Liar-In-Chief

I could barely make out Barack Obama’s Syria speech to the nation on my old car radio as I negotiated the narrow curves of Route 79 on the western banks of the Mississippi River in central Missouri last Tuesday night. What I could hear sounded very much like more of Obama’s by now standard if stunning arch-mendacity.

“To Take This Debate to Congress”

Looking at the speech transcript and video online[1] recently, my suspicions were richly confirmed. Speaking from the end of the same long red carpet where George W. Bush delivered his demented announcement of the invasion of Iraq, Obama claimed that he has turned to Congress for authorization to use force against Syria because “I’m…the President of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy” and “believe[s]…it [is] right, in the absence of a direct or imminent threat to our security, to take this debate to Congress.”

That is certainly a lie. He did no such thing in the case of Libya, subjected to a five-week U.S. bombing campaign (though it posed no “direct or imminent threat to [Americans’] security”) because he didn’t have to, politically. This time it’s different, as the liberalMiddle East historian Juan Cole has explained: “Obama did not need Congress in the case of Libya. He had the Arab League, the UN Security Council, and NATO…But [he has] became more and more isolated [on Syria]. The Arab League declined to call for intervention… Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and other Arab countries forthrightly denounced the idea of foreign military intervention in Syria, a very different stance than many of them took in 2011 with regard to Libya…Then NATO declined to get involved, with Poland, Belgium, and others expressing reluctance…Then the British Parliament followed suit.” Failure to garner any meaningful fig leaf of formal international support is why Obama ran to Congress this time.

“I Possess the Authority”

Obama claimed he has gone to Congress “even though I possess the authority to order military strikes.” The former “liberal” constitutional law professor with a degree from Harvard Law certainly knows that the U.S. Constitution grants war-making authority in Congress alone. He should know further that it is thoroughly criminal under international law for him to attack any sovereign nation in the absence of any direct or imminent threat to the U.S.

Claims of Humanitarian Concern

Obama’s claim to be moved to act by civilian deaths in Syria, citing the horrors of “children writhing in pain, and going still on a cold hospital floor.” This claim is contradicted by the grim determination with which he has regularly murdered innocent civilians (including large numbers of women and children) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere – “collateral damage” in the dirty global war on/of terror he inherited from Cheney-Bush and then expanded. One horrific example – neither the first nor the last among many – occurred in the May of 2009. That’s when U.S. air-strikes killed 140 civilians in Bola Boluk, a village in western Afghanistan’s Farah Province. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives were children. Just 22 were males 18 years or older. Villagers brought tractor trailers full of the pieces of human bodies to the provincial governor’s office to prove that the casualties had occurred. “Everyone at the governor’s office was crying, watching that shocking scene,” one observer reported.”[2]

The initial response of the Obama administration and Pentagon to this appalling incident (one of many mass civilian-butchering U.S. aerial killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world under Obama) was to absurdly blame the civilian deaths on “Taliban grenades.” Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “regret” about the loss of innocent life, but the administration refused to issue an apology or acknowledge U.S. responsibility for the blasting apart of civilian bodies in Farah Province.[3]

The matter was quickly dropped and forgotten, sent down George Orwell’s memory hole, with deep media complicity, as the Pentagon wrote checks to the Afghan government to give families a couple thousand dollars per corpse. The U.S. subsequently conducted a dubious “investigation” that reduced the civilian body count drastically and blamed the Taliban for putting civilians in the way of U.S. bombs.[4]

There have been many crimes like Bola Boluk under Obama. People who command glass houses of a sociopathic, mass-murderous empire should not expect to be taken seriously when throw “humanitarian” stones at other butchers.

If Obama is so dismayed by the spectacle of a government “killing its own people,” why is he not calling for missile strikes against the military dictatorship in Egypt, which recently slaughtered hundreds if not thousands of civilians to stop popular protests against the regime? Is it okay to kill your own civilians as long as you are a U.S.-allied regime and/or do the killing with “conventional” weapons?

But why does Obama think we should believe that he can advance humanitarian goals by lobbying cruise missiles at anyone? Two days after Obama’s speech, the New York Times published an Opinion-Editorial from Russian president Vladimir Putin. “The potential strike by the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition from many countries and major political and religious leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders,” Putin reasonably observed. “A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.”[5]

Selective History and Terrible Weapons

In his discussion of the past horrors of chemical weapons (by European powers during World War I and by the Nazi holocaust) last Tuesday night, Obama deleted the United States’ vicious deployment of dioxin during the Vietnam War. That example of chemical warfare caused an explosion of birth defects among other terrible results in Southeast Asia. The president also failed to mention that Washington helped Saddam Hussein use nerve gas against Iranian soldiers and the U.S. Marines used white phosphorous in their massive assaults on the civilian population of Fallujah, Iraq in November of 2004.

Will Obama threaten Tel Aviv with cruise missiles for using white phosphorous against Palestinian civilians in Gaza? Of course not: the Palestinians are officially unworthy victims, like the East Timorese and countless others who have been killed and tortured by governments that are allied with the inherently good United States and therefore officially incapable (like the U.S.) of crimes against humanity.

Obama painted out Syria as a rogue state because it has not signed a treaty against chemical weapons like “189 governments that represent 98 percent of humanity.” He did not mention that Syria’s neighbors Syria and Egypt (both U.S. allies) have also not signed the treaty.

Obama had nothing to say, of course, about the even greater dreadfulness of nuclear and radioactive ordnance. The U.S. stands alone in having incinerated and poisoned civilians with atomic weapons – quite unnecessarily in August of 1945. And thanks to America’s deployment of depleted uranium in Iraq, the toxic legacy of the U.S. attacks on Fallujah was worse was that of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An epidemic of cancer, leukemia, and birth defects quickly followed in Fallujah.[5A]

“We Know the Assad Regime was Responsible”

“We know,” Obama said, “the Assad regime was responsible” for the Syrian chemical weapons attack of August 21, 2013. Not so. The proof offered by the president, a former lawyer, was hardly impressive. It contained nothing remotely like a smoking gun. Obama made no attempt to disprove other theories of what might have happened, including some German journalists’ finding that the attack was conducted by a rogue Syrian officer acting without Assad’s approval. Nor did he address what left commentator Glen Ford rightly calls “credible reports (everybody’s reports are more credible than the Americans) that rebels under U.S. allied control were told to prepare to go on the offensive following an American retaliation to chemical attack that would be blamed on Assad’s forces.”[6]

“No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria,” Putin wrote in his Times editorial: “But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with [Islamic] fundamentalists.” That is a reasonable judgment.

Nobody should doubt the monstrosity of the Assad regime, but Obama’s proof of Assad’s culpability for the attack in questions amounts pretty much to this: “because I say so.”

“These Things Happened:” The Memory Hole

“When dictators commit atrocities, they depend upon the world to look the other way until those horrifying pictures fade from memory,” Obama said. “But these things happened. The facts cannot be denied.”

