sees.” His pun is intentional. But I didn’t get the white world at all as a kid. They just enraged me. Not one of them talked straight, as far as I could see. The “nicer” they were the more they enraged me.

The real torment came later, when I had to learn, not only to see, but to fully articulate what I see. And for someone in my position, there were very few guideposts then for me to follow. I had to learn for myself and largely from myself which part of me was which, what was Mexican, what was absorbed from white culture, and what was Black in how I experienced myself and the world I lived in. It’s easy now; I can switch culture and tone like switching a channel or clicking a link. I can do it, but usually I don’t bother; I just come from where I am at the moment, secure in who I am and what I know about the world and the dynamics of it that I am meeting in the moment. I rely less on my own tone than on understanding and knowing how to listen. Then, however, it was all sheer suffering.

I came from both inside and outside the Black world. My reality was Black reality, a Black world – and even at that it wasn’t really mine, in a sense, although I grew up in it. The Mexican community wasn’t quite mine either: I was lacking in the proper resepto, and there was nothing – or very little, of the agachado in me. I was arrogant, a sinvergüenza. Besides, my Spanish was poor. White people very often had no idea what to make of me; I felt they instinctively feared me, and I despised their thinly veiled brutality.

I reacted to the world like a Black youth, not as a Mexican or white youth would react, and I didn’t understand it.

When I was 16, I used to buy The Black Panther newspaper at a little convenience store across from the local supermarket on what is now called Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. It came to haunt me. I always bought it- for a quarter – from the same brother. Then, one day, I was listening to the radio. The pigs had the local Panther headquarters under siege. There was a shoot-out. I don’t know what may have happened to him, but I never saw the brother again. And I never talked to anyone about it. There was no one to talk to. It never occurred to me to talk to anyone about it. As I said, I had no teacher. I was just a kid, I wasn’t Black, and no one in my family cared – just me. I remained silent. Millions of people from the oppressed nationalities in the US remain silent; and it’s not just that white people don’t care about oppression – it’s that we are punished for speaking out, for saying what we really see.

Here’s one simple example. About half the workers at my place of employment are people of color. Supervisors are hired in-house, as a rule. The boss is a “liberal” white woman in a company whose work is devoted to “liberal” causes. She came to our office after busting a union on behalf of the company in another city. In her first year and a half here not a single person of color became a supervisor. In my case, she tried to fire me – she sent my case to the corporate president and the corporate lawyers to see if they could fire me for having organized a union in another, similar workplace in the past. I came to work every day for four and a half months last year not knowing, if, that day, I would be fired. That’s the way it is, that’s the atmosphere white Amerikkka – liberal and conservative alike – has created for poor people and minorities.

Yes, of course, those of us who work there are the working poor. The “passionate” liberals who run the company act like they never heard of a living wage – but there is a shelf in the kitchen with “free food” for the people whose paycheck didn’t stretch far enough this week. It’s bought with money the liberal boss solicits from the workers. No one says anything. We all know the nature of the white liberal façade; We all know we’ll be punished if we speak up, if we demand equality in hiring or a raise, much less a living wage. So, our rage simmers in a pot with a tight lid. There’s one guy, though, who has blown up at work a couple of times over racist incidents at work. He’s one of the company’s most productive employees. I was told by a lower level supervisor that he was passed over for a promotion only because he’d gotten angry on the floor about racism – he’d created “conflict.” He wasn’t trustworthy.

So we stay silent, as a rule, on the job. We stay silent as a rule, in the white world.

Barack Obama is the living symbol of our silence. He is our silence writ large.

He is our Silence running for president –

With respect to Black interests, Obama would be a silenced Black ruler: A muzzled Black emperor. A Black man at the head of the White Amerikkkan State – one who’s unwilling to speak truth to power, but more than willing, like a Condi Rice or a Colin Powell, to become that power and to launch wars of aggression against other people of color.

In Obama’s case the targets will be Iran (which he has threatened with “surgical” missile strikes) and Pakistan, rather than Iraq. That’s the only difference between Obama and Rice and Powell, or Bush, for that matter.

Even ABC News notes that “Obama, one of the more liberal candidates in the race, is proposing a geopolitical posture that is more aggressive than that of President Bush.” Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan, in a column entitled “Obama, the Intervensionist,” cites Obama’s claim that “he wants the American military to ‘stay on the offense, from Djibouti to Kandahar.’” To help the empire stay on the offensive, and despite the fact that US military spending is breaking the bank at over $1 trillion a year, and far outstrips the spending of any potential imperial rival, Obama wants to beef up military spending, adding 65,000 troops to the Army and 27,000 more Marines beyond the obscene levels already under arms in the so-called “War on Terror.”

That’s another matter. Most of us at my workplace, for example, don’t want to become that power, we don’t want to lord it over others or punish them if they disobey the corporate rules, much less the rules of Pax Amerikkkana. We don’t want to “succeed” that badly, not badly enough to sell our souls and boss around – and certainly not kill – people who, we know, suffer every day just like we suffer.

Nor do we want to be cops – pigs – or to be the commander in chief of pigs, be they local police or the cops of the world. No one imagines themselves the commander.

We’d like things to be better in our personal lives, of course, if we could have them better and still feel clean.

And that’s the Obama equation. Keep your Black/ Brown mouth shut and you can “succeed.” And you can still feel “clean.” Here we have the real story behind Obama’s portrayal of his squeaky clean-ness. Yes, Black man, yes, Black woman, you can have power in this killer-racist system and stay “clean.” In Obama’s carefully constructed image lies a symbolic resolution of a profound inner conflict that all people of color in the US face in their daily lives.

Obama plays the role of a Black Cinderella. He does for Black folks what Cinderella does for girls. He shows that oppression and silence can be good for you – at least if you are the one the prince chooses, or if you are the one who gets to be the prince. It’s total fantasy. It’s a glass slipper that will break at the arch and be turned on us like a broken beer bottle or a jagged-edged knife; the same knife Obama has threatened to turn on the people of Iran and Pakistan.

But, he’s getting over with it, if for no other reason than that the inner conflict I’ve described remains largely unconscious for oppressed people in the US. That’s why one Black poet, spoken word artist Darian Dauchan, wrote a piece called “” It’s because Dauchan was trying to sort it through. Even though he fails – he buys into the Obama myth- nonetheless he had to sort it through as best he could, because Obama is the walking illusion of the realization of an impossible dream; the dream that in white racist Amerikkka a Black man could be judged on the content of his character, not the color of his skin.

There is, of course, a racist subtext to Obama being called “pretty”- it’s the subtext of internalized racism and the imposition of an internal color-caste system within the Black nation itself, a color-coded stratification held over from the era of slavery – the era of the “mulatto, the “half-breed,” “quadroon” and “octoroon”; a caste system in which “whiter” is better – smarter, “prettier,” more worthy, etc.

The rest of the racist subtext is this: Obama, with his extraordinary intelligence and presence (by any standard), is, in the eyes of white Amerikkka,(and, according to the standards of the so-called “Enlightenment,” which still rule the thinking of Euro-Americans) the half-white, and thus, half-redeemed “Black savage” – “redeemed” by his “white blood”, “civilized” by it – redeemed by his relative whiteness- ultimately redeemed and refined by the white nation itself.

The question from the Black perspective has been posed as to whether Obama is “Black enough” – which is to say, “Is he loyal enough to the Black nation? The more decisive question, viewed from the white electorate’s standpoint, at least, is this; “Is he white enough, is he loyal enough to whiteness and to the white nation?” That’s why the question of his religion, and of his Arabic name, are points of attack and vulnerability from the standpoint of the more openly racist and xenophobic sectors of the white public. That’s why his “patriotism” is also questioned, unlike any white candidate. After all, everyone in the US knows that people of color with Arabic names are the enemy. It doesn’t matter, apparently, how many nukes Obama wants to hit Iran with, he’s got to stand up and recite the pledge of allegiance to prove he’s not a terrorist – at least not an anti-US terrorist.

Obama is not being judged on the “content of his character” – the question of how his character is perceived in a racist nation and, conversely, among a colonized African people, is a question that is sociologically inseparable from the color of his skin.

Many people, nonetheless, think Obama is the realization of Dr. King’s dream. The power of this archetype is immense. It’s why the completely empty catch-phrase “Change” works for him, and it’s the deeper reason for the quasi-religious wave of “Obama fever.” Obama is Cinderella and King’s Dream rolled into one. He’s even had the myth of Kennedy’s so-called “Camelot” invoked on his behalf. For many, he’s not only phenomenally charismatic, but irresistible. There’s even been talk of an “Obama Cult.” {The comments at this link, many of which attack the essay, are every bit as interesting as the essay itself.}

But, if Obama is the realization of King’s dream, then the price of the dream is silence. And, as the slogan goes, “Silence = Death.” If Obama is the realization of King’s dream, then the price is silence about the oppression of Black people – and the abandonment of the millions locked away under the conditions of mass incarceration that have replaced Jim Crow. If Obama is the realization of King’s dream, then being Black means being white – then Black is white, or at least it’s Black on white terms. It’s a Blackness that dare not speak its name.

Obama’s shot at the presidency doesn’t signal the end of racism in the U.S. It is made possible, rather, by the new form racism itself has taken, a form that offers a prison cell to poor people of color, and, for the middle class, on the other hand, an Apartheid-style pass card stamped “SILENCED.”

The functioning of this new dynamic of racism is plain to see in Obama’s attitude toward the newest persecuted “Other” in U.S. society – Brown migrants. On one hand, in one of his most impressive moments, he very rightly called attacks on migrants “scapegoating” (although he failed to critique NAFTA or US Imperialism at any level.)

His campaign even lifts and translates the migrant chant of “!Si Se Puede!” into English as “Yes we can,” and uses it as a slogan. (Obama himself has been a prime beneficiary of the mass opposition of the wrongly labeled “New Civil Rights Movement” in 2006 – the pro-migrant movement that not only cracked open and deeply divided the Republican Party so severely that it has not been able to re-group, but that also put white Amerikkka on notice that a it would never get by with making instant felons of millions of Brown people, and that openly racist persecution, at least, would not be tolerated from Republicans or anyone else.)

Obama favors driver’s licenses for the undocumented, but he’s all for the Apartheid Wall being built on the US side of the Mexican/ US border. Obama is willing to issue pass cards to migrants who make no trouble, since – after all – they’re here, for god’s sake.

Obama’s attitude toward brown migrants is the much the same as that of white liberals toward the Black middle class. It’s much the same as the attitude of the white ruling elite toward him. Keep up the racist wall, but give the “trustworthy ones” a pass. In the case of the Black middle class, the “trustworthy ones” are the ones who maintain silence about oppression. In the case of immigrants the “trustworthy ones” are the ones who have “learned English”, and “ have paid a fine,” as Obama puts it, for the violation of having been driven from their countries by hunger – by the gutting of their nation’s economies by the global capitalist empire headquartered in the U.S.

Even more telling is Obama’s refusal to recognize the right of Palestinians to return to the land stolen from them by Israel during the Nakba of 1948– the disaster of the birth of the Israeli regime. Obama supports and promotes the character of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state – in other words, as an Apartheid state, a Jim Crow state that not only keeps Palestinians separate, but which uses its military might to bomb them at will.

Like the Israelis themselves, Obama wants a separate Palestinian state – separate, but certainly not equal.

There can be no authentically autonomous Palestinian state located on the border of a nuclear-armed Israel – only a subjugated state militarily controlled by its neighbor – its oppressor. Such a state can be nothing but a Bantustan. In the meantime, while the whole world condemned the recent Israeli closure of Gaza, including a cut off of electricity that impacted its hospitals, Obama asserted that “Israel was forced to do this.”

Obama knows the rules of the game, after all – he is the rules of the new race game- his candidacy itself is a manifestation of the new system of racism.

He knows how to make white Amerikkka feel good about the status quo, here and abroad.

There’s a reason for that.

If he told the truth, if he stood up for justice, and on that basis, authentic healing, he couldn’t be president.

Under those circumstances, if he’d attracted any measurable attention, much less the global attention he’s gained today, more likely be dead.

Like King.

Like Malcolm.

Dead, like Steven Biko of the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania / South Africa, or Fred Hampton from Chicago.

Or imprisoned for decades, like Nelson Mandela was.

But Barack Obama doesn’t have that kind of vision and courage.

And he’s not, in the end, even a street activist. He’s been bought. What kind of “street activist” or “community organizer,” after all, ends up a millionaire?.

One who won’t say what white people don’t want to hear.

What white Amerikkka doesn’t want to know, Obama is not about to tell them. That’s a large part of why they like him; it’s key. Whites don’t want to know, as a rule, the actual conditions of Black America, just as the German people, as a rule, didn’t want to know the actual conditions of the Jews and Gypsies, even as the smoke of the crematoria drifted through their streets.

Here’s one part of the core truth that Obama is silencing:

The U.S., which has roughly 6% of the world’s human population, imprisons 20% of the world’s prisoners. The vast majority of those it imprisons are men of color. American Indians have the highest incarceration rate on the planet. Black men have the world’s next highest rate, although their absolute numbers make up the largest group of US prisoners. Mexicans and other Spanish speaking Natives in the U.S. have the third highest rate of imprisonment of all the world’s peoples.