An interesting thing to hear from an American president! “From the end of World War Two through the present, the U.S. Empire has caused “the extinction and suffering of countless human beings. The United States,” William Blum Pilger noted eight years ago, “attempted to overthrow fifty governments, many of them democracies, and to crush thirty popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process, twenty-five countries were bombed, causing the loss of several million lives and the despair of millions more.”[7]

The leading American imperial crimes include a massive U.S. assault on the peasant nation of Vietnam – an epic attack that killed 3 million Indochinese – and the illegal invasion of oil-rich Mesopotamia, whose terrible human consequences (including at least 2 million Iraqis dying prematurely) remain essentially unmentionable in “mainstream” (dominant) U.S. media. Chemical weapons were deployed in both of these grand imperial transgressions.

Over these decades, the U.S. has been what Noam Chomsky calls “ a rogue state, the leading rogue state, radically violating international law, refusing to accept international convention” and even maintaining “self-authorization to commit genocide.”[8]

Is it any wonder that, as Putin noted in the Times, “Millions around the world …see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us’” (emphasis added).

“The Anchor of Global Security”

There should be little surprise that knowledgeable observers the world over cringe and/or roll their eyes when U.S. presidents say things like this, from Obama’s Tuesday night address:”My fellow Americans, for nearly seven decades, the United States has been the anchor of global security…The burdens of leadership are often heavy, but the world is a better place because we have borne them” (emphasis added).

That is a blatant lie, as Obama surely knows. Tell it to the survivors of the millions who have been snuffed out by rogue state America, consistently identified by the global populace for many years as the leading threat to peace and security in the world. Tell it to the people of Chile. Two days ago they commemorated the 40th anniversary of their 9/11 – the September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of socialist president Salvador Allende. The coup was assisted and supported by Washington, determined to install a vicious military dictatorship that executed thousands of leftists and others and became a leading center of international terror. The U.S. would not permit the continued existence of democratic socialist government in “our hemisphere.”

What would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., say about Obama’s claim that the U.S. has been “the anchor of global security” since World War II? In 1967, well within the timeframe of Obama’s sweeping historical claim, King identified the U.S. as “the leading purveyor of violence in the world today.” The Vietnamese, King said, “must see Americans as strange liberators” as they “languish under our bombs….as we he herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps. They know they must move or be destroyed by bombs. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops [with chemical weapons]. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one ‘Vietcong’-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them – mostly children…” [9]

Looking at the historical literature on the Cuban Missile Crisis and subsequent moment of supreme nuclear danger, a living King (who would be 84 today had he not been assassinated or perhaps executed inside “the anchor of global security” exactly one year to the day after publicly declaring his opposition to the Vietnam War at the Riverside Church in New York City) today might also like to mention (among other things) the remarkable degree to which the Ahabs of Washington have been willing to risk global thermonuclear war (very barely averted in October 1962) in their quest for unchallenged global supremacy.[10]

“It Never Happened”

But in the U.S, and indeed across much of the West, the record of ongoing, mass-murderous American criminality is airbrushed out of the official history and mass culture. It is tossed down Orwell’s memory hole, consistent with Big Brother’s dictum in Nineteen Eighty Four: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” As Harold Pinter noted in his biting acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, the reigning Western cultural authorities behave as if U.S. crimes simply did not occur. When it comes to America’s transgression against civilized norms and international law, “nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening,” Pinter added, “it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”[11] Dominant U.S.-led Western cultural codes mandate that the only victims meriting acknowledgement and compassion are those assaulted by officially designated enemies. The larger number victimized by the U.S. and its clients and allies (e.g., the Palestinians suffering under Israeli occupation and apartheid) do not qualify for sympathy or even existence. They don’t exist. The crimes against them didn’t take place.

Detour and Lost Cool

Eleven minutes into his war speech, Obama had to strangely shift gears and acknowledge the need to delay his hoped-for war vote in light of Russia and Syria’s last-minute proposal to demolish Syria’s chemical weapons under international supervision and control. He tried to save militaristic face by attributing the Russian and Syrian move to his threatened use of force. He seemed to expect his listeners to preposterously believe that a peaceful, diplomatic, and international solution is his idea.  Obama wants us to think that the United Nations route was his preferred path all along.

That’s nonsense. Obama is an aggressive commander of a rogue military state that prefers force and unilateral action in the names of unimpeded hegemony and “American exceptionalism.” He and many of his fellow fake-humanitarian cruise missile liberal imperialists have been itching for a bigger war in the Middle East, one that will let him attack the great regional enemy Iran and wrap the remainder of his lame-duck presidency in the splendor of war-fed patriotism.

Like the British Parliament’s vote against attacking Syria, Putin and Assad’s peace gambit is a great humiliation for Obama. It knocked more stuffing out of his failing fake-humanitarian effort to rally a reluctant, war-weary citizenry plagued by massive domestic problems (including remarkably durable “homeland” poverty and unemployment alongside stunning, New Gilded Age levels of inequality that have only increased under Obama’s supposedly progressive presidency) behind another expensive imperial campaign.

Expect the defeated president to do his best to get the nation back on a unilateral war footing. For now, he has been defeated not simply by other politicians but also by public opinion – by the citizenry in whose name he claims to speak. Imagine that. Along the way, Barack “The Empire’s New Clothes” Obama may well have lost his public cool, the swagger in his step, once and for all. Syria may prove his undoing –the moment when the outwardly nice and smooth-talking “leader” is most clearly revealed for what he really is: a cold-blooded sociopath and pathological liar. That’s long overdue, but its better late than never.

Paul Street () is the author of many books, including The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (2010), Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008), Crashing the Tea Party (2011), and They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm Publishers, forthcoming in January 2014). 

Selected Notes

1. ;
2. Carlotta Gall and Taimoor Shah, “Civilian Deaths Imperil Support for Afghan War,” New York Times, May 6, 2009.
3. Gall and Shah, “Civilian Deaths;”
4. Paul Street, “Niebuhr Lives, Civilians Die in the Age of Obama,” ZNet (June 15, 2009), read athttp://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21701. By contrast around the same time in 2009, there was a brief media frenzy over a very different occurrence, enough to elicit a full apology and to fire a White House official. The problem was that the White House had scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-soot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people below of 9/11. SeeChristina Boyle, “President Obama Calls Air Force One Flyover ‘Mistake’ After Low-Flying Plane Terrifies New York,” New York Daily News, April 28, 2009; Michel Muskai, “Presidential Plane’s Photo-Op Over New York Coast as Much as $357,000,” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2009; Peter Nicholas, “Louis Caldera Resigns Over Air Force One Flyover Fiasco,” Los Angeles Time, May 9, 2009.
5. Vladimir Putin, A Plea for Caution From Russia,” New York Times, September 12, 2013.
5A. Patrick Cockburn, “Toxic Legacy of U.S. Assault on Fallujah ‘Worse Than Hiroshima,” The Independent, July 24, 2010,http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/toxic-legacy-of-us-assault-on-fallujah-worse-than-hiroshima-2034065.html; “Fallujah More Radioactive Than Hiroshima,” RT, uploaded on July 29, 2010, . A useful history of U.S. use and encouragement of chemical and biological weapons at home and abroad can be found in William Blum,Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Monroe. ME: Common Courage, 2005), 136-160.
6. Glen Ford, “Obama’s Humiliating Defeat,” Black Agenda Report (September 11, 2013),http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/obama%E2%80%99s-humiliating-defeat
7. Blum, Rogue State, 1-2. Honduras and Libya must (at the very least) be added to the list of countries where the U.S. has acted to overthrow governments since Blum wrote. Libya and Somalia must (at the least) added to the list of countries bombed by the U.S.
8 Noam Chomsky, “Instead of Illegal Threat to Syria, U.S. Should Back Chemical Weapons Ban in All Nations,” Democracy Now! (September 11, 2013), http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/11/chomsky_instead_of_illegal_threat_to
9. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam – a Time to Break the Silence” (Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967), audio recording at 
10. Noam Chomsky, Address to Left Forum, New York City, 2013, 
11.Quoted in John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (New York: Nation Books, 2007), 4.
Via Z Net

Has Washington, D.C., Become A Criminal Entity?

I recently read a column by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts that was so good I wish I had written it. First, a little bit about Roberts. This is from his official web site: “Dr. Roberts has held academic appointments at Virginia Tech, Tulane University, University of New Mexico, Stanford University where he was Senior Research Fellow in the Hoover Institution, George Mason University where he had a joint appointment as professor of economics and professor of business administration, and Georgetown University where he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy in the Center for Strategic and International Studies.”

His bio continues: “Dr. Roberts was associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service. He was a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States.”

And one more paragraph about Paul Craig Roberts: “President Reagan appointed Dr. Roberts Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and he was confirmed in office by the U.S. Senate. From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy. After leaving the Treasury, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Commerce.”

See Paul’s web site at:

Paul Craig Roberts

I realize that anyone who dares to contradict accepted politically correct dogma is demonized as being “radical,” “extremist,” or racist,” and some people have tried to characterize Dr. Roberts in that vein. But it should be obvious to any honest and objective person that Paul Craig Roberts has one of the most distinguished resumes of anyone in America today.

Paul recently wrote a column entitled, “Humanity Is Drowning In Washington’s Criminality.” I realize it is difficult for most Americans to conceive the idea that their federal government could actually be criminal, but the case Roberts makes in his column cannot be tossed aside as the ranting of some right-wing nut (as if there are no left-wing nuts).

Roberts writes, “Americans will soon be locked into an unaccountable police state unless US Representatives and Senators find the courage to ask questions and to sanction the executive branch officials who break the law, violate the Constitution, withhold information from Congress, and give false information about their crimes against law, the Constitution, the American people and those in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Guantanamo, and elsewhere. Congress needs to use the impeachment power that the Constitution provides and cease being subservient to the lawless executive branch. The US faces no threat that justifies the lawlessness and abuse of police powers that characterize the executive branch in the 21st century.

“Impeachment is the most important power of Congress. Impeachment is what protects the citizens, the Constitution, and the other branches of government from abuse by the executive branch. If the power to remove abusive executive branch officials is not used, the power ceases to exist. An unused power is like a dead letter law. Its authority disappears. By acquiescing to executive branch lawlessness, Congress has allowed the executive branch to place itself above law and to escape accountability for its violations of law and the Constitution.

“National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper blatantly lied to Congress and remains in office. Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency, has also misled Congress, and he remains in office. Attorney General Holder avoids telling Congress the truth on just about every subject, and he also remains in office. The same can be said for President Obama, one of the great deceivers of our time, who is so adverse to truth that truth seldom finds its way out of his mouth.

“If an American citizen lies to a federal investigator, even if not under oath, the citizen can be arrested, prosecuted, and sent to prison. Yet, these same federal personnel can lie to Congress and to citizens with impunity. Whatever the American political system is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with accountable government. In Amerika [Roberts’ spelling] no one is accountable but citizens, who are accountable not only to law but also to unaccountable charges for which no evidence is required.”

Roberts is one hundred percent right. While everyone seems to be caught up in debating all kinds of remedies to Washington’s ills, hardly anyone seems to notice that the power to put a stop to all of this unconstitutional (not to mention criminal) conduct on behalf of the executive branch of the federal government rests squarely in the laps of the 535 men and women who comprise the US House of Representatives and US Senate. Granted, impeachment has been seldom used by the legislative branches in Washington, but what was that again about desperate times calling for desperate measures? Besides, impeachment is not a desperate measure; it is a constitutionally-required measure. When the executive branch of the federal government is run amuck in foul play, it is the duty of Congress to protect both the American citizenry and the US Constitution.

Roberts rightly asks, “The question demanding to be asked is: What is the purpose of the domestic surveillance of all Americans? This is surveillance out of all proportion to the alleged terrorist threat. The US Constitution is being ignored and domestic law violated. Why? Does the US government have an undeclared agenda for which the ‘terrorist threat’ is a cover?

“What is this agenda? Whose agenda is more important than the US Constitution and the accountability of government to law? No citizen is secure unless government is accountable to the Constitution and to law. It is an absurd idea that any American is more threatened by terrorism than by unaccountable government that can execute them, torture them, and throw them in prison for life without due process or any accountability whatsoever. Under Bush/Obama, the US has returned to the unaccountable power of caesars, czars, and autocrats.”

Roberts is exactly right. The modern-day burgeoning police state, under the rubric of “national security,” is the biggest threat to our liberties since the British marched on Lexington and Concord in 1775. And, unfortunately, when it comes to the destruction of civil liberties, Republicans are as culpable as Democrats.

Roberts writes, “American conservatives regard civil liberties as mere excuses for liberal judges to coddle criminals and terrorists. Never expect a conservative Republican, or more than two or three of them, to defend your civil liberty. Republicans simply do not believe in civil liberty. Democrats cannot conceive that Obama–the first black president in office, a member of an oppressed minority–would not defend civil liberty. This combination of disinterest and denial is why the US has become a police state.

“Civil liberty has few friends in government, the political parties, law schools, bar associations, or the federal judiciary. Consequently, no citizen is secure. Recently, a housewife researched online for pressure cookers looking for the best deal. Her husband was searching for a backpack. The result was that a fully armed SWAT team appeared at the door demanding to search the premises and to have questions answered.”

When it comes to creating the modern-day police state, the left-right paradigm that most people are consumed with means absolutely nothing. NOTHING! As Roberts notes, for the most part, both Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Christians and heathens seem to see nothing wrong with the dismantlement of the Bill of Rights if the stated reason is to keep us “secure.”

Beyond that, so many Americans seem to have the attitude, “I don’t care if the government is spying on me; I haven’t done anything wrong.” To this, Roberts writes, “I am always amazed when someone says: ‘I haven’t done anything wrong. I have nothing to fear.’ If you have nothing to fear from the government, why did the Founding Fathers put the protections in the Constitution that Bush and Obama have stripped out? Unlike the Founding Fathers who designed our government to protect the citizens, the American sheeple [Roberts’ word] trust the government to their own demise.”