According to a report from MSNBC, about 16% of black men in their twenties who are not college students are currently either in jail or in prison, while almost 60% of black male high school dropouts in their early thirties have spent time in prison.

Human rights Watch notes that in the U.S., “Nationwide, blacks are incarcerated at 8.2 times the rate of whites. That is, a black person is 8.2 times more likely to be in prison than a white person. Among individual states, there are even more extraordinary racial disparities in incarceration rates. In seven states — Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — blacks are incarcerated at more than 13 times the rate of whites. Minnesota has by far the highest disparity — blacks in that state are incarcerated at 23 times the rate of whites. In the District of Columbia, blacks are incarcerated at 34 times the rate of whites. Even in Hawaii and Vermont, the states with the smallest racial disparities in incarceration rates, blacks are still incarcerated at more than twice the rate of whites.”

But to hear the mainstream media spin it, racism in the US is over.

After all, Barack Obama might be president of the US.

To hear Barack Obama tell it, “There is no divide that we can’t bridge.” The easiest divide to “bridge”, of course, is the one you pretend doesn’t exist, the one you never mention.

White Amerikka wants to believe it is innocent- that racism is over. It doesn’t want to know that its rulers solved the “problem” presented to them by the end of Jim Crow segregation and by the eruption of the Black Power movement by replacing the de facto chains of Jim Crow with the even more literal shackles of mass imprisonment.

Obama rejects the Black militant stance – even the pro-Black stance of Dr. King or Reverend Jackson– not only by distancing himself from Jackson, but, much more importantly, by remaining silent about the fact that the white imperial ruling class met the challenges they faced with the end of segregation and the rise of the Black Power movement by flooding Black streets with crack cocaine and guns – creating a “gang problem” out of nowhere – then by inventing “The War on Drugs” and “The War on Gangs” to carry out the greatest mass imprisonment in human history, a campaign more Draconian and Machiavellian than anything most dictators, even the demonized Saddam Hussein, ever dreamed of.

The isolation engendered by a quarter-century of the War on Drugs and the War on Gangs – which is actually a war on poor people of color in the US – is overwhelmingly intense. It’s suffocating: and the silence about the war on poor people of color in the US has been punctured only twice – first, by the Los Angeles rebellion in 1992, and secondly by the mass marches of millions of Brown people protesting the State’s efforts to retroactively turn even more millions of migrants into instant felons in 2006.

The war against the oppressed nationalities in the US is real. In the ghettos, the barrios and on the rez it’s a palpable phenomenon: Millions of families are missing their sons and daughters. Again, their children make up roughly 20% of the prison population of the world, again – not just of the US – of the world.

But for white Amerikkka, it may as well be taking place in Baghdad, not next door. They know a little about what’s up in Iraq, of course, but not about what is happening to much more intimately, right next door, and in their names.

Barack Obama, in the meantime, says that the invasion of Iraq was misdirected. It was the wrong war. The Empire’s real enemy, he says, lay elsewhere.

He says nothing at all about the War at Home against his own people.

It’s not after all, that racism is over. It’s that whites imagine that they can now be at peace about it – that the race war in Amerikkka is over as a two-sided affair. Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report, in a fascinating and important debate with Michael Eric Dyson, says the Obama campaign is “relentlessly sending out signals to white people that a vote for Barack Obama, an Obama presidency, would signal the beginning of the end of black-specific agitation, that it would take race discourse off of the table.” Ford says, “Barack Obama does not carry our burden, in addition to other burdens. He in fact promises to lift white-people-as-a-whole’s burden, the burden of having to listen to these very specific and historical black complaints, to deal with the legacies of slavery. That is his promise to them.”

An exhaustive NAACP report indicates that there is very little difference between the stances of Obama and Clinton on issues important to Blacks. Others have noted the centrist nature of the Obama campaign more broadly. Black legal scholar Vernellia Randall, of the University of Dayton, Ohio, says that Obama has no specific plan for addressing institutionalized racism, and that he doesn’t even acknowledge the issue. (Others have noted the centrist nature of the Obama campaign more broadly.)

In the white imagination, Barack Obama represents, not the “End of Racism” (racism has an experiential, existential meaning for only the barest sliver of the white population), but, he represents, rather, the end of the struggle to end racism.

The “End of Racism,” like the “End of History” proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama with the fall of the Soviet Union, is meant to signify and hail the end of polarization and struggle, a final assimilative victory in which the antagonist (Communist or Black, respectively) is absorbed into the benevolent embrace of the white capitalist empire – there to disappear as a problem – even as a distinct entity.

Obama, in this context, can be viewed as a kind of Gorbachev, a figure that surrendered the sovereignty and independence of his nation, opened it to overt capitalism, collapse and chaos, and who, in the process, became the darling of the capitalist world; who became, in the West, at least, a figure representing “reconciliation and peace” – not capitulation and betrayal.

In the Amerikkkan imagination, Obama signals the co-optation, not of the pseudo-Marxist Soviet style socialism, but of the drive for Black liberation, autonomy and self –determination – the end of Black Nationalism, of the Black nation as a distinct people with a distinct history, distinct needs, a distinct culture, a distinct oppression and a distinct agenda. It signifies the supremacy of the white nation over the Black nation, just as the so-called “End of History” is meant to signify the supremacy of capitalism over all anti-capitalist potentials for organizing society.

The only awareness most whites have of racism comes as a result of the immediate and very short term impact of the struggle of peoples of color upon their consciousness. The silencing of that struggle means only the end of its painful intrusion into white awareness – not the end of racism as an omnipresent, violent burden on the oppressed, not the end of racism as omnipresent oppression and degradation. As noted above, Obama has no plan, and thus, it is fair to say, no intention of ending systemic racism in the US. It’s easier to pretend for popular consumption, that it no longer exists.

Barack Obama is priceless. If he didn’t exist, as the saying goes, they’d have had to invent him. And, no matter Obama’s subjective intentions – white people did just that in their imaginations and in setting the social terms of the New Racism. The very best one can say is that Obama’s let them get by with it by pandering to it. I’ll leave the worst one can say to you. It’s closer to the point, and to the truth.

It should be more than clear by now that Barack Obama will not save us. But neither is the point to expose the man as an individual, or even as a hypocrite, betrayer or oppressor. The point is to see him in context, within the limits of the system, the matrix, the cultural and political environment in which he arose and in which he operates. It’s not that Barack Obama, per se, is worthless, it’s that none of the dreams in us that he speaks to so deeply in us can be fulfilled under the system of oppression he is an expression of and that his candidacy concentrates in visible form.

There is nothing wrong at all in the hopes we have that Obama’s rhetoric speaks to. The problem lies in what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation – a hope, a need, that has been buried and denied by an oppressive system, is allowed some room to breathe, then co-opted and redirected back into a form that ultimately reinforces the oppressive system that denied and suppressed out hopes and needs in the first place. That’s what Obama represents.

He speaks to our dreams of connection, of reciprocity, of balance, sanity and a noble way of life. He speaks to our hope for a world worth living in, to our hope for the future generations that have been crushed for decades now under the heel of the Bush regime and its predecessors. The enormous energy for change unleashed in the 1960s has been buried deeper and deeper under the weight of oppression, and, especially for the last 7 years, under the weight of the most cynical, sadistic, apocalyptic regime of our lifetimes, a regime that has embraced a vision of global destruction and that has denied every life-giving hope.

The Bush regime was and remains an expression of a conscious plan by the far right – especially of the Christian fascists under the leadership of Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and co-founder of the Moral Majority – to crush everything that came to life in the upheavals of the cultural revolutions of the 60s era. They meant, as they consciously expressed it, to counter the counter culture, the culture of hope, and offer a new “hope” of a “purpose driven life” in the context of the old traditions of oppression. They meant to, as they put it, “reframe this struggle as a moral struggle, as a transcendent struggle, as a struggle between good and evil” along traditional Christian lines.

The Christian Fascist strategist Eric Heubeck wrote, “We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment’s rest. We will endeavor to prove that the Left does not deserve to hold sway over the heart and mind of a single American. We will offer constant reminders that there is an alternative, there is a better way. When people have had enough of the sickness and decay of today’s American culture, they will be embraced by and welcomed into the New Traditionalist movement.”

The regime of Bush the Lesser was the pinnacle of this effort – he carried the agenda as far as it could go, before it began to fracture and collapse under the weight of its own madness – before it met the determined resistance of society’s most vulnerable, scapegoated and openly stigmatized targets, as they marched in their millions refusing to be victims. The combined force of the Christian fascist juggernaut, the repressive powers of the State, and the US war machine looked unstoppable until it met this opposition at home, and until it met the mad and fierce resistance of the people of Iraq who have, however chaotic and horrifying their tactics, refused to be conquered. With these events, the aura of invincibility and unstoppable momentum was destroyed, the lid of repression began to crack, and what had been suppressed in us rose again to the surface. Literally, in terms of time in office, and as a sweeping reactionary social agenda, the Bush regime is coming to an end. With its end, inevitably, comes a wave of hope and euphoria.

This is the wave Obama is riding, the ocean of energy he is trying to steer into an acceptance of the same old deal, the same old wars, the same old systemic racism, packaged as if it were something new. This wave of energy is not something he’s inspired, it’s something he’s riding and that he is uniquely qualified to channel toward his own ends – which are not our ends.

As we have seen, Obama doesn’t represent peace – he represents an expansion of war and the power of Empire. He’s even more extreme on this than Bush himself, except in his public rhetoric. He doesn’t represent the real and legitimate needs, desires and hopes of Black people – he refuses to speak openly of the most fundamental issues affecting Black people. He doesn’t represent the “end of racism,” but the perpetuation of oppression in a new guise.

Obama doesn’t represent a new system or the new way of life we dreamed of and fought for and that has been suppressed – he represents the old one. He represents a system that is fundamentally rooted in exploitation, oppression and destruction on a global scale, and he is living proof that no fundamental change for the better can – or will – come about under the system he represents and upholds. It doesn’t work that way. To tell the truth is to betray the system, and he can’t bring himself to do it, even though he is far too conscious not to know it.

Attaining authentic freedom requires, as its barest starting point, the naming of what keeps us subjugated. What keeps us subjugated is the very system Obama wants to rule. The system, even with Barack Obama as its first Black emperor, is not our hope. It’s our enemy, the enemy of the world, and, because this system is rapidly undermining the ability of the planet to foster and sustain life, it is the enemy of all Life on Earth. This is exactly the understanding that the Christian fascists like Weyrich and Heubeck wanted to crush out of our awareness, and the lack of such awareness is exactly what Barack Obama depends on if he is to remain a symbol of the impossible dream that the system can be something other than what it is.

Juan Santos is a guest columnist for Novakeo.com
Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays from 2006 can be found at:
http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com.
He can be reached at:

Wolfowitz the Undead

Former World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz will head a high-level advisory panel on arms control and disarmament, the State Department announced on January 24. He is returning to government as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board (ISAB). This is appalling news. It is deplorable that this devious and tainted man, who has been wrong—spectacularly, damagingly and provenly wrong—on every issue of substance in the post-Cold War era, is to get any government post ever again. It defies belief that he is getting the one that entrusts him with “supplying independent advice on arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation and related subjects,” which means that he will be able to have an impact on the U.S. Iran policy.

Almost three years ago, upon learning of President Bush’s nomination of then-Deputy Defense Secretary to become the new president of the World Bank, I expressed relief (Chronicles, May 2005) that “at his new post Wolfowitz will not be able to do nearly as much damage as he has done at the Pentagon.”

Last May came Wolfowitz’s resignation and departure in disgrace from the World Bank. Ostensibly his ouster was the result of a sordid corruption scandal involving his role in securing improper salary raises for his mistress, and trying to cover it all up. According to the Bank insiders, however, her employment contract was used as the handy pretext to get rid of Wolfowitz, the true reasons being gross mismanagement, utter misunderstanding the Bank’s role in the world, and an extreme of arrogance. Either way, however, I assumed that his public service career was finally over:

Wolfowitz is no longer able to engineer doomed foreign adventures that cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of our dollars. The fruits of his past labors are still with us, but at least he is no longer directly involved in foreign policy making. Other officials also make mistakes and blunders; but he is unique in being certain to make them all the time, and on a grand scale.

I was wrong. Like Glenn Close in , he springs back with gusto just as you think he’s finally done for. Like with Count Dracula (or like with the presumably late Charles Haughey, as per Connor Cruise O’Brian) you need to look over your shoulder even if you find him lying, at midnight, with a stake driven through his heart.

The facts of the case add up to a perverse and troubling story. Most Americans—or at least those who try to think about such things— implicitly assume that the U.S. foreign policy (whether they agree with its conduct or not) is coherent in its assumptions and rational in its execution. Wolfowitz’s various inputs into the “decision-making community” over the decades, however, have been neither coherent nor rational by any conventional standard. His personal and professional credibility in the world is non-existant. He has been wrong on so many issues, and so spectacularly and visibly wrong, that his return into the fold marks an apt finale for this deeply flawed administration.

THE MAKING OF AN INSIDER—Wolfowitz’s intellectual maturing, when he was a doctoral student at the University of Chicago in the late 1960’s, proceeded under the tutelage of the late RAND guru Albert Wohlstetter. The latter was famous for his view that mere nuclear deterrence was not a satisfactory basis for strategic doctrine: the United States had to plan to fight and win a nuclear war in order to deter the enemy. Richard Perle was another promising protégé of Wohlstetter’s. He and Wolfowitz got to know each other through their ageing mentor, and became life-long political and personal associates.