And exactly who are the real terrorists, anyway? Roberts answers:

“Terrorism seldom comes from outside. The source almost always is the government in power. The Czarist secret police set off bombs in order to blame and arrest labor agitators. The Nazis burned down the Reichstag in order to decimate the communists and assume unaccountable power in the name of ‘public safety.’ An alleged terrorist threat is a way of using fear to block popular objection to the exercise of arbitrary government power.

“In order to be ‘safe from terrorists,’ the US population, with few objections, has accepted the demise of their civil liberties, such as habeas corpus, which reaches back centuries to Magna Carta as a constraint on government power. How, then, are they safe from their government? Americans today are in the same position as the English prior to the Great Charter of 1215. Americans are no longer protected by law and the Constitution from government tyranny.

“The reason the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution was to make citizens safe from their government. If citizens allow the government to take away the Constitution, they might be safe from foreign terrorists, but they are no longer safe from their government.

“Who do you think has more power over you, foreign terrorists or ‘your’ government?”

Roberts continues:

“The constitutional principle of freedom of speech is being redefined as treason, as aiding an undefined enemy, and as seeking to overthrow the government by casting aspersions on its motives and revealing its secret misdeeds. The power-mad inhabitants of Washington have brought the US so close to Gestapo Germany and Stalinist Russia that it is no longer funny. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to see the difference.

“The neoconservatives have declared that Americans are the ‘exceptional’ and ‘indispensable people.’ Yet, the civil liberties of Americans have declined the more ‘exceptional’ and ‘indispensable’ that Americans become. We are now so exceptional and indispensable that we no longer have any rights.

“And neither does the rest of the world. Neoconservatism has created a new dangerous American nationalism. Neoconservatives have given Washington a monopoly on right and endowed its military aggressions with a morality that supersedes the Geneva Conventions and human rights. Washington, justified by its ‘exceptionalism,’ has the right to attack populations in countries with which Washington is not at war, such as Pakistan and Yemen. Washington is using the cover of its ‘exceptionalism’ to murder people in many countries.”

Roberts also rightly observes, “Washington is always morally right, whatever it does, and those who report its crimes are traitors who, stripped of their coddling by civil liberties, are locked away and abused until they confess to their crimes against the state. Anyone who tells the truth, such as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, are branded enemies of the state and are ruthlessly persecuted.”

See Paul Craig Roberts’ column at:

Humanity Is Drowning In Washington’s Criminality

Sadly, everything Dr. Roberts stated above is absolutely true.

Many previous administrations most certainly pushed the envelope of federal usurpation of power from time to time, but the administrations of G.W. Bush and Barack Obama have (and are) literally taken America to the very precipice of a police state. With the advent of the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the Military Commissions Act, the NDAA, USNORTHCOM, etc., all of the laws and military apparatus which would be necessary to enact a police state within the continental United States are in place.

Plus, grassroots Americans throughout the country are abuzz with both rumors and truthful eyewitness testimony to the strange movement of military supplies and personnel and the construction of large, unmarked and undeclared facilities. All over America, large containment-looking facilities are being built. Most of these structures are large, fenced (with the fences designed to keep people IN not OUT), in rural areas, near train tracks, and are completely unmarked and inaccessible.

Granted, for every substantiated fact there seems to be a dozen meritless rumors out there. I will absolutely give you that. But, there are simply too many reports by extremely credible eyewitnesses (including military and police personnel) to simply ignore as mere conspiracy theories. Concerned federal agents (yes, MANY federal agents love freedom and the Constitution just as much as we do) continue to leak information regarding unusual training, equipment purchases, procedural instructions, etc., to their fellow citizens.

Could some of this strange and unconfirmed information be government propaganda and disinformation designed to embarrass and marginalize patriot-minded citizens? Absolutely. But the old adage is still true, “Where there is smoke, there is fire.” And right now, this is a HUGE amount of smoke.

Paul Craig Roberts has spent a lifetime in the upper echelons of economics, journalism, and politics. His assertion that Washington, D.C., is awash in “criminality” cannot be taken lightly.

Are Most Diseases Caused By The Medical System?

I do not want to pretend that this is an impartial investigation. Instead I am now fully convinced that most diseases are indeed caused by the medical system, and in the following I want to state my reasons for this conclusion.

Increasingly over the years my health beliefs have been turned around. I started out by working as a biochemist and toxicologist in university medical departments fully believing that all these chronic and incurable diseases are indeed incurable and generally of unknown origin, but that pharmaceutical drugs made life easier for patients and often were even curative. My re-education started after immigrating to New Zealand and learning about natural healing and living; this made me realize that disease is mainly caused by unnatural living conditions and can be overcome by natural methods of living and healing.

While I learned about the harmful nature of drug treatment, I was still thinking of it as being ineffective and causing side-effects rather than as a main cause of our diseases. Diseases caused by medical treatment are called iatrogenic diseases. The total number of iatrogenic deaths in the USA for 2001 is estimated to be 783,936. These were due to fatal drug reactions, medical error and unnecessary medical and surgical procedures. With this, the medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. In comparison the 2001 heart disease death rate was 699,697 and the annual cancer death rate 553,251 (1).

This is also the reason why it is so beneficial for patients when doctors go on strike. Statistics show that whenever there was a strike by doctors, the death rate in the affected population fell dramatically. In 1976 the death rate fell by 35 per cent in Bogotá, Colombia. In Los Angeles County,California, it fell by 18 per cent during a strike in the same year, while in Israel it fell by 50 per cent during a strike in 1973. Only once before was there a similar drop in the death rate in Israel and that was during another doctors’ strike 20 years earlier. After each strike the death rate jumped again to its normal level (2).

However these figures of iatrogenic deaths do not take into account iatrogenic diseases from the long-term harm done by medical treatments where patients survive but with a chronic disease. My real awakening to this problem started when I became aware of the story of Orion Truss who discovered the Candidiasis-causing potential of antibiotics.

Dr Orian Truss

In 1953 Dr Orian Truss discovered the devastating effects of antibiotics in an Alabama (USA) hospital (3). During a ward round Truss was intrigued by a gaunt, apparently elderly man who was obviously dying. However, he was only in his forties and in hospital for four months. No specialist had been able to make a diagnosis. Out of curiosity Truss asked the patient when be was last completely well.

The man answered that he was well until six months before when he had cut his finger. He had received antibiotics for this. Shortly afterwards he developed diarrhoea and his health deteriorated. Truss had seen before how antibiotics cause diarrhoea. It was known that Candida was opportunistic and thrived in debilitated patients, but now Truss wondered if it might not be the other way round, that Candida actually caused the debilitated condition.

He had read that potassium iodide solution could be used to treat Candida infestation of the blood. So he put the patient on six to eight drops ofLugol’s solution four times a day for 3 weeks and soon the patient was again completely well.

Soon afterwards he had a female patient with a stuffy nose, a throbbing headache, vaginitis and severe depression. To his amazement all her problems immediately cleared with Candida treatment. Some time later he saw a female patient who had been schizophrenic for six years with hundreds of electroshock treatments and massive drug dosages. He started treating the woman for sinus allergies with a Candida remedy. Soon she had recovered mentally and physically, and remained well.

From then on he treated his patients against Candida at the slightest indication of its presence. Many of his patients made remarkable recoveries from most unusual conditions, including menstrual problems, hyperactivity, learning disabilities, autism, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis and auto-immune diseases such as Crohn’s disease and lupus erythematosus.

Every experienced naturopath can relate similar success stories. Also some alternative medical practitioners have realized the curative potential of anti-Candida therapy, as for instance Dr William Crook who wrote several books about the successful treatment of allergies and hyperactive children (4).

The Antibiotic Syndrome

Candidiasis is not the only side-effect of antibiotic treatment, and antibiotics are not the only drugs that cause such problems. Drugs used in chemotherapy, anti-inflammatory steroidal drugs and other long-term drug therapies tend to kill or suppress the natural intestinal bacteria, and yeast, parasites and harmful bacteria start taking over. This is then called dysbiosis. Most patients receive such drugs in hospitals and can be expected todevelop systemic Candida overgrowth as a result.

Our natural intestinal flora, mainly based on lactobacteria, not only helps to digest and absorb food, it also protects us against ingested harmful bacteria that otherwise may cause food poisoning. With a healthy intestinal flora millions of salmonella bacteria may be needed to cause an infection but with dysbiosis only tens of salmonella would be required.

With chronic dysbiosis the intestinal wall becomes inflamed, causing ulcers, appendicitis, malabsorption and Crohn’s disease, and as the intestinal membrane erodes we develop multiple food allergies, arthritis and autoimmune diseases. In addition to Candida also other pathogens and parasites now invade the bloodstream and various organs. With live cell analysis natural therapists can see and show their patients the fungi in their blood. This invasion greatly weakens the immune system so that people now become susceptible to frequent or chronic infections. Commonly this is then treated with more antibiotics, which continues to intensify the symptoms.

Actually, the problem is not with the antibiotics. You can take a course if you feel it is needed, provided that you take a fungicide, such as fresh garlic, at the same time, and have some probiotics after the antibiotic and before you ingest any carbohydrates. This will prevent most diseases that are caused by the careless medical method of using antibiotics. For more details see Candida and the Antibiotic Syndrome.

Autoimmune Diseases and Asthma

Autoimmune diseases, including psoriasis, lupus erythematosus and pancreatitis, have been linked to dysbiosis. When remedies are given that bind bacterial endotoxins, these conditions usually improve. In addition autoimmune diseases have been shown to be linked to mycoplasmas ornanobacteria which start to develop from diseased red blood cells in the presence of toxic chemicals and systemic Candida. The weaker our immune system becomes, the more these mycoplasms start to develop into bacterial and finally fungal forms. They have been found in all autoimmune diseases, cancers and AIDS (5).

Antibiotics are also a major contributing cause of asthma. Children who received broad-spectrum antibiotics were about 9 times more likely to suffer from asthma (6). A recent research paper confirmed dysbiosis as a main cause of asthma (7)

In the 1980’s New Zealand had the highest rate of asthma deaths in the world. This was drastically reduced when in 1991 the inhaler drug Fenoterolwas banned as it caused a 13 times higher risk of dying (8). This reduction in the asthma death rate was generally hailed as a great triumph for medical science. Other studies revealed that asthmatics using more than one bronchodilator inhaler a month had a fifty-fold increased risk of suffering a fatal asthma attack.

In addition to asthma, I also see the combination of pasteurized cow’s milk with antibiotic-induced dysbiosis in babies and infants as the main cause of their frequent infections, glue ear and greatly contributing to cot or crib death. Because health authorities insist on pasteurizing milk, and doctors prescribe antibiotics without the most basic precautions, I regard asthma and most childhood infections as predominantly iatrogenic diseases.

In the ‘good old days’ people ingested a lot of lactic acid fermented foods and raw milk products that replenished our ‘good’ bacteria, and because antibiotics had not been invented, dysbiosis and therefore chronic diseases were rare. Instead people mainly died from acute infections due to unhygienic living conditions, and in the slums also from malnutrition.

Staphylococcus aureus or golden staph causes serious infections in hospital patients. It has been found that not only golden staph but also other infections are greatly potentized when they occur combined with Candida overgrowth. As Candida overgrowth is a natural outcome of the standard hospital treatment, it is easy to see why golden staph is so deadly in hospitals.

A similar picture emerges with AIDS. People do not die from the AIDS virus but from Candida or fungal-potentized bacterial and mycoplasmainfections. The end stage of AIDS is the same as the end stage of cancer. It is called cachexia, a wasting condition mainly caused by fungal overgrowth. Lugol’s iodine solution and other systemic fungicides should do wonders for it. Presently also MMS, a 28% solution of sodium chlorite, is gaining acceptance as an effective antimicrobial remedy (see http://miraclemineral.org).

All of this shows that antibiotic-induced dysbiosis and Candida are not isolated and relatively harmless problems as the medical profession prefers to believe, but rather the underlying cause of most of our modern diseases.

 Cancer and Leukemia

One hundred years ago the rate of cancer was very low. I have no doubt that the phenomenal increase in the use of agricultural and industrial chemicals as well as pharmaceutical drugs has greatly accelerated the increase in the rate of cancer, and there is also a link to the consumption of sugar.  Even stronger is the link to dysbiosis and Candida.

Chemotherapy commonly leads to systemic Candida infections, which greatly limit the success rate of the treatment. Long-term follow-up studies show that children develop 18 times more secondary malignant tumors later in life, girls face a 75 times higher risk of breast cancer by the time they are 40 (9), while the risk of developing leukemia after chemotherapy for ovarian cancer increased 21-fold. Also other tumors commonly develop after treating malignancies with chemotherapy (10). A main problem appears to be the development of deep or systemic Candida infections shortly after starting chemotherapy (11).

Only recently have oncologists started to acknowledge what patients called “chemo-brain”, a distressing loss of memory and other cognitive functions.  Psychiatrists have now found that the conventional treatment of cancer causes serious depression in 15 to 25 percent of patients. “The depression itself can often be worse than the disease” they say (12). Brain fog and depression are common with systemic Candida.

All of this shows that chemotherapy tends to cause leukemia and cancer many years later mainly as a result of dysbiosis and systemic Candida. The reason for the widespread use of chemotherapy despite its lack of effectiveness, severe side effects, and long-term cancer promotion can be seen in the fact that private-practice oncologists (in the US) typically derive two-thirds of their income from selling chemotherapy to patients (13).

This chemotherapy connection makes it very likely that dysbiosis and systemic Candida can also cause cancer and leukemia when they are caused as a result of antibiotic treatment. The rate of cancer really accelerated only after the use of antibiotics became widespread.