Perle was the first to go to Washington, in 1969, when Wohlstetter secured his appointment as executive director of the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, founded primarily to defeat President Richard Nixon’s arms-control negotiations with Moscow. Three years later Perle was active—together with Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, and Irving Kristol—in the establishment of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), founded to promote the bid for presidency by Senator Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson. At that time they were all Democrats. When they revamped the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) in 1976, however, they were “Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.” Yet when exactly the same crew created the Committee for the Free World (CFW) in 1981, Reagan was in the White House—and Perle & Co. had become Republicans and “conservatives.” To keep all bases covered, a link with the old Trotskyite base was maintained through Joshua Muravchik and the Social Democrats-USA. SDUSA chairman Penn Kemble was the Executive Director of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority in 1972, until he brought in Richard Perle’s aide Stephen Bryen to take his place.

By that time Wolfowitz had left a teaching position at Yale and moved to Washington, he could rely on a well developed support network His first appointment was to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Wohlstetter’s two prodigies soon became a strong tandem clamoring for confrontation with Moscow. From there Wolfowitz went to the Pentagon as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs, then to the State Department’s Policy Planning Office, and spent three-and-a-half years as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs before being sent to Indonesia as the U.S. Ambassador. He returned from Jakarta to serve under President George H.W. Bush as Under Secretary for Policy at the Pentagon (the post subsequently held by his friend and protégé Douglas Feith).

IDEOLOGUE OF GLOBAL HEGEMONY—Wolfowitz’s rise to national prominence (notoriety is a more apt term) came at that post in early 1992, when he authored a secret 46-page Pentagon memorandum, the Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994-99 fiscal years. That remarkable document was soon leaked to the New York Times—and it shook the world.

The Cold War was over, the USSR had disintegrated, Russian soldiers were back home from Central Europe, but to Wolfowitz that was not enough. America had to keep arming herself in order to ensure that no rival power is allowed to emerge, anywhere, ever. The United States had to convince “potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role” and Washington’s task was to promote “the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.” The quest for hegemony was to be open-ended: “We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” Wolfowitz accordingly asserted the right of the United States to intervene when and where it believed necessary:

While the U.S. cannot become the world’s policeman, by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, we’ll retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations.

This “responsibility” was to be discharged especially in the area of the former Soviet Union. Wolfowitz’s doctrine was formulated at a time of Russia’s abject weakness and pathetic attempts by Yeltsin and Kozyrev to prove her “cooperativeness” through an endless string of concessions and capitulations; yet Wolfowitz—an instinctive Russophobe—was unimpressed:

We do not dismiss the risks to stability in Europe from a nationalist backlash in Russia or efforts to reincorporate into Russia the newly independent republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and possibly others . . . We must, however, be mindful that democratic change in Russia is not irreversible, and that despite its current travails, Russia will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States.

In assessing future threats, the document repeatedly stressed this alleged danger of Moscow’s ambition to re-incorporate the newly independent republics of the USSR. Incredibly, Wolfowitz advocated an all-out, U.S.-led NATO war against Russia if Moscow threatened their security—and that of newly-independent Baltic republics in particular. He boldly asserted that Russia would be unlikely to respond with nuclear weapons, but with no clear basis for that assessment.

That, in a nutshell, was the Wolfowitz Doctrine. That America should fight an all-out war and risk nuclear annihilation in order to maintain the independence of former Soviet republic was utterly insane, of course, but instead of being taken to a safe, quiet place where he could do no harm to himself or to others, Wolfowitz became a neocon hero and embarked on a decade of activism that in 2001 brought him to the Pentagon as Rumsfeld’s No. 2.

JIHAD’S ENABLER—Paul Wolfowitz enthusiastically supported Bill Clinton’s pro-Muslim interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. He joined a long line of American officials, starting with Lawrence Eagleburger in 1992 and culminating with Tom Lantos last spring, who approved of “cracking some Serbian skulls” (Bill Kristol) in order to score a few points in the Muslim world— especially if this is done on the cheap. He looked then, and still looks now, upon Serbia as Russia’s potential asset that can and should be brutalized and fragmented. Finally, Wolfowitz saw in the U.S. intervention in Europe’s Balkan backyard an opportunity for Washington to disabuse its European partners of any misguided notion that they can resolve that crisis—or for that matter any crisis —without America’s tutelage.

To that end, in the mid-1990s Wolfowitz worked with Morton Abramowitz in setting up the Balkan Action Council, a rabidly anti-Serb quasi-think tank bankrolled by George Soros. He criticized the Clinton administration for not being belligerent enough: for not arming the Muslims and striking the Serbs in Bosnia, for not bombing Serbia already in 1998 (which he demanded, with others, in a full-page ad in the New York Times), and for not pursuing a clear military victory in Kosovo once the bombing had started.

Wolfowitz is known to have been equally supportive of the insanely Russophobic American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (which has changed the last word of its name to “Caucasus” while keeping the same acronym, ACPC), although he could not join due to his Pentagon appointment. Chaired by the ubiquitous Dr. Brzezinski, this pro-Jihadist organization included many of his close friends and associates (Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Joshua Muravchik, Morton Abramowitz and William Kristol among them). They jointly promoted the theory that the Chechen rebellion was a movement of national liberation worthy of support, not terrorist in nature, not Islamist in character, devoid of links with foreign Jihadist groups, and justly aggrieved by Russian intransigence. They were spectacularly wrong, of course, just as they had been spectacularly wrong on the Balkans.

It is noteworthy that Wolfowitz and his partner Richard Perle, enthusiastically pro-Muslim in the Balkans and the Caucasus, have the reputation of being Israel’s dedicated and reliable friends. (In 1996, for instance, Perle gained the distinction of simultaneously advising both Bob Dole’s presidential campaign and Benjamin Netanyahu’s election campaign.) Yet their strange conviction that some Jihadists must be fought while others may be wooed as geopolitical allies is deservedly derided in Israel herself. Wolfowitz has yet to grasp that, just as the Palestinian cause is inseparable from the Muslim ideology, the blending of the Caucasian or Balkan Muslims’ brand of nationalism with Islamism has already taken place—and the bond can no longer be broken.

ARCHITECT OF IRAQI WAR—Wolfowitz and Perle had advocated the war on Iraq for years before they got it. They were founding members of the Project for a New American century (PNAC) established on principles that included “American global leadership.” PNAC began advocating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein almost immediately. Its open January 26, 1998 letter to President Clinton demanding war against Iraq was said to have been drafted by Wolfowitz. Testifying to the House National Security Committee eight months later he declared that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his prohibited weapons capabilities and suggested “a serious policy in Iraq” that would “free Iraq’s neighbors from Saddam’s murderous threats”:

The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use, or threaten to use, weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

Testifying to the House National Security Committee eight months later (September 17, 1998) Wolfowitz declared that Saddam Hussein “now finds himself free to reconstitute his prohibited weapons capabilities without fear of intrusive inspections.” He suggested “a serious policy in Iraq” that would “free Iraq’s neighbors from Saddam’s murderous threats.”

Just nine days after the 9/11 attacks, PNAC sent another letter, this time to President George W. Bush, stating that “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.” Wolfowitz did not sign the letter as he was a government official, but according to the final report of the 9/11 Commission, he was doing his bit for the cause by trying to insert the war against Iraq into the package of anti-terrorist options.

Secretary of State Colin Powell told the Commission that, within days of 9/11, Wolfowitz had argued that Iraq should be attacked, although he had no rational basis for the demand:

Powell said that Wolfowitz was not able to justify his belief that Iraq was behind 9/11. ‘Paul [Wolfowitz] was always of the view that Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with,’ Powell told us. ‘And he saw this as one way of using this event as a way to deal with the Iraq problem’.

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND WOLFOWITZ’S WMDS—In the end, as we know, the Commission concluded that there was “no credible evidence” of a terrorist link. Its findings were openly supported by CIA and FBI officials who had been under intense political pressure before the war to establish such link, notably by the “Office of Special Plans” at the Pentagon that was busy crafting WMD “intelligence” out of Dr. Feith’s whole cloth.

As soon as the war was over, however, Wolfowitz calmly changed his tune and took to calling the WMDs a “secondary issue.” Soon thereafter came his now famous admission (Vanity Fair, July 2003) that “for bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” His audacity reached a new height on April 20, 2004, when he told the Armed Services Committee that the war in Iraq was fought to remove a “brutal dictator”—and failed to even mention any WMDs—his main justification for war in previous years:

• On February 17, 2002, Wolfowitz told Fox News Sunday that WMDs were not merely a threat to Iraq’s neighbors: they posed “a real threat to the world.” He criticized some European leaders trying to separate the war against terrorism to include Iraq.
• On February 17, 2003, he told London’s ITN that Saddam was “more dangerous now than he was five years ago, and he’ll be even more dangerous if we leave him.”
• In an ABC television interview (February 28, 2003) he said, “We’re dealing with a dictator who had weapons of mass terror, who continues to hold on to them at great cost to his country and to his own regime . . . [The danger] only grows the longer we wait.”

Once the war was over and it became evident that U.S. troops occupying Iraq were unlikely to find any banned weapons, Wolfowitz calmly changed his tune and took to calling the WMDs a “secondary issue.” Returning from a visit to Iraq (July 2003) he thus said “I’m not concerned about weapons of mass destruction, I’m concerned about getting Iraq on its feet.” He further claimed that Iraqis themselves had little concern about the “historical” issue of weapons, which was no longer an issue worthy of discussion.

A MENDACIOUS SERVANT—Wolfowitz’s modus operandi in pushing his agenda from within the government structure is well illustrated by a sequence of events in one week in late 1993. On December 6, according to an AP report, “President Bush and his top aides were cajoling, imploring and even sweet-talking allies” into sharing the burden of Iraq with America. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld met NATO defense ministers in Brussels that week, he declared that Washington “welcomes more help in Iraq. Only days later, addressing American allies in Europe, Secretary of State Colin Powell urged them to help rebuild Iraq.

In apparent contradiction to such statements by his boss Rumsfeld and Secretary Powell, on December 9 Wolfowitz—as Assistant Secretary of Defense—declared that countries that had opposed the Iraq war would be barred by the U.S. from bidding for billions of dollars of reconstruction contracts. Those contracts would only be given to companies from the United States, its coalition partners and “force-contributing nations,” Wolfowitz said. In a sentence deeply Marxian in its dialectics he declared that “limiting competition for prime contracts will encourage the expansion of international cooperation in Iraq and in future efforts.”

Wolfowitz’s statement came as a bombshell. “We noted this news with amazement,” German foreign minister said. Prime Minister Paul Martin found it “very difficult to understand.” France thought it violated U.S. commitments to the World Trade Organization. “This is a gratuitous and extremely unhelpful decision,” said the EU commissioner for international relations Chris Patten. The New York Times declared that “President Bush has reversed field again and left the European allies angry, the secretary of state looking out of step, and the rest of us wondering exactly what his policy really is.” Wolfowitz himself was not reproached at first, but within days the Times revealed that “White House officials were fuming about the timing and the tone” of Wolfowitz’s statement. A State Department source called it “a train wreck.”

REAL MOTIVES?—In this long-forgotten episode Wolfowitz was guilty neither of ineptitude nor of incoherence. His every statement and every move prove that he is rational and coherent in pursuit of his defined objectives. The key problem with him is that those objectives are not necessarily identical with the stated goals of the U.S. foreign policy: his behavior is personally functional but systemically dysfunctional. In this instance, far from seeking “partnership” with “our allies,” Wolfowitz and other neocons want either an utterly subservient, or else an alienated and utterly alien Europe.

Wolfowitz’s statement in December 2003 and his famous Vanity Fair admission quoted above were equally at odds with the Administration’s stated policy. They made sense, however, if his true objective was to make sure that the U.S. remained the only outside power that matters, in the Middle East and everywhere else. Since Paul Wolfowitz is neither mad nor stupid, his actions indicate that he is loath to see any foreign involvement anywhere, except on his, and his like-minded cohorts’ terms, and under their control. The doctrine behind this policy was stated frankly in Wolfowitz’s famous 1992 Pentagon memorandum:

Like the coalition that opposed Iraqi aggression [in 1991], we should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted, and in many cases carrying only general agreement over the objectives to be accomplished. Nevertheless, the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S. will be an important stabilizing factor.

Wolfowitz is who he is and what he is, true to his vocation and his convictions; Er kann nicht anders. As head of the ISAB—formerly known as the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board— he will advocate war against Iran, of course. He will produce information and analysis making an attack mandatory As for George W. Bush, his enabler, this appointment in the final year of his tenure is the seal of proofs that he learns nothing and forgets nothing.

UNDERSTANDING A BAD MAN—Dr. Paul Dundes Wolfowitz is the upholder of a peculiar set of ideological convictions. His mindset, Manichean, paranoid and hubristic, combines elements of all major 20th century brands of totalitarianism, and notably an instinctive preference for geopolitical imperialism, militarism, and statism. His core beliefs are equally at odds with any recognizably conservative outlook and with the preferences of the non-Stalinist Left. In this respect Wolfowitz is closer to Stalinism and National Socialism, than to the Trotskyist roots of some of his best friends. Far from identifying himself with the real and historic America, he treats the United States merely as a tool for the exercise of his Will to Power.