There is also more direct evidence that Candida and other fungi are a cause of leukemia. Meinolf Karthaus, MD, reported several children with leukemia going into remission upon receiving antifungal remedies for their ‘secondary’ fungal infections (14). In his lifetime work Milton White, MD, was able to find fungal spores in every sample of cancer tissue he studied (15).

Fungal infections have been diagnosed and treated as leukemia, and leukemia has disappeared on grain-free diets, presumably because of the high content of mycotoxins in grains (16).

The Italian oncologist Dr. Tullio Simincini claims a success rate of up to 90% by treating cancer as a fungus. He infuses tumors with sodium bicarbonate solution and recommends taking bicarbonate in water to get rid of gastro-intestinal tumors (17).

Recently I received a personal communication that a large stomach tumor had unexpectantly shrunk after swallowing some mouthwash for a few weeks for a different problem. The main ingredient of this mouthwash was benzoic acid, a strong fungicide that inhibits the metabolism of fungal cells. Cancer cells have the same fungal-type metabolism which thrives on high levels of glucose and insulin, and they may therefore be regarded as a kind of fungal cells.

While the work of the German Dr Ryke Geerd Hamer (18) shows that emotional shock is a major trigger for the development of cancer, a weak immune system as caused by intestinal dysbiosis, systemic Candidiasis, toxic chemicals, and root canal treatments appears to be an essential co-factor. After all, a century ago people must have had a similar number of emotional shocks as at present, but cancer was very rare. Conversely, there are lots of people with dysbiosis and root canals that do not have cancer, but add emotional shock, and voilà!

Root Canals

Root-canal filled teeth are a variation of the theme of intestinal dysbiosis. They, too, appear to be a major contributing factor in many health problems, not only cancer but also heart disease, arthritis, kidney disease and auto-immune diseases. This is due to microbes that multiply in the multitude of tiny canals or tubules in the dentine and gradually leach out into the lymph system. Even normally harmless microbes become very dangerous and more virulent and toxic under the anaerobic conditions in dead teeth.

Dr Weston Price (19), a former Director of Research for the American Dental Association, observed that the removal of root-filled teeth from patients with kidney or heart disease would in most cases lead to an improvement. When he then inserted a removed root-filled tooth under the skin of a rabbit it would die within 2 days. When he implanted normal teeth there was no adverse health effect. In some experiments he implanted the same fragments of root-filled teeth in succession under the skins of up to 100 rabbits and they all died within 2 weeks of the same disease that the human donor had!

Dr Price conducted about 5,000 experiments over 25 years. He did not find a reliable method to disinfect dead teeth and make them safe. His research has been suppressed, and if at all mentioned by our dental associations then they are described as “dated” because this research was conducted and published over 70 years ago but it has never been repeated or otherwise investigated, or root canals shown to be safe.

The main argument for their supposed safety is that millions of people have them and are still alive many years later. The question of root canals causing widespread degenerative diseases is not discussed or researched. Price found that about 30% of individuals have such a strong immune system that they do not develop problems from root canals until they become old but the remaining 70% develop problems much sooner.

I regard root canals, even more so then intestinal dysbiosis, as a major cause of autoimmune diseases. In 1993 George E. Meinig, DDS, a formerUS root canal specialist, re-published the dental research of Dr Price in a popular version, and included his own experiences (20).

Iatrogenic Heart Attacks

One hundred years ago heart attacks were almost unknown despite diets generally being high in saturated fats. The ascent of heart attacks began with the pasteurization of milk and the use of chlorine to kill bacteria in public water supplies. This began around 1900 and was generally accepted in Western countries in the l920’s. From 1920 onwards the explosive increase in the incidence of cardiovascular disease and fatal heart attacks began, but only in countries that chlorinated their water supplies. These diseases remained unknown, for instance, in Africa, China, Japan, and other parts of ASIA. However, when Japanese citizens immigrated to Hawaii where water was chlorinated, they suffered the same rate of heart attacks as the Americans, and the black population in the US have the average US rate of heart attacks but not their brothers in Africa. Inhabitants of the non-chlorinated Roseto in Pennsylvania remained free of heart attacks unless they moved to a chlorinated area (21).

Some of the chlorine reacts with organic impurities in water to form organochlorins (DDT is an Organo-chlorine) while the rest remains as residual free chlorine in the water. It may then react either with food chemicals or with parts of our digestive tract. In 1967 a Dr J. Price in the US performed a decisive experiment. With one group of 50 three-month-old chickens (cockerels) he added one third of a teaspoon of chlorine bleach to about one litre of water whilst another group of 50 chickens served as controls. Seven months later over 95 per cent of the chlorinated group had advanced atherosclerosis, yet none of the control group showed any such evidence.

In the following years Dr Price repeated his experiment many times, always with the same results, and more recently even researchers funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency have confirmed atherosclerotic type changes in other animals, including monkeys, when exposed to chlorinated water (22).

Drugs and Chemicals

Basically all drugs are more or less toxic, the more so, the more ‘powerful’ they are. Natural remedies cannot be patented, therefore in order to maximize profits the pharmaceutical industry routinely makes and sells synthetic versions of effective natural remedies. Synthetic substances are usually more difficult to detoxify than natural remedies and tend to create more problems the longer they are taken. Often they become highly addictive and after some time may cause the symptoms that they originally alleviated. This, however, is rarely acknowledged by drug companies or medical practitioners, instead when a problem arises simply alternative or additional drugs are prescribed.

A main problem is that drugs are tested individually for relatively short periods, but are then prescribed as drug cocktails for very long periods. Drugs have not been tested under these conditions, and therefore all drug use, except as individual drugs for short periods, is unscientific and unsafe. As a result of this, there are countless dangerous and fatal drug interactions and side-effects as reported in numerous books, articles and statistics.

It is similar with the thousands of synthetic chemicals and heavy metals that are allowed by health authorities to contaminate our living space. These are even less tested than drugs but also react with each other and with drugs in a brew that is impossible to disentangle.

I want to mention just one instance of such a combination. The herbicide paraquat and the fungicide maneb are widely used in farming and may remain present as crop residues. Each on its own did not cause a problem but if rats and mice were exposed to both together, even at very low rates, they developed symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.  The leader of the research team said: “No one has looked at the effects of studying together some of these compounds that, taken by themselves, have little effect. This has enormous implications,” and “it’s a huge problem to start thinking about a nearly infinite array of mixtures of chemicals, instead of the risk that a single chemical might pose” (23).

We have similar problems with fluoride and chlorine as well as mercury, aluminium, nickel and other heavy and toxic metals being deliberately put into vaccines and used in dentistry. For a detailed documentation of the problems associated with heavy metals and endocrine disrupting chemicals see Bernard Windham (24).

Sunlight

Health authorities and medical associations have campaigned strongly to avoid sun exposure of the skin. Presumably this causes skin cancer, including melanoma that can kill. However, the vast majority is normal skin cancer that almost never kills, and there is widespread doubt that melanomas are really caused by normal sun exposure, although there seems to be a link with sunburn. Generally outdoor workers with the most sun exposure had the lowest rates of skin cancer and melanoma, while melanomas often show up in office workers. Melanoma often occurs on areas of the skin that had not been exposed to sunlight. Other studies show a strong link between long-term exposure to fluorescent lighting and melanoma (25). With the present campaign to replace all incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent ones, I expect a melanoma epidemic in ten to twenty years (26).

Now more and more research papers show that a vast number of diseases, and especially cancer, could be avoided by greatly increasing our levels of vitamin D with suitable foods, supplements, and frequent or daily short sun exposure of the skin. Sunlight is our main source of vitamin D. Research shows that there is a strong negative correlation between available sunlight and breast cancer death rates – living in a sunny area is associated with lower cancer rates. Even skin cancer is inhibited by regular low-level sun exposure; only sunburn is a strong skin cancer promoter. It has now been calculated that with these measures worldwide about 600,000 cases of colon and breast cancer could be prevented (27).

Furthermore, the researchers pointed out that by increasing levels of vitamin D3 by regular sun exposure and other measures we could prevent diseases that claim nearly 1 million lives throughout the world each year (28, 29).

The irony of all this is that the present skin cancer epidemic has, in my opinion, been manufactured by our health authorities and medical experts. There are three conditions that make us susceptible to develop skin cancers with high sun exposure. These are overacidity, a high ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids, and a lack of antioxidants. The most common cause of overacidity is Candida overgrowth, especially in combination with the officially recommended diet high in cereals. Our omega-6 to omega-3 ratio was always somewhat too high but it went off the chart when our health authorities recommended replacing saturated fats with seed oils high in omega-6 fatty acids. This increased inflammatory conditions of all kinds, including tumors and skin cancers. To make matters worse, health authorities also discourage and legally minimize the use of antioxidant nutrients.

With these measures health authorities created the conditions for an epidemic of skin cancers. Then they tried to prevent skin cancers by recommending complete avoidance of sun exposure, which in turn caused large-scale vitamin D deficiency with an estimated loss of 1 million lives each year. I sometimes ask myself if it is simply ignorance and incompetence or if there is something more sinister to it.

The Obesity epidemic     

I could write a book about all the health problems caused by the medical-pharmaceutical complex and the neglectful way in which health authorities contribute to our diseases. In addition to directly causing diseases, these same forces also prevent the healing of these same diseases by restricting, suppressing and persecuting the practitioners of natural medicine as well as giving disease-causing nutritional advice.

Until 1980 the rate of obesity and Type 2 diabetes was fairly stable. However, when health authorities in the U.S.A. started vilifying foods containing fats and cholesterol, and recommended eating more carbohydrates instead, obesity increased from 15% of the adult U.S. population to 25% within one decade and continued to rise to 32.9% in 2003-2004 (30). Type 2 diabetes became an epidemic as well. In addition, for the first time in history a large number of obese children developed Type 2 diabetes. Since then it is no longer called maturity-onset diabetes. Also children start now developing Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes simultaneously (31, 32, 33). All of these are iatrogenic diseases, caused by the medical system.

Natural practitioners are experts in preventing and successfully treating chronic diseases with nutrition and other natural methods. This includes the metabolic syndrome which leads to diabetes, heart disease and overweight. It is routinely and quickly remedied with proper nutrition, but with accepted medical practice it becomes a life-long condition managed with more or less toxic drugs. Surgery is used for a wide range of conditions, and patients are severely traumatized or mutilated for life when these problems could be successfully treated with natural therapies.

Vaccinations

Vaccinations are the proud showpiece of drug medicine in eliminating the dreaded childhood infections of previous centuries. However, long-term statistics and diagrams tell a different story. Starting between 1850 and 1900 scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles had declined by about 90% by the time general vaccination was introduced for each disease. While statistics vary between different countries, this is generally true for England, the United States and Australia. Whooping cough had declined in England by about 98.5% before a vaccine became generally available, and measles had declined by over 99%. Tuberculosis had declined by 87% when antibiotics first became available and by 93% before the introduction of the BCG vaccine. The death rate from rheumatic fever had declined by 86% when penicillin was introduced (34). All of this has obviously more to do with better plumbing than with vaccinations.

There are also statistics showing that death rates from targeted diseases rose with the introduction of vaccines. Other side-effects ascribed to modern vaccines are cot or crib death (SIDS), a strong rise in autism and ADHD, and shaken baby syndrome (spot bleeding in the brain) which apparently landed innocent parents in jail. Experts strongly deny that there is a connection between vaccines and autism, but it is strange nevertheless that the rates of autism have suddenly exploded after greatly increased numbers of vaccinations in recent decades, and there is no obvious alternative reason. Also autism is absent in Amish children who are generally not vaccinated. Vaccinated children are reported to have about 150% more neurological disorders such as ADHD and autism compared to unvaccinated children (35).

Another curios aspect of vaccine safety statistics was highlighted by Dr Archie Kalokerinos. Working in the remote Australian outback with Aboriginals he found that every second child died as a result of vaccinations. Because deaths commonly occurred about 3 weeks later, they were not recorded as vaccine-related; officially reactions were limited to occur only for up to 2 weeks after vaccination. However, eventually Dr Kalokerinossolved the problem by giving babies high doses of vitamin C before vaccinations, and no more vaccination deaths occurred. Also SIDS disappeared. Naturally he encountered ridicule and hostility from his medical colleges, and babies are still dying needlessly (36).

Deliberate Bias Against Natural Therapies

It has become a habit that any successful natural cancer remedy or treatment is quickly outlawed by our health authorities. Many natural health practitioners have been dragged before the courts and often imprisoned, especially in the area of cancer treatment (37). This is especially regrettable because there is no evidence that the methods of orthodox cancer therapy are in any way successful (38).

One of the methods increasingly used to denigrate natural therapies is for the pharmaceutical industry to finance shoddy research on natural remedies and then proclaim them to be ineffective or harmful. This is only partly intended to influence the general public but mainly to provide the justification for health authorities to outlaw and greatly restrict natural remedies (39).

Another strategy is not to list favorable vitamin studies in the MEDLINE database. This is taxpayer-funded and operated by the US National Library of Medicine. It lists all articles by medical research journals, including Time magazine and Readers’ Digest, but not the peer-reviewed Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine (http://www.orthomed.org/jom/jomlist.htm) which specializes in vitamin research. Now the British Medical Journal has published a letter about Medline bias (40) and this has forced Medline to index articles on Medline bias.

Because all these favorable vitamin studies are not indexed by Medline, proponents of drug medicine can claim that there are no studies that show that vitamins are useful in the treatment of diseases or that they are safe in high doses, and therefore should be restricted to very low doses. Of course, world-wide yearly fatalities due to vitamins are zero; in comparison drug fatalities are infinitely higher.