Wolfowitz’s driving force is his psychotic quest for power and dominance, and the exceptionalist discourse its justification. His advocacy of uninhibited American control of far-away lands bears resemblance both to the New European Order of 65 years ago and to the “Socialist Community” that succeeded it in Eastern Europe. His abiding disdain for Russia and other Orthodox Slavs (notably Serbs) is positively Hitlerian. His visceral Russophobia is reminiscent of Hitler’s obsession with Russia, an animosity that was as unrelated to the nature of its regime in 1941 as it is today. Wolfowitz’s advocacy of a new Drang nach Osten in 1992 was insane but logical.

The brazen mendacity apparent in Wolfowitz’s misrepresentation of the reasons for the Iraqi war to the American people recalls Goebbels’s “hypodermic needle approach” to propaganda. Hitler’s propaganda minister was a forerunner of Strauss and his dictum that perpetual deception of hoi polloi by those in power is necessary because they need to be led and told what is good for them. On this, at least, Wolfowitz, Trotsky, Stalin, and Hitler would all agree: those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that might is right.

Wolfowitz has devoted his life to the relentless pursuit of power and to its use in promoting his ideological obsessions. Those obsessions are not only separate from, they are contrary to American interests and American tradition. In his words, actions, and ambitions Paul Wolfowitz has sinned against God and man, and specifically against his fellow countrymen. His morbid quest for unrestrained global dominance is devoid of any moral or legal justification.

It is regrettable and scandalous that his quest is still allowed to continue by George W. Bush. It must be checked. If continued unhindered, the end result of Wolfowitz’s life’s work will be similar to that we have witnessed in Berlin on two occasions in the 20th century, in November 1989 and in May 1945.

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=507

Dr. Srdja Trifkovic is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Dr. Trifkovic is Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, published by The Rockford Institute, and Director of the Institute’s Center for International Affairs. He has a BA (Hon) in international relations from the University of Sussex (UK), a BA in political science from the University of Zagreb (Croatia), and a PhD in history from the University of Southampton (UK).
www.trifkovic.mysite.com

Listen up, eye rollers! (Part 2 of 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 or 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?

NOTES:

[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, http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA%20Hits/CIA_GreatestHits.html, 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
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Guess who did not come

When President Bush visited the Middle East, all the high and mighty flocked to him, Jew and Arab alike. Princes presented him with their priceless swords, presidents and prime ministers drank every word out of his lips, bishops and imams beamed their smiles upon the ruler. They knew why he had flown all over half a planet, this man who is not given to foreign trips. Tel Aviv and New York craved more blood and ruins, and Iraq was already bled white. Now Iran has to be bombed, and Bush came to muster a new coalition of the willing to partake in its destruction. In order to provide a respite, Israel made a hecatomb in his honour – some fifty Palestinians were slaughtered and wounded, and upon their blood Bush confirmed America’s unlimited support of the Jewish state.

Among the dead, there was Hussam, the second son of Mahmud Zahar, the former Foreign Minister of Palestine. Our sincere condolences to him: his elder son was murdered by Jews four years ago in an attempt to assassinate the father, and now the second son has heroically died, defending Gaza from the invader. But the disparity of forces is too great: fifteen fighters were killed, proving that Gaza is still defenceless, still weaponless, still at mercy of the merciless enemy. This disparity may lure Israelis into carrying out their plan of retaking Gaza.

As the dead and wounded of Gaza were carried to the mosque, George Bush preached to the Arabs how wonderful Israel — this beacon of light and democracy in the Middle East — is, and he pushed his message of war with Iran deeper and deeper down their throats. He wants to bomb Teheran and Shiraz before the end of his term. This was demanded by his Israeli hosts, and George is always ready to do whatever they ask.

And the Arab leaders listened, and presented him with horses, and overloaded tables with food. There never was a more shameful surrender than this one. After seeing the Arab leaders with Bush, one wants to apologize to Marshal Petain for having been so harshly treated.

“From the standpoint of the local populations, the spectacle of their hereditary rulers literally rolling out the red carpet for — and hanging heavy gold chains representing their countries’ highest honours around the neck of — the man widely viewed as the worst enemy in living memory of Arabs, Muslims and Islam itself, the man who is already responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Muslims and who appears eager to kill more, can hardly enhance the respect in which these rulers are held,” wrote the perceptive John Whitbeck.

One Arab spiritual leader refused the dishonouring honour, declined the invitation and the photo-op. This was Archbishop Theodosius Atallah Hanna, the highest-ranking Palestinian hierarch in the old great Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem and Holy Land, the community whose first bishop was James, brother of Jesus. Archbishop refused to come to the Bethlehem Church of the Nativity when other bishops met with the man of blood. This noble and daring act saved the honour of the Arabs. Sometimes, one man can do it. Thus, one lieutenant saved the honour of the Czech army in 1938 when he, single-handed and armed with a standard handgun, opened fire on the invading German Army tanks. Archbishop Theodosius followed the example set by his elder fellow churchman, the Archbishop Christodoulos, head of the Greek Church, who also had refused to meet with the American President while he visited Greece. These princes of the church rejected the warmonger, as the Prince of Peace taught. They also destroyed the lie of a Conflict of Civilizations; these Christians are for peace and against war, and here all sincere people are united, whether they are Muslims or Christians.

Jews are different

“And Jews! Please add the Jews”, I hear voices crying. I’d love to, but the Jewish spiritual leaders do not agree. They are for war and bloodshed, if it’s goys’ blood to be shed. The Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, Yona Metzger, thanked President Bush for his invasion of Iraq with its 200,000 dead. “I want to thank you for your support of Israel and in particular for waging a war against Iraq”, Metzger told Bush, reported Jerusalem Post. Yona Metzger is not some old Jew out of touch with the modern world. I met him recently: tall, elegant, handsome, exquisitely dressed; his tall hat could cause the envy of a London dandy. Prince, yes, but Prince of Darkness and War.

Metzger knows what is good for Jews, though it has nothing to do with the wishes of ordinary Jews: the Ukrainian President unveiled a monument to a Nazi leader who killed umpteen Jews, he openly adores the Ukrainian SS, yet Metzger blessed him, for he is about to bring the Ukraine into NATO. The President of Belarus said that Jews do not keep their streets tidy; Metzger attacked him like a Rottweiler, because Lukashenko does not privatize national assets. Metzger is a symbol of the full integration of Jews into US imperialism as its special propaganda corps. And he was elevated by Jewish-managed CBS to rank among “the 12 most influential religious figures in the world”, together with the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

There is much talk of a huge difference between aggressive Ashkenazis and peaceful Sephardis, but reality disproves it. If a Sephardic leader speaks well of Islam, like rabbi Haim Ovadia of Los Angeles did in his essay The Bridge with Islam which was spread by the Internet as good news, you may be sure he does it in order to attack the Christian faith. Indeed he says that he is “a Jew of Islam”, and refers to Muslim tolerance only to mention in the same breath “the Crusades, Saint Bartholomew’s day massacre and the Inquisition”; further on he smears St. Francis of Assisi and the Church for daring to claim, even nowadays, that “the Lord Christ is the only true god”. Should Christians say that He is just one of many true gods, in order to satisfy the good rabbi?

Actually, the Sephardic spiritual leaders are as keen on war and death as their Ashkenazi brethren. Former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef called the Arabs “snakes” and “Amalek” who should be exterminated like vermin. “It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable”, he said. Kill them all, there is no need to distinguish between warriors and non-belligerents, wrote former Sephardi Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu. There is no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians, for all civilians of Gaza are collectively guilty, he said, taking a leaf from the Old Testament. His guiding light was the Shechem massacre (Genesis 34): two titular ancestors of the Jews massacred all the inhabitants of this city (present day Nablus) after tricking them into becoming circumcised. His conclusion – carpet bombing is the best.

He also called upon Bush to do the Jews’ will because this is God’s will: “The Jewish nation is eternal, and forever remembers those that have aided it throughout history, as well as those that have done it harm. Please let your name go down in history as a president who aided the Jewish nation, who worked alongside God and not against him,” wrote the rabbi. And the Jews’ will is forever the killing of some inconvenient goy, or a million of them.

As for remembering favours, you may ask the Brits. Their leaders, Balfour and Lloyd George, believed in this mumbo-jumbo. And they shed the blood of their soldiers, conquered Palestine, squashed native resistance, allowed Jews to come in, trained their army, and when they had completed this work and were waiting for the promised gratitude, they were bombed, knifed, burned, hanged and humiliated in hundred ways. Read more about Jewish gratitude with respect to the Brits: I wrote about it in Prince Charming, but you’ll find it even in that most Zionist of all books, The Exodus by Leon Uris. The facts are still the same.

Some cultures indeed value debt repayment. Such are the Japanese. They enjoy paying their debts. In 1905, Jewish American bankers gave the Japanese generals a generous loan to rearm their military and beat the Russians. In return, in the 1930s, the Japanese gave visas to every Jew who applied for it. But Jews have no such sentimental tradition. They say: you borrow somebody else’s money, but give away your own; you borrow for a while, but give away for good. Or, even easier: only cowards pay debts — including the debt of gratitude. Anyway “aiding the Jewish nation”, in Rabbi Eliyahu’s words, is a sacred duty for a goy, and where there is duty, no debt is incurred.

If you still doubt this, go ask the South Lebanese Army soldiers – they were dropped like a hot brick when it suited Israel. Ask the Poles who permitted the biggest Jewish colony ever to settle and prosper in their borders, only to be forever branded as “vicious antisemites”. But enough of this.

It’s dangerous to say “peace”, for one may be attacked by more extreme Jews. Olmert is not much of a peacenik. He devastated Lebanon, starves Gaza and kills civilians there on a daily basis. If he mentions the word “peace”, it’s in order to mislead, as so many Israeli politicians have done before him. And even then, Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpe, a Khabad leader, called him “the terrible traitor, who should be hanged”. Yitzhak Rabin was not much of peacenik either. He ordered the breaking of the arms and legs of Palestinian children; he brought Fatah from Tunis in order to suppress the Intifada without the mild limitations of the Israeli Supreme Court. Still he was assassinated by a Jewish religious fanatic.

Alas, this proves as little as the title of ‘antisemite”. Some Jews called Sharon, Rabin, Olmert – ‘antisemites’. Likewise, there are Jews who would consider Rabbi Kahane a peacenik and a traitor! But beyond this virtual reality, there are still no Israelis close to power who would go for a peace acceptable to Palestinians.

Israel Shamir is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
A native of Novosibirsk, Siberia, a grandson of a professor of mathematics and a descendant of a Rabbi from Tiberias, Palestine, he studied at the prestigious School of the Academy of Sciences, and read Math and Law at Novosibirsk University. In 1969, he moved to Israel, served as paratrooper in the army and fought in the 1973 war. After his military service he resumed his study of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but abandoned the legal profession in pursuit of a career as a journalist and writer. He got his first taste of journalism with Israel Radio, and later went freelance. His varied assignments included covering Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the last stages of the war in South East Asia. In 1975, Shamir joined the BBC and moved to London. In 1977-79 he wrote for the Israeli daily Maariv and other papers from Japan. While in Tokyo, he wrote Travels with My Son, his first book, and translated a number of Japanese classics.

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Scorpion Logic

The Arctic cold spell that has frozen Palestine for a few weeks apparently departed with President Bush, leaving us to ponder why this strange man came here at all. Some incorrigible optimists expressed belief that Bush had called the Annapolis conference and departed on his present journey in order to achieve peace in the Middle East and to improve his image for future generations. “He does not want to retire with the blemish of Abu Ghraib and the Iraqi war, he dreams of being well remembered”, they say. The same optimists used to say the same things about General Sharon during his much publicised withdrawal from Gaza. It took a year or two for even the dumbest optimists to understand that (as we wrote in real time during the withdrawal) this act allowed the Jews to inflict more suffering on Palestinians and at a cheaper price.

Now they can bomb Gaza at ease, without worrying about the stray Jew who might be hit as well. Now they can starve Gaza and make billions by selling their goods to the besieged while the price tab is paid by the international community. That was Sharon’s nature: if he’d give you a piece of bread, look for a needle in it; if he’d give you a glass of water, check it for poison. Like the scorpion in , he could not behave differently. Bush is an American twin of his vegetable friend Sharon who is now stuck in a comatose limbo reacting to pain. These guys simply can’t do good. If you see Bush doing a good deed, run to the optician! Our friend Jack Graham wrote recently that America is not the Great Satan. True, but under Bush, it will fill the bill until the real Satan comes along.

A psychologist might try to unravel the mystery of Bush’s deep connection with the Neocons — we won’t go into his motives (Is he zombified? Blackmailed? Bewitched?), we’ll just accept it as a fact. For Neocons, Israel/Palestine is the most important core issue. But they are not satisfied with full control over Palestine; whatever it is they conspire towards requires securing the entire East from India to Ethiopia. They will come back to deal with Palestinians later, when the rest is secured. Now they wreak havoc and let slip the dogs of war to run free. They intend to undo Pakistan and seize its nuclear assets, they want to bring Russia and China under control, but their immediate desire is to subdue Iran. For this purpose, Bush needs some Arab stooges standing by. The Masters of Discourse claim that the Arabs “are trembling with fear of the alleged ‘nuclear ambitions’ of Iran and might even be willing to sell out the Palestinian people if the United States were to ‘take out’ Iran on their behalf”, says John Whitbeck, correctly describing this claim as “psychedelic”. (In reality, “[t]he [Arab] street would be thrilled if any Muslim state within reach of Israel (even a non-Arab and Shiite one) were to acquire nuclear weapons and establish a ”balance of fear” in place of the unilateral terror of the past four decades,” Whitbeck avers.)

It is possible to convince Americans that this psychedelic claim is correct: The Masters of Discourse can convince the majority of US citizens of anything at all, even of Gray Aliens. Americans were convinced that the Vietcong were soon to land in California, that Saddam Hussein has WMD and that Iraqis would embrace the US Marines as their liberators, so they can be convinced again and again, until such time as they undo the brainwashing yoke of the Masters. But the Arabs won’t take it, just as the Iraqis did not. For the next move, Bush must deliver some progress in Palestine. It can’t be true progress of course, because Palestine is the core, the final goal; it will be enough if it just looks like a step forward.

That is why Bush went on with the futile farce of Annapolis. If you believe Annapolis and Bush’s visit have moved the notorious “peace process” forward one inch, you do not need an Electric Monk, the device described by Douglas Adams as a machine created to believe anything people find hard to believe – you can beat this machine at its own game! The soon-to-retire Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, Msgr Michel Sabbah correctly explained in his Christmas talk: “A new peace effort was begun these last few weeks. In order for it to succeed, there must be a firm willingness to make peace. Until now, there has been no peace, simply because there has been no willingness to make it” and he pointed out “the strong party, the one with everything in hand, the one who is imposing occupation on the other”. Indeed Israel does not want a peace acceptable to Palestinians, but it [along with President Bush] wants peace on its own terms.

The Arabs understand this as well as anybody. Even the most pro-Western Arab mainstream paper, the Gulf News of Abu Dhabi, wrote a “Letter to George W. Bush” saying: “You said that your current tour aims to realise the long neglected peace in the Middle East. Regional peace will not be achieved by escalating tension and threatening to change regimes. And most importantly, it will not be achieved by supporting Israel, which continues to defy international law, occupy Arab lands, oppress the Palestinians and rebuff peace initiatives.”

Al Jazeera says referring to ‘analysts’ that “the US president is too late in his calls to Arab allies to confront Iranian ‘extremism’, as key American allies in the Arab world have thrown their weight behind a growing rapprochement with Iran… American fumbling in the Middle East has pushed Arabs to adopt dialogue with the Islamic Republic”.

Russia’s rejection of the sanctions against Iran was also instrumental in creating the weather change, and it is possible to say that Bush missed his chance for building an anti-Iranian coalition. However, Western anti-Iranian propaganda did influence many Arabs; even the relatively friendly site of Iraqi resistance, www.uruknet.info, publishes terrible diatribes against “the Persians”. Dr Theodor Reik wrote that people and cultures always trip on the same rake: the Arabs were tricked once into supporting England against the Ottoman Empire. The result was sad; but will this experience keep them from repeating the error, or will they support the US against the Iranians, if offered some convincing performance by Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas? Palestine is still the key.

Israel Shamir is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
A native of Novosibirsk, Siberia, a grandson of a professor of mathematics and a descendant of a Rabbi from Tiberias, Palestine, he studied at the prestigious School of the Academy of Sciences, and read Math and Law at Novosibirsk University. In 1969, he moved to Israel, served as paratrooper in the army and fought in the 1973 war. After his military service he resumed his study of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but abandoned the legal profession in pursuit of a career as a journalist and writer. He got his first taste of journalism with Israel Radio, and later went freelance. His varied assignments included covering Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the last stages of the war in South East Asia. In 1975, Shamir joined the BBC and moved to London. In 1977-79 he wrote for the Israeli daily Maariv and other papers from Japan. While in Tokyo, he wrote Travels with My Son, his first book, and translated a number of Japanese classics.

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Two Things Infinite: The Universe and Human Stupidity

Notice presidential candidates on both sides promise more job growth, bigger pay checks and an expanding economy! They talk about sustainable growth and greater economic progress. All of it depends on growth.

If you drove an hour to work each day in bumper-to-bumper traffic in Los Angeles, would you want more growth? When you stand in a long line at the grocery store in Chicago, do you want more people in ‘Chi Town’? If you walked to work through the overloaded streets of New York City, would you demand more skyscraper apartment buildings to give you even more crowded sidewalks? How about trying to drive to work in Atlanta where they must build a second beltway around the city to alleviate the mind-numbing traffic on the first beltway? Do Atlanta residents want more growth?

If your husband stood six feet tall and weighed 300 pounds, would you like to see him add another 50 pounds as a positive aspect of growth? If you suffered cancer, and millions of Americans suffer from it, and die–would you like to see that cancer enjoy unlimited ‘growth’ as it takes over your body? Growth is good, right?! Everything should keep growing until it bursts!

This week, the Associated Press celebrated that 4.3 million newborns graced the United States in 2006. They called it a ‘birth boomlet’. Economists and policymakers said, “The increase in births is good news.” What’s causing 90 percent of our growth? Legal and illegal immigration!

Albert Einstein said, “Only two things are infinite—the universe and human stupidity.”

Since the United States houses 300 million people, how about adding another 100 million, even 200 million and, what the heck, let’s add another 300 million people to the USA, just to see what happens.

Let’s not look at China, India and Mexico to see what’s already happened. That would be asking too much of anyone with an ounce of common sense.

Lester Brown, publisher of “State of the World” said, “We recently entered a new century, but we are also entering a new world, one where the collisions between our demands and the earth’s capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. It may be another crop-withering heat wave, another village abandoned because of invading sand dunes, or another aquifer pumped dry. If we do not act quickly to reverse the trends, these seemingly isolated events will occur more and more frequently, accumulating and combining to determine our future.

“Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are being consumed in a single human lifespan. We cross natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. These deadlines, determined by nature, are not politically negotiable.

“Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late. For example, when we exceed the sustainable catch of a fishery, the stocks begin to shrink. Once this threshold is crossed, we have a limited time in which to back off and lighten the catch. If we fail to meet this deadline, breeding populations shrink to where the fishery is no longer viable, and it collapses.

“We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of economic decline were environmental, not economic. The trees went first, then the soil, and finally the civilization itself.

“Our situation today is far more challenging because in addition to shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with falling water tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful storms, disappearing species, and, soon, shrinking oil supplies. Although these ecologically destructive trends have been evident for some time, and some have been reversed at the national level, not one has been reversed at the global level.

“The bottom line is that the world is in what ecologists call an “overshoot-and-collapse” mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable yield of natural systems at the local level countless times in the past. Now, it is doing so at the global level. Forests are shrinking for the world as a whole. Fishery collapses are widespread. Grasslands are deteriorating on every continent. Water tables are falling in many countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions exceed CO2 sequestration.

“In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, who now heads the Global Footprint Network, concluded that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. Their study, published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, estimated that global demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20 percent. The gap, growing by 1 percent or so a year, is now much wider. We are meeting current demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.

“The world is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcity, which is already highly visible in the efforts by China, India, and other developing countries to ensure their access to oil supplies. In the future, the issue will be who gets access to not only Middle Eastern oil but also Brazilian ethanol and North American grain. Pressures on land and water resources, already excessive in most of the world, will intensify further as the demand for biofuels climbs. This geopolitics of scarcity is an early manifestation of civilization in an overshoot-and-collapse mode, much like the one that emerged among the Mayan cities competing for food in that civilization’s waning years.”

What’s the difference between Lester Brown and this writer? Answer: I’ve seen what he writes about.

My conclusion: this country’s leaders and general population prove to be dumber than a box of gerbils. We’re on course to be the fastest growing, most successful civilization—only to fall on our own sword by immigrating ourselves into this “Human Katrina.” Our children become guppies in a sea of oblivion.

This country MUST implement a 10 year moratorium on all immigration!

Listen to Frosty Wooldridge on Tuesdays and Thursdays as he interviews top national leaders on his radio show “Connecting the Dots” at www.republicbroadcasting.org at 6:00 PM Mountain Time. Adjust tuning in to your time zone. January 22, 2008, he interviews author Mike Folkerth about his book “The Biggest Lie Ever Believed”. It’s about the American Dream sinking faster than the Titanic.

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

Bush’s Vacation Get-Away in Paraguay?

Every country must surrender their sovereignty in order to establish the One World Order. This is facilitated by the globalists and their American minions, abetted by the obedience-trained U.S. Congress. Economic destabilization, with or without military blitzkriegs (a.k.a. major acts of terrorism) is an effective method for taking over a vulnerable country. The play-for-pay political puppets are installed or replaced according to their compliance to the globalist handlers. The elite affluent men behind the curtain remain the same: big banks and multi-national businesses. The privatization of so many government functions has stripped Congress, with their compromised consent, of congressional approval and oversight which is mandated by congressional law.

The privatization of warfare, rendition flights, torture, and economic destabilization has produced numerous enemies and vehement animosity. Most Americans, who get their daily dose of government-friendly 1984 Orwellian-style propaganda, have no idea why foreigners hate us.

Countries with huge populations of indigenous, brown-skinned “enemies” seem particularly vulnerable to resource pilfering, together with the atrocities and massacres that accompany such activities. After all, they are “uncivilized” and standing in the way of our “national interests,” without appreciation or vision for what their resources could produce in our insatiable, more sophisticated society. Incredulous Americans, comfy at home, don’t like hearing about the bloody, gory details. However, there are astute foreign leaders, though U.S. media-demonized, who won’t readily acquiesce to economic assailants or conform to globalist demands. In addition to the Middle East, the resource-rich countries of South America have been especially targeted.

Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador and Bolivia are fighting against United States control and hegemony, preferring, instead, to control their own country and resources. Their duly-elected, populist, egalitarian leaders, compassionately concerned about their own people, though deserving of admiration, would never receive respect from the greedy globalists. Rather they will be summarily accused of inciting unrest or supporting terrorists so that when our government announces that a regime change is essential, by military force or by Washington-directed election-riggers, obedient U.S. citizens will readily assent. For decades, America has attempted to influence politics in South America for our own national and business interests through such projects as Operation Condor.

The U.S., under the pretext of fighting terrorism, has conducted military exercises in Paraguay since July 2005 after threatening to withhold millions of dollars in aid if Paraguay failed to allow hundreds of our military, along with our planes, weapons and ammunition, into their country. [i] Ex-Secretary of Defense (War) Donald Rumsfeld, ironically the current owner of Mount Misery, visited Paraguay in August 2005. He said that Cuba and Venezuela were somehow instrumental in creating tensions in Bolivia. Although he claims keen perception into the internal problems of foreign countries, he apparently was deliberately inept with his own responsibilities. An audit revealed on September 10, 2001, that $2.6 trillion was missing in some pentagon accounts. This was conveniently forgotten with the horrifically distracting events of 9/11. [ii] That sum, plus another $1 trillion, disappeared under Dov Zakheim’s* watch, the Pentagon Comptroller appointed by Bush in May 2001. Zakheim, like so many others, has left “through the traditional revolving door for government-corporate insiders”[iii] and gone on to greener pastures. *(CFR)

The proposed U.S. military objective is to train our Paraguayan counterparts. Why we had to financially finagle them into accepting our help isn’t clear – obviously it was in our “national interests” rather than accommodation of their needs. Unless renewed, our contract ends December 31, 2006. Justifiably, local residents immediately protested our invasive military presence. “Some activists, military analysts and politicians in the region believe the operations could be part of a plan to overthrow the left-leaning government of Evo Morales in neighboring Bolivia and take control of the area’s vast gas and water reserves.” [iv] The water reserves constitute the Guaraní Aquifer, an underground water reservoir shared by four nations. Morales signed a decree on May 1, 2006 which nationalized all of Bolivia’s gas reserves, an outrageous objective – certainly not conducive to U.S. interests. Imagine a national leader who puts his country’s needs first – rather than the needs of the American government!

“A major focus of the unrest in Bolivia is who controls its vast natural gas deposits, the second largest in the Western Hemisphere. Under pressure from the United States and the IMF, Bolivia sold off its oil and gas to Enron and Shell in 1995 for $263.5 million, less than 1% of what the deposits are worth.” [v]

“Would the United States try to destabilize Bolivia’s economy while training people how to use military force to insure Enron, Shell, British Gas, Total, Repsol, and the United States continues to get Bolivian gas for pennies on the dollar? Quite likely.” [vi]

“And would the White House like to use such a coup as a way to send a message to other countries? You bet. President Bush may be clueless on geography, but he is not bad at overthrowing governments and killing people.” [vii]

The United States alleges that they have no plans for establishing military bases in Paraguay. Of course, they said they had no plans to establish military bases in Iraq. Not only are the locals concerned about the military taking up residence, there are substantial rumors that the Bush family has purchased land in Paraguay. News of George W. Bush purchasing 98,840 acres of land in the Chaco area of Paraguay was reported in Prensa Latino, the Latin American News Agency on October 18, 2006. That story is no longer available at their site but is available as a PDF file.

Jenna Bush paid a 10-day visit to Paraguay in October 2006. She met with the Paraguayan president and America’s ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason, who was appointed in July 2005, the same time our troops arrived. Ambassadors function as damage control and are charged with representing U.S. interests. Jenna Bush was visiting under the auspices of the UNICEF but it was apparently also a private visit. She did not grant any interviews nor did she do any fundraising. It appears to have been a convenient pretext to visit in as much as the UNICEF function was occurring at the same time. [viii]

Despite claims in international newspapers (Argentina, Brazil), official U.S. sources maintain that neither George H. W. nor George W. Bush have purchased thousands of acres of land in northern Paraguay. The White House claims that this is merely a conspiracy theory. [ix] Now we know that the government never lies, right? Any story that remotely questions the covert activities of the government is considered a conspiracy theory. The greatest conspiracy in this country is the one the government is perpetrating against the citizens. Despite his egregious actions, revelatory books, numerous impeachment web sites, Bush will likely never be impeached. Our congress, both parties, lacks the courage to facilitate the process regardless of what the public wants.

The Chaco area of Paraguay, the area in question, contains vast natural gas reserves. Most of the Chaco region belongs to private companies. Conveniently, the property that Bush claims not to own is close to the U.S. Mariscal Estigarribia Air Base and also near another large block of land controlled by the ultra right-wing Christian fundamentalist cult of Sun Myung Moon, a Bush contributor and supporter. Perhaps, Bush and Moon will be neighbors? The Reverend Sun Myung Moon owns almost 1.5 million acres. The local residents are not happy about Moon’s intrusion and control. Of course, if Bush should ever need to claim political asylum, Paraguay has a history of giving asylum.

In addition to easy access to Bolivia, there is another reason for the United States and big business being in Paraguay, considered by the U.S. to be a failed state. It is the fourth-largest producer of soy in the world. Paraguay is a country of 157,047 sq. miles, which is about the size of California (158,402 sq. miles).

Ninety thousand (90,000) poor families have been displaced from their soybean producing land for rejecting Monsanto’s genetically manipulated soybeans. “On June 24, 2005, in Tekojoja, Paraguay, hired policemen and soy producers kicked 270 people off their land, burned down fifty-four homes, arrested 130 people and killed two.” [x] “As a result of the rapid expansion of genetically modified soybeans into the area, peasants and indigenous people in Eastern Paraguay have become the targets of land evictions, pesticide poisoning and assassinations.” [xi] Perhaps some of the local officials benefit as the result of allowing Monsanto and their problematic big profit products into the country.

As recently as 2004, genetically modified soybeans were illegal in Paraguay and for excellent reasons and possibly should be illegal in other places, like Iraq. Individuals should avoid genetically modified soybeans for the following reasons: (information comes from What About Soy?)

• two-thirds of the U.S. soybean crop today is genetically engineered;
• they are genetically altered to withstand Monsanto’s Roundup, a weed killer
• Roundup residue levels in harvested crops exceed the allowable legal limit
• the FDA tripled the allowable amount of Roundup residues that can remain on the crop (the FDA seems to be Monsanto’s Washington branch office)
• permitting increased residues helps Monsanto’s bottom line
• corporate interests are given higher priority than public safety
• Monsanto’s own research had raised many questions about the safety of their Roundup Ready soybeans. Solution: stop the tests, market the product
• genetically modified soy is contained in a wide array of processed foods
• tens of millions of people are unknowingly eating experimental foods daily
• Roundup Ready soybeans contain 29 percent less of the brain nutrient choline, and 27 percent more trypsin inhibitor, the potential allergen that interferes with protein digestion, than normal soybeans
• genetically altered soybeans have lower levels of phenylalanine, an essential amino acid that affects levels of phytoestrogens
• levels of lectins, which are most likely the culprit in soy allergies, are nearly double in the transgenic variety

These foods should definitely be avoided if one cares for their health. Monsanto collects royalties from countries that use its seed and they obviously have a great deal of influence in our country through our current administration. Monsanto believes that everyone who benefits from proprietary technology should have an obligation to pay for it. The global market for soybean oil is growing. Soybean oil, together with palm oil, accounts for over half of all oil consumed in the world. For alleged health reasons, consumers are switching to soybean oil as studies suggest that soy may lower cholesterol. “Compared to regular soybeans, the genetically engineered beans have more of the very things that are problematic, and less of the very things that are beneficial.” [xii] “The international market for soybeans is being artificially inflated, not least by the new craze to exploit globalized sources of biofuels.” [xiii]

Since January 1, 2006, the FDA, our selectively health conscience government agency, has required the Trans fat content on all foods and dietary supplements that it regulates. [xiv] Some communities are banning Trans fats in restaurants – possibly a disaster for smaller businesses. Depleted uranium munitions, though not under the FDA, have no such labels. I suppose a study about Trans fat, cholesterol, cancer, diabetes, etc. can prove anything you want it to – meanwhile our general health diminishes. My distrust leads me to think that Monsanto probably financed many studies! The Rockefeller Foundation promoted and financed many of the GM studies. [xv] Government officials, often former employees, assist the companies that contribute to campaigns. Regular people lack that kind of influence – money talks. Monsanto is world-wide – they are not discriminatory about which nations they inflict their products on.

Oppression and violence in Paraguay are the worst in the areas occupied by the U.S. military. [xvi] Imagine that – their very presence creates tension which is then ominously used to justify their presence. Similar situations are true in other parts of the world. Yet, in a further attempt to justify their presence, they have tried to link the campesino organizations to terrorist cells whose existence has never been proven – it is mere propaganda to justify prolonged U.S. presence – comparable to our (2 minute video clip) except Paraguay is under the U.S. media radar. Supposedly, they are providing humanitarian service to some of Paraguay’s most disadvantaged citizens. I am uncertain how removing the poor from their farms is humanitarian – more Orwellian doublespeak!

Apparently the military establishes a relationship with various farmers in order to garner information. Then they “establish the plans and actions to control the farmer movement and advise the Paraguayan military and police on how to proceed.” The military conducts classes for the Paraguayan troops under the auspices of the Southern Command, the branch of the U.S. military for South America. [xvii]

“The Mariscal Estigarribia air base is within 124 miles of Bolivia and Argentina, and 200 miles from Brazil, near the Triple Frontier where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet. Bolivia’s natural gas reserves are the second largest in South America, while the Triple Frontier region is home to the Guaraní Aquifer, one of the world’s largest fresh water sources.” [xviii] The air base is capable of housing 16,000 troops, includes a fancy radar system, large hangars and has an air traffic control tower.

By agreement, our military is exempt from trial in the International Criminal Court (ICC). Paraguay is terminating the immunity stipulation to comply with the MercoSur trade block, which includes Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela. On October 3, 2006 George Bush signed a waver pledging military aid to countries that reject the immunity stipulation. However, the CIA, the FBI and the DEA will continue to enjoy immunity. [xix]

“Kremlin sources are reporting today that the International Committee of the Red Cross, based in Switzerland, has opened a War Crimes Portfolio charging the United States President, Vice President, Defense Secretary, United States Military Commanders and the majority of United States Senators and Congressmen with ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ over what the United Nations has declared as an ‘illegal’ war in the Middle Eastern Country of Iraq, and where the innocent civilian death toll is nearing 30,000.” [xx] It is actually drastically higher. Yes folks, American leaders have committed and sanctioned war crimes as well as torture.

When criminals go against all legal conventions and wage savage, brutal war against civilians as well as unwarranted, disproportionate military attacks, infrastructure destruction and demolition, they deserve to face military tribunals. Rather, some attempt to alter the law to avoid culpability. The Nuremburg Trials failed to execute justice against many who escaped to South American countries like Argentina and Paraguay. Even though it was illegal, the most talented Nazi scientists came to America via the help of the U.S. Military through “Project Paperclip.”

“This is reported to be only the second time in the International Committee of the Red Cross’s history where a War Crimes Portfolio has been opened against the Civilian and Military Leadership of a sovereign country, with the first being opened in 1943 against the Nazi German Empire and its Chancellor, Adolph Hitler, and various other civilian and military leaders of that country.”

“The specific ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ that these Americans are being charged with are violations of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, specifically Articles 3 and 4.” [xxi] War crimes and their punishment are also covered under the War Crimes Act of 1996.

The Nazi war criminal, Joseph Mengele, Auschwitz’s notorious “Angel of Death” managed to fake and finance his way out of Germany by 1949 and headed for Buenos Aires, Argentina, a country stricken with serious economic problems but sympathetic and relatively safe for Nazis. The country was divided between the poverty-stricken and the affluent with an active black market.

After ascertaining that people might be looking for him in Argentina and because of enhanced financial opportunities, Mengele fled to Paraguay, a haven for Nazi war criminals. The government had been overthrown by Alfredo Stroessner in 1954.[xxii] Mengele was approved for Paraguayan citizenship on November 27, 1959 under his own name. [xxiii] Unlike Argentina, Paraguay and West Germany had no formal extradition agreement between them. Mengele, like many other war criminals, was never brought to justice. [xxiv] Paraguay and the United States entered into an extradition agreement in 1998. (PDF File) Enforcement is another matter! For the sake of the vulnerable of the earth, one can only hop

[i] The US Military Descends on Paraguay
[ii] Testimony before the House Appropriations Committee: Fiscal Year 2002 Defense Budget Request
[iii] Pentagon Fraud Chief Dov Zakheim Goes to BoozAllen by Uri Dowbenko
[iv] The US Military Descends on Paraguay
[v] Dark Armies, Secret Bases, and Rummy, Oh My!
[vi] Ibid
[vii] Ibid
[viii] What are the Busheviks up to now?
[ix] United States Has No Plans for Military Base in Paraguay, Misunderstandings arose from agreement on military exercises
[x] The US Military Descends on Paraguay
[xi] Monsanto Teams Up with the U.S. Military to Force Genetically Engineered Soybeans on Paraguay
[xii] What About Soy? by John Robbins
[xiii] Monsanto Teams Up with the U.S. Military to Force Genetically Engineered Soybeans on Paraguay
[xiv] Continued Losses Put Pressure On Monsanto Product Launch, Anastasia L Thatcher, November, 2004
[xv] Seeds of Destruction: The Geopolitics of GM Food, William Engdahl, Current Concerns (Zurich), 6 Mar 2005
[xvi] Marines Blamed for Deaths
[xvii] The US Military Descends on Paraguay
[xviii] Project Censored: US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region
[xix] Paraguay Revokes U.S. Military Immunity
[xx] ‘War Crimes’ Portfolio against United States President, Vice President and Defense Secretary Opened By International Committee of the Red Cross Charging ‘Crimes Against Humanity’
[xxi] Ibid
[xxii] Alfredo Stroessner; Paraguayan Dictator
[xxiii] How Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele cheated justice for 34 years
[xxiv] Josef Mengele

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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Video: The Doomsday Code

Tony Robinson investigates the people with powerful political friends in the White House, who are trying to bring about the end of the world. Julia Bard reports.

Broadcast 09/16/06 – Channel 4 Documentary

Pitch Black Void

Freefall

The towers fell upon their own imprints, floor after floor cascading down upon the next in an avalanche of concrete, glass, steel and flesh, in the process pulverizing everything, and everybody, between them, over 200 combined stories of human ingenuity flattened in the span of seconds, their reign over gravity and the skies eviscerated, falling down to the land of mortals not with the chaos of randomness and malevolent physics but with the unexpected order and perfection of orchestration and wicked pre-planned intentions.

One building was followed by another in a near perfect duplication of the first, almost as if déjà vu had supplanted itself on Manhattan island, after morbidly disturbing airplane crashes had sent the collective conscious of the world on freefall, their fires blazing yet their inferno not scorching enough to melt the reinforced steel of towers designed to withstand airline crashes. Soon after the strikes black and gray smoke billowed out of the crash sites, proof that what had once burned was now dissipating, unable to breathe the oxygen it needed to burn or unable to chemically alter steel skeletons or cause the structural integrity of two separate skyscrapers to be compromised.

Yet less than one hour after each building was struck the monoliths of New York came crashing down, almost in perfect synchronization, more than half an hour apart, one after the other in a display of destruction too perfect to qualify as randomness, a form of controlled chaos never to befall a burning steel skyscraper in the histories of modern civilization or architecture. Strangely, not one hour passed before we were led to believe fire and heat compromised and melted reinforced steel, not for one but two separate buildings, as if lightning had struck twice in the same spot, as if the impossible had become normal, as if black smoke could bend, in the course of an hour, what usually would take multiple hours to achieve.

In America, however, where citizens have the attention spans of gnats, tuning out after ten-second sound bites, one minute news reports and having the patience only to accept rapid video flashes, even orchestrated, criminal mass murder must be accomplished on fast-forward time. And so the destruction by controlled demolition of the WTC, brilliantly executed, monstrously planned, hidden behind the charade of hijacked airliner crashes, yet so easily deciphered by open minds and through the magic of video and the passage of time, became a reality, in a few seconds of malevolent decimation killing close to 3,000 innocent human beings and plunging a nation of 300 million into the freefall of madness, shock, fear, hatred, rage and the collective blindness needed by criminals, warmongers and greed addicts to steer a nation down the precipice of human emotion and into the realm of total control and obedience.

While the nation, indeed the world entire, recovered its collective breath, paralyzed shock and ever-increasing fear at what we had just witnessed – and repeatedly seen over and over again thanks to the corporate media – a rather peculiar, and unexpected, event occurred that hundreds of millions were unable to see, either because of shock, fear or the blindness spawned by the psychological trauma we had just experienced. A few hours after the towers had fallen, entombing thousands and forever altering the course of history, another skyscraper came tumbling down, clandestinely falling almost inconspicuously to the ground below. This building, the fifty story WTC 7, seemingly untouched and unaffected by the destruction of her much larger brothers, with no fires or smoke apparent, with no structural damage noticeable, with no airplane smashing into her, decided to fall to earth in much the same way, falling exactly the way multiple buildings have fallen over the years thanks to controlled demolitions, seemingly imploding from within, her top falling down as if her structural skeleton had been turned to butter. It would later be said by authorities that WTC 7 fell due to structural and fire damage, yet video and eyewitness testimony, as well as the open eyes of any rational human being, beg to differ. If no rational reason can be found to explain how WTC 7 fell in such a “controlled” demolition sort of way, in the absence of damage, what, then, can be deduced? What, then, are we to make of the fate that befell the Twin Towers, in direct contradiction to the laws of physics and those of logic?

Make no mistake, 9/11 was, and continues to be, a war upon the American people, a psychological operation directed at our minds and hearts that was, from the very start, nothing but the catalyst needed to launch Project Empire by the delusional criminals and miscreants in power. The events of 9/11, with the destruction of the World Trade Center, as well as the hit on the Pentagon, were designed by the architects of mass murder as the oil needed to fine-tune and start the engine of the American war machine as well as those sparkplugs of blind and unthinking support, the American people. The targets were largely symbolic, landmarks entrenched into the American psyche, easily recognizable as pillars of American strength, the strikes upon their infrastructure calculated not only to inflict mass murder, but to deeply affect the collective psychology of hundreds of millions of Americans. In 9/11 the enablers of terror would have the birth pangs of their new American Century.

The Throne Determined

The individuals who planned and executed 9/11 knew that with the ascension of George W. Bush to the throne of the American presidency their plans and projects, long since created and written yet for years lacking the keys to power, would have the green-light to commence wars upon the American people as well as those long-planned against the Arab world. Indeed, well before Bush became president the decision had already been made, deep in the dark closets of clandestine meetings and arrangements, where deal making and power decisions are made, to attack and invade Iraq, along with other nations deemed “important,” both for geopolitical and ideological reasons.

These wars and invasions, which were to be the centerpiece of the miscreants’ master plans, creating the birth pangs of a New American Century, one based on unilateralism, resource domination, protection of Israel’s vital interests and unequaled imperial hegemony, would, it was thought, catapult America into the realm of Empire, a kingdom untouched and unrivaled, in control of the world’s energy resources, in full mastery of all potential rivals, possessed of vitally important lands and locations. All that was needed was a stolen election or two, a little luck and a new Pearl Harbor from which to spawn their dogma of controlled chaos upon the globe.

When seen in this light, the importance to the miscreants that George W. Bush become president after the 2000 election, by any means necessary, is more readily understood. To the corporatist and neoconservative cabal that has declared war on the American people, it was imperative that Bush be declared the winner versus Al Gore. Only with a Bush victory could their projects and sinister intentions be born and implemented, thereby creating the conditions needed to control the country and its citizens, and by extension the entire planet, for years and even decades into the future.

Indeed, they knew that to succeed, years and even decades would be needed to transform the world according to their ideology. The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, full of corporatists and neoconservatives, could only commence their blueprint with the selection, no matter how devious it became or how unscrupulous the methods chosen, of George W. Bush to the White House, and not just for one term. Thus, the stolen election of 2000, especially in the state of Florida, was but one more strategic maneuver designed specifically to set in place the mechanisms by which their ideology could, after years of frustration, finally be allowed to blossom. The ascension of George W. Bush to the American throne thus became an inevitable conclusion well before the first vote was cast. It was the individuals that counted the votes, and not those that cast them, who would decide the 2000 election.

The election of 2000 was orchestrated to perfection by the corporatists and neoconservatives who clandestinely or openly supported the Republican ticket. Using the television and the unrivaled power of the corporate media, with its images, sound bites, editing magic and legions of journalist lackeys, they set out to tarnish the reputation and achievements of Bill Clinton and by consequence, those of his vice-president and most likely Democratic candidate, Al Gore. Knowing how easy the buttons of manipulation can be pressed upon an unsuspecting and dumbed down American populace, they created Clinton fatigue and dislike among millions of potential voters, knowing full well that by destroying the president’s likeability they were at the same time decimating Al Gore’s potential votes among moderates and independents. Using the television to their advantage, they thereby eliminated the president from the election picture, knowing that Clinton, if allowed to campaign for Gore, and ever the political charmer and genius, could have delivered the election to the Democrats, or at the least made Gore a more marketable personality to the electorate.

With Clinton out of the picture, the smearing of Gore and the adulation of Bush commenced, with the corporate media using all tools at its disposal to turn Gore into an unlikable candidate, using clever editing of sound and video, combined with the negative comments of embedded lackey journalists, to turn Gore, a much worthier candidate than Bush could ever become, into a mediocre politician with no personality or popularity. He became the unlikable candidate, the elitist Washingtonian whose candidacy was imputed to Bill Clinton fatigue. The corporate media did everything in its power to sway the unsure voter that Gore was not the right man to be president. In the era of corporatism, it is the corporations that decide who will run and who will win. We the People can only vote for those deemed acceptable by the corporate establishment, those that have shown loyalty not to the People, but to the interests of the corporate world.

Meanwhile, with the complete backing of big business, the military industrial energy complex and the neoconservatives in and out of the media, Bush was transformed from east coast elitist into average Joe six-pack, with the tools of television propelling and marketing Bush as an average middle class American, with a recently purchased Texas ranch to prove it. The creation of the Bush persona was carefully orchestrated, following the results of research, polls and focus groups, trying to recreate or imitate, at least in some psychological way, shape or form, the qualities inherent in or sought by those groups needed for Bush and his still clandestine cabal to garner the most votes in the general election. Meanwhile, the corporate media gave the dimwit Bush a pass at every turn, forgiving his penchant for idiocy and his quite apparent lack of knowledge. His shady past was ignored; his repeated failures as a businessman were glossed over. The corporatist world had its man and the will of the People would not stand in their way.

As such, Bush’s persona is a fiction, in as much as he is made to represent the American middle-class, for deep inside, where genetics and environment and pathology meet on the superhighway of psychological fusion, Bush is a manifestation of the unthinking knuckle-dragger, a slight step above our primate cousins, incapable of deep thought, reasoned intelligence or logical decision making, preferring to dwell in the certainties of black and white thinking and the archaic beliefs of primitive theology. He remains a hollow poster child for elitist juniors, a pampered spoiled little boy given to temper tantrums when he does not get what he wants, a man who for too long nursed off the breast of superiority, apathy and greed, for decades living in a wealth-induced bubble devoid of discipline or suffering.

Deeply flawed mentally, never able to replicate the intelligence or the success of fathers and grandfathers, possessing a lack of empathy and a willingness to inflict suffering onto others, fully aware that everything he has achieved has been due to the laurels of his father and not the talents of his existence, Bush nonetheless exhibits many characteristics of a psychotic, with a penchant for incessant lying, for walking over anybody that gets in his way, for his appetite for destruction and murder, for his indifference for human life, in his ability to bully the world, in his love of greed and power, in his distaste for knowledge and intellectual stimulation, and in the unmistakable reality that whatever he has touched during his life has turned not to gold, but to pure, one-hundred percent fecal matter. This is the George W. Bush chosen by the cabal of corporatists and neoconservatives to help usher in a new era of American imperialism. With such a president at the helm of the most powerful state in the world, a man easily influenced and manipulated, lacking reason, logic and the wisdom of leaders, PNAC found itself the instrument of terror it so desperately needed.

Knowing for months the likely outcome of the 2000 election, after months of research, studies and historical analysis, and millions of dollars invested had shown them the direction, Bush’s handlers focused on the one state they knew would decide the outcome. And so, with months to go before the 2000 election, the Republican machine set out, with help from George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, to embed into the election system the mechanisms needed to steal Florida in favor of Bush, the Republicans, the neoconservatives and the corporatists.

They immediately set out to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters, most of them African-American, through a myriad of illegal yet methodical ways. Felons were purged from the voting records, as were thousands of law-abiding citizens whose names were erased from registration lists. Outdated voting machines, those most likely to tabulate wrong vote counts, were introduced into poor areas for the sole purpose of disenfranchising voters, most of whom would likely vote for Gore. The irregularities were many; the votes purged were in the hundreds of thousands. The corporatist/Republican voter disenfranchisement machine, so adept at Jim Crow, had come calling again.

This election, after all, was of paramount importance, both for the corporatists from the military industrial energy complex, who were depending on Bush for hundreds of billions of dollars in future oil and war profiteering profits, as well as a complete dismantling of burdensome corporate taxes, laws and environmental regulations, not to mention untold billions of dollars in stolen Iraqi money and American taxes, and the neoconservatives, whose main interests were ideological and strategic, through imperial domination of the Middle East and Central Asia, control of oil/gas resources and mechanisms, toward complete American hegemony and eventual Empire building through domination of potential rivals, not to mention the always present protection of Israel and her interests, assuring her regional domination in the Middle East through the elimination of her rivals. By any means necessary, the 2000 election would have to be won, irrespective of the will of the People.

After the Supreme Court selected their man as the new president of the United States, a decision that was a foregone conclusion, the wheels were set in motion, and soon the project for the New American Century would have its new and improved Pearl Harbor, a 21st century Reichstag fire whose usefulness would never subside and whose demons could always, at the whim of expediency, be resurrected. The dreaded Arab terrorist was about to be born, entering the grand stage of American produced enemies, becoming the bogeyman striking fear at the heart of a cowardly majority.

A new America was soon to be born from the smoke, dust and debris of falling monoliths and demolished lives. An obedient populace would soon surface, wide eyed in allegiance to fascism, ready to hate and fear and kill for the sake of the red, white and blue, proud to march lockstep with the drums of war, eager to unleash weapons of destruction upon the lands of the barbarians. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Iran were only months away from being gobbled up, and the Bush cabal, assured by its delusions and its arrogance, could only salivate at the thoughts of what would surely soon arrive.

Enter the Darkness

If we ponder over the horizon of the last five years and ask ourselves who has benefited the most from the tragic events of 9/11 then surely the arrow would point to the Bush administration, along with the clandestine and known neoconservatives and corporatists controlling the military industrial energy complex. As a result of 9/11, these groups, the Bush cabal for short, have seemingly grown in absolute power and wealth, declaring wars, occupying nations, killing hundreds of thousands of human beings, manipulating the American populace, fleecing America’s treasury, making obscene profits from war and death, curtailing Americans’ civil liberties and rights, further instituting corporatist control over government and society, engendering fear and hatred into the people and ignoring the rule of law along with the Constitution of the United States.

The Bush cabal has succeeded in reaching many of the goals it had set for itself before taking office in 2000. In this war against the American people, the cabal has utterly defeated us, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. We are quite impotent, it seems, to their manipulation of our fears and the conditioning of our hatreds. It has been 9/11, that catalyst to population control and manipulation, that has cemented the Bush cabal firmly in power, doing with the American people as they wish, leading us further down the road to corporatism. The cabal has systematically declawed us of our bravery, making us babies crying out for our mother. It has succeeded at manipulating us through the use of fear and terror, actually convincing us to throw away liberties and flush down freedoms for the sake of protection and security, even though the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

It was 9/11, a devastating conduit of brain wave alteration, more than anything else, that has completely and systematically transformed the American people into the sheeple and lemmings needed by authoritarian rulers everywhere to govern and impose their tyrannical policies. The 9/11 psychological war upon the citizenry, or, in the words of the PNAC, the “new Pearl Harbor,” was designed to nurture perpetual fear and hatred in hundreds of millions of minds, in the process harvesting loyal and obedient citizen soldiers. The attack, taking place on a few city blocks of the largest metropolis in the country, devastated two giant buildings but left the rest of the country, besides the Pentagon, physically unscathed.

What September 11, 2001, did, however, more than anything else, was destroy not the physical infrastructure of America, but the mental energy of the nation and its citizens. It was both a mental manipulation dirty bomb and a weapon of mass deception rolled into one, a direct hit against the very foundation of America’s citizenry, creating the most fragile, and by extension subservient, populace since Nazi Germany. September 11th’s tragedy, its morbid violence, its sinister evils were played and replayed countless times, from every possible angle, sending shockwaves into our pores, fear running through our veins, with every replay our mind succumbing further inside our fragile psyches, searching for answers, and vengeance. The thirst for Arab blood was what the cabal wanted, and it was what it got.

A direct hit upon the American psyche did more damage to the nation than two hits on colossal skyscrapers ever could, yet slowly but methodically, our mind became the dominion of the cabal. We became, over the course of a few days, possessed by the demons of fear and hatred, like zombies sleep-walking through our daily lives, not knowing what to do, experiencing emotions we had never felt, remembering tragedy we had just recently seen, searching in darkness for light, needing to place blind trust in the nation’s authorities, needing to trust our security and freedom and democracy upon the leaders of the country.

We became putty in the hands of the cabal, and they knew it. Everything they wanted we would gladly give them for we had become, in the span of a few days, corralled sheep and caged lemmings, robbed of free thought, our bravery supplanted by the fear hovering throughout the land, our reason destroyed by the hate in our hearts. We wanted security, safety and most of all, vengeance. We failed to think logically about the mess the cabal was immersing us in. We failed to understand the ramifications of entering a hornet’s nest and murdering tens of thousands of people. We failed to comprehend the vicious cycle of violence our acquiescence would soon spawn, nor the disaster that was to unfold. Standing behind the flag and our patriotism blind we became to the view of reality. We wanted revenge for 9/11; we wanted to unleash carnage upon Arab lands, whether they were a threat or not. We fell right into the cabal’s master plans.

The tragic events of 9/11 became an instant myth in our collective consciousness, its story firmly entrenched in our minds, its official narrative becoming both national tragedy and inspiration, its fable unable to be altered, its façade unbending, its reality hidden by blind rage and closed minds. We were conditioned never to question the official narrative, or the obvious 9/11 Commission white wash. To question and even seek truth was to delve in realities we could not bare or wish to understand. The implications would be unfathomable, and deeply disturbing. For if our protectors had committed mass murder in New York and Washington, if our leaders were responsible for 9/11, then who and what was running the nation? If they could kill 3,000 citizens, what was stopping them from murdering many more? It was better to be brainwashed with the official story than to question the uncomfortable. It was easier to never question than to seek the truth. In the end, it was easier to drink the Kool-Aid than enter the rabbit hole.

In the end, it was simple to believe that we had been attacked by what we did not know or understand, by entities that wished to destroy our freedom and our democracy, by brown-skinned bogey men lurking in every corner and underneath every bed, waiting to come out of closets, ready to murder and rape, pillage and devastate. We were made to fear, and with fear we lost reason. We were made to hate, and with hate born free thought died. The Arab and the Muslim had become our enemy; almost overnight more than a billion humans were condemned by a barrage of corporate media propaganda and government manipulation, seemingly too conveniently, too prepared and scripted, as if the enemy had been concocted months and years before, its fault carefully planned and orchestrated, marketed for all its faults and none of its virtues, transforming a group of people into the monsters of our imaginations and the madmen of our corporate media indoctrination.

The Bush cabal had succeeded in concocting an enemy from the same lands and region where it wanted to wage war and occupation. Geopolitics, geostrategy, oil, gas and pipelines, imperial hegemony and absolute power, how lucky for the cabal that America’s new bogeymen hailed from the same nations scheduled for invasion. The cabal’s actions, or inaction, depending on how one looks at 9/11, embedded the lust for vengeance, and thus for war, on the American population. The Bush cabal, fully aware that the American people would never consent or give approval to multiple wars of choice upon lands and peoples that had not done us harm, thus needed a catalyst, a new Pearl Harbor, a 9/11-like event from which to alter the minds of 300 million Americans, making warmongers out of pacifists, vengeance-seekers out of peaceful citizens. Without the trauma and the shock and the fear and the hatred and the blind rage spawned by 9/11, the Bush cabal would never have been able to embark on their warmongering and profiteering ways. The anger and hatred and blind trust engendered thanks to 9/11 made sure that the cabal could proceed with long-held plans and ideologies.

Thus we were fed the lies and the deceits and the manipulations that exist in the lands of authoritarianism, where the citizenry is too dumbed down and unable, or unwilling, to question its own government. We followed the fable and the bull manure, believing, still to this day, a government that has lied about every single issue to ever arise in five years since usurping power. In a world where war is peace, slavery is freedom and ignorance is knowledge, let it also be said that lies are truth in these new days of “new normals” and “birth pangs” and “bringing democracy to the Middle East.” Let it be said we have entered the darkness, from which light dare not enter.

Terrorist Cabal

The cabal, it must be understood, is comprised of pure blooded authoritarians, corporatist (fascists) tyrants that care not one ounce for the well-being of the population. To them we are but mere peasants, nothing but peons and pawns and patsies relegated to playing the grand game of geopolitical and greed-mongering chess, doing our part to advance the neocon Machiavelli wet dream of imperial hegemony. The death of 3,000 citizens means nothing to these monsters, much like the murder of 250,000 Iraqis or the death of 2,600 American soldiers. The Bush cabal is made up of madmen and monsters, incapable of living in reality or of understanding truth, yet tyrannical enough to create a new Pearl Harbor through the controlled demolition of the Twin Towers (not to mention WTC 7 and a strike on the Pentagon). They dwell in an infallible bubble of make believe and of unrealistic theories, a land of Kool-Aid drinkers and dependents of delusional cocktails.

The Bush cabal has no morals or scruples, preferring lies to truth, secrecy to transparency, life in a pitch black void over that in translucent light. They have no trouble murdering their own citizens to pursue and achieve their goals and ideology. They are authoritarians, tyrants more comfortable living in a police state than in an open society, inside their pores hating every facet of true democracy, for to them the will of the people should never be heeded. Democracy is a hindrance of governance, an uncomfortable principle that works to destroy their vision, though now made a charade for the masses to believe the system is as it has always been. The death of democracy and of the Constitution would send tears of joy running down their cheeks.

In their view citizens are incapable of making the right decision and should therefore be told what to think, how to act and who to follow and obey. The majority needs to be conditioned as to what to do and how to do it. To them the corporate media is but a tool of control and manipulation, a way to make good sheep and lemmings out of the citizenry, a loudspeaker to proclaim that the state is the only entity capable of protecting the nation, a disseminator of lies and half truths, a gatekeeper telling the people only what the cabal wants us to know.

The Bush cabal cares only about absolute power, hegemony, greed and wealth. They care nothing for American soldiers, all of whom are considered cannon fodder for the military industrial energy complex. Wars are fought not for defending “freedom and democracy,” which to them is nothing more than a catchy focus group catchphrase, rather to expand and defend the interests of American corporations, as well as to enrich the military industrial energy complex. After all, instability in the Middle East is great for energy corporations; the more instability the higher the price of a barrel of crude will be and the higher will thus be a gallon at the American pump. The cabal thinks in black and white, not in shades of grey; it makes policy based on ideology, not reality. It operates under the theory of controlled chaos, unleashing hell to get to an eventual heaven.

The cabal makes enormous profits at our expense, helping shrink our wallets while fattening theirs. The cabal supplies billions of dollars in military arms to the Middle East, and to the world, only to see nations declare war on each other, killing and murdering with our weapons. Human life and human rights, along with international law are but bumps in the road to total hegemony, to be sidestepped on the road to Empire. Civil rights and freedoms in America are contrary to the authoritarian dream; if it was up to them America would be under martial law and under severe police powers, our civil liberties curtailed severely, our freedoms eroded. In time they will inevitably get their wish; each year the threat to our liberties and freedoms is exacerbated, not by terrorists but by the Bush cabal.

For five years we have been told to look far and wide for so-called terrorists, across the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, given a magnifying glass into the Middle East. It is here, we are made to believe, where they hate us for our freedoms and our democracy, for our “grand” way of life, though certainly not for our occupations, undying support for Israel and brutal foreign policy. It is said they hate us for our democracy, yet we refuse to grant them the same freedoms. It is said they strike us for our open society, yet we exploit their lands, rape their women and subjugate their daily lives. For five years our minds have been distracted with the threats posed by Arabs and Muslims, most of which happen to live below the last remaining fields of oil. If the French or the Germans lived in the Middle East, they too would today be America’s enemy, our terrorist barbarians.

For five long years we alone have been responsible for sacrificing our civil liberties and our freedoms, not to mention our democracy, which in essence is today nothing but a charade, a banana republic façade exported to a first world nation. Our fear and cowardice has resulted in the loss of liberty at home and in warmongering escapades abroad, creating in Iraq the worst strategic disaster in the history of the nation. Our almost absurd over-reactions to bull manure infested terror warnings, nothing but control mechanisms implemented to remind us who is protecting us and who deserves our loyalty and our vote, make us the laughing stock of the world. Terror warnings laced in lies and manipulation should be questioned, not religiously followed. They should be understood for what they are, not feared like the end of the world. Terror warnings about dark-skinned Arabs and Muslims are but a ploy to control your thoughts and your lives, designed for you to place allegiance to the cabal, to distract you from the erosion of liberties or the disasters in the Middle East. They are, like 9/11, a figment of our imaginations, nightmares of our conditioned minds, stories meant to frighten us into giving away more of our freedoms and liberties. Sadly, however, these mechanisms seem to be working brilliantly.

All this time we have been looking to the Middle East for the dreaded terrorist, yet since 9/11 we should have been looking for terrorists within our own shores. It is the Bush corporatist and neocon cabal that is the real terrorist organization. It is they, a bunch of miscreants of the highest order, criminal minds addicted to power, wealth and greed, arrogant and monstrous in behavior, that are the cause of terror worldwide. It is they that have made our nation less safe, not more. It is they who are guilty of committing mass murder upon our shores and it is they who will not hesitate to murder many more if it suits their needs.

It is because of them that the so-called war on terror paralyzes and controls us. It is they that spawned it and continue nurturing it, carefully rearing it like a mother does a child, ever so proud of what it has become, looking forward to the greatness it can one day turn into. The war on terror is their brainchild, a creation designed to replicate its malevolent energy over and over, growing and expanding through the vicious cycle of hatred born and murder committed, repeated until a clash of cultures, civilizations and religions sustains and engorges it, creating the controlled chaos needed to satisfy the delusion of the Project for the New American Century.

The so-called war of terror is a figment of their imagination, now lingering in ours, a creation that has become a self-fulfilling prophesy. It was a war started by the cabal, a result of our foreign policy and our destruction of both people and land abroad, a vicious cycle that feeds itself more and more with each new death inflicted by our corporate controlled military. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, for every death or maiming the thirst for vengeance grows; for every brutal occupation calls for hatred and revenge arise. With every American made missile launched, artillery exploded, bullet released the war on terror is assured of new recruits, new reactions of opposite and intended consequences. This is the war on terror’s mantra, its slogan, the law created by the cabal so that it never ends, just as it never began. The war on terror is designed to last into perpetuity, for America always needs an enemy to quench its war culture thirst. It always needs war and enemies to cause fright among the populace, the easier to control millions. War means profit, wealth and the sustained viability of the economy. In America, war, and thus enemies, is good for business.

The war on terror is but an illusion, a concoction disseminated by the Bush cabal and its journalist hacks to control the population into submission, into forcing us to abandon the freedoms and democracy we once enjoyed. We are being frightened by the cabal of terrorists using the corporate media and government loudspeakers, our strength and courage evaporating with each new terror threat or warning, with each new sermon advocating still another war of choice. We are being used and abused, our lives transformed, slowly but surely, methodically creating a “new normal,” an American police state, an authoritarian system full of followers, full of yes-men and women, full of sheep and lemmings, unable to comprehend how we allowed our nation to become the reality of our nightmares.

We must open our eyes to the reality of the Bush cabal. They are the real terrorist organization. They are the murderers and the criminals, the destroyers of life and the butchers of the Middle East. They are preparing us for perpetual war, for a future devoid of security or freedom or democracy. The war on terror will not end; our troops will be in Iraq for decades to come; wars against Iran and Syria have been planned. There will be many more 9/11’s to come, some real and some concocted, yet the next one will undoubtedly open the doors to a perpetual police state, altering dramatically our way of life, making George Orwell roll in his grave. According to the cabal of terrorists, it is inevitable.

One more attack on our soil is all it will take for the bastion of democracy and freedom to turn into the cesspool of authoritarian rule. The cabal of terrorists is looking for an excuse, an opportunity. How many of us will die this time? How many of our children will be sent to the next war(s)? How many liberties will we have left? How many of our friends and neighbors will be made to disappear? Will we accept their rule, and continue fighting a charade, or will we finally put an end to this madness? Will we change our ways, or will we continue living like the sheep and lemmings we are being conditioned to become?

We must put a stop to the madness before the madness puts a stop to us. We must reclaim America from the claws of authoritarianism and corporatism. We must show we are not pawns or patsies in the games the neocons play. We must show we are brave and strong, not fearful and weak. They are few, we are many. Truth and fairness and justice are on our side; karma and malevolence on theirs. The time for indifference and passivity are over. Enough fear mongering and war making, enough terror threat manipulation. We must show that we do not hate, that we actually think for ourselves, that we seek peace and international harmony. Enough death and suffering has gone on in our name. America is being made the laughing stock of the world, hated like never before, stirring anger and boiling rage for all we allow to happen. Only this time, the peoples of the world no longer differentiate between the government and the people. We are all hated now. The time to take a stand is now, for if not now, when? We were once loved and admired, respected and an inspiration. Let not five years of disarray become a lifetime of disaster. We know who the real terrorists are. It is up to us to show them that their America is not our America. It is time we show them the door out of the country.

Their America is not our America, for we are the People of the World; they but the Scourge of Humanity. We are Peace and they are War, they are few and we are many, many more.

Manuel Valenzuela is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current events observer, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com. The novel is now available on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. We invite you to visit his blog at: Valenzuela’s Veritas
Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at:

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