30 years ago Linus Pauling showed that high doses of vitamin C are beneficial in cancer treatment. This has been ‘disproved’ by the orthodoxy ever since. But now a study by conventional Johns Hopkins scientists has shown that he was right (41). In addition, the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine has just published a double-blind, randomized clinical trial showing that HIV-positive patients given supplemental nutrients can stop their decline into AIDS (42). This would pose a big threat to the medical-pharmaceutical complex and is one more reason not to index this journal on Medline.

There exists a systemic culture of suppression of dissenting views in science and medicine, and frequently a vicious persecution with “Gestapo-like” methods (43, 44). Recently in the US even a mother has been jailed and brutalized for “illegally” using natural methods to cure her son of malignant melanoma (45).

Of course, this assault of the medical-pharmaceutical complex on natural healing methods is not illegal. On the contrary, in a capitalist system it is their duty to maximize profits by eliminating the competition and generating a steady supply of patients with chronic diseases who can be managed indefinitely with drugs. The question is just why do government health authorities make and enforce laws on behalf of drug medicine and against natural medicine?

Theoretically they should be impartial and ensure the best outcome for the population. I believe the answer can be found in some good lateral thinking by the pharmaceutical industry. By paying for and influencing much of the medical education (46, 47, 48), they automatically produce health officials and government advisers who are steeped in pharmaceutical thinking and biased against natural medicine. No bribery is needed, but health officials always know that there is a well-paid job waiting if and when they want to retire from government service, simple!

Natural Medicine to the Rescue

Health authorities so far have ignored the claims and evidence of natural medicine that it is the superior form of treatment for chronic and medically incurable diseases. The very fact of a high rate of chronic disease in our society attests to the inability of the medical profession to successfully treat these diseases. I have no doubt that natural medicine could eliminate most chronic diseases within a decade, needing only a few percent of the money that is spent on conventional medicine. The knowledge is already available; no expensive high-tech research is needed that may or may not give results sometime in the future.

There is a simple low-cost solution for bringing about the healing of our society:

1.   Phase out public assistance for pharmaceutical companies and their research, and require research to show that a drug is safe with long-term use in combination with other common drugs and chemicals and with old or fragile patients, or alternatively that it is superior in the long-term to available natural treatments

2.   Make it illegal for pharmaceutical companies to fund medical education or provide drug information, marketing or incentives directly to the public or to medical practitioners, or to employ former health officials. Information to medical practitioners should be provided by an independent and impartial body

3.   Except for unethical conduct according to general society standards, make it illegal for medical associations to restrict the therapies used by their members

4.   Afford qualified practitioners of natural medicine the same recognition and opportunities as those of drug medicine, including in hospitals, rehabilitation, research and publications, health departments and regulating authorities

So far our medical and economic leaders do not want to face reality. They brainwash the public into believing that the present health situation is completely normal. Importantly, the whole economic structure of Western civilization is based on the production and distribution of goods and services that are contributing to poor health. These include chemicalized agriculture and food processing, the pharmaceutical industry, technological medicine and the petrochemical and plastics industries.

The guiding motto for industry is ‘profit’, while for the consumer it is ‘convenience’. The price for all to pay is the loss of health. This situation is the natural outcome of a society based on selfish motivation. A change for the better can only come when more and more people realize that ultimately they harm themselves with selfish attitudes, and start electing leaders who are prepared to act in a compassionate and cooperative way in the interest of the whole society. We get what we choose: natural health or enduring drug management.

REFERENCES 

(1)      Null, G, Dean, C. et al.: Death by Medicine. Nutrition Institute of America, Nov 2003, www.NutritionInstituteOfAmerica.org

(2)      Mendelsohn, R.S. Confessions of a Medical Heretic. McGraw-Hill 1990, first published Contemporary Books, Chicago, 1979

(3)      Truss, C.O.: The Missing Diagnosis. Truss, Birmingham, AL, 1983

(4)       Crook, W.G.: The Yeast Connection. Vintage Books, N.Y. 1986

(5)       Cantwell, A.” The Cancer Microbe. Aries Rising Press, Los Angeles, 1990. http://ariesrisingpress.com/ is Alan Cantwell’s website

(6)      Motluk, Alison, “Baby study links antibiotics to asthma” New Scientist 30 September  2003

(7)      G. Huffnagle and M.C. Noverr in the January 2005 issue of Infection & Immunity

(8)      Crane J, Pearce N. et al: Prescribed fenoterol and death from asthma in New Zealand, 1981-83: case-control study. Lancet 1989, Apr 29; 1 (8644):917-22

(9)      Bhatia, S., Robison, L.L. et al.: Breast cancer and other second neoplasms after childhood Hodgkin’s disease. N Engl J Med. 1996 Mar 21;334(12):745-51.

(10)   Klein-Szanto, A.J.P.: Carcinogenic effects of chemotherapeutic compounds. Progress in Clinical and Biological Research, 374, 167-74, 1992.

(11)    Klingspor, L., Stintzing, G., Tollemar, J. Deep Candida infection in children with leukaemia. Acta Paediatr 86 (1) 30-6, 1997

(12)    Moss, R.W.: THE MOSS REPORTS Newsletter #128 April 11/04

(13)    Reynolds T.: Salary a major factor for academic oncologists, study shows. J Natl Cancer Inst 2001;93(7):491. Retrieved March 12, 2004 from:http://jncicancerspectrum.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/full/jnci;93/7/491 and Abelson, Reed. Drug sales bring huge profits, and scrutiny to cancer doctors. New York Times. January 26, 2003, page A1. Cancer scare tactics: New York Times editorial March 22, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/22/opinion/22MON2.html. Also in THE MOSS REPORTS Newsletter #126 03/28/04

(14)    Karthaus, M. Treatment of fungal infections led to leukemia remissions. Sept. 28, 1999

(15)    White, M.W. Medical Hypotheses. 1996;47,35-38

(16)    Etzel, R.A. Mycotoxins. Jan 23, 2002. 387(4). Journal of the American Medical Association

(17)    Simoncini, T.: Is the Cause of Cancer a Common Fungus? Nexus Magazine Vo. 14/5, 2007, also www.cancerfungus.com

(18)    The official English-language website of Dr Hamer is at www.newmedicine.ca. See also The New Medicine of Dr Hamer (Nexus Magazine 10/05 and www.health-science-spirit.com/hamer.html)

(19)   Price, Weston A., Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Price–Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, first published 1939, http://www.ppnf.org/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=226

(20)    Meinig, G.E: Root Canal Cover-Up. Bion Publ. 1993 www.ppnf.org/catalog/ppnf/Articles/Rootcanal.htm

(21)   Price, Joseph M: Coronaries/Cholesterol/Chlorine. Jove Books, New York, 1981

(22)   ibid.

(23)   Comments by Prof. Deborah Cory-Slechta, Ph.D. reported at http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/Paraquat-Maneb-Parkinsons.htm

(24)   Bernard Windham: www.flcv.com/dams.html and www.flcv.com/indexa.html

(25)   Walter S.D., Marrett L.D., Shannon H.S.,From L. and Hertzman C.: The Association of Cutaneous Malignant Melanoma and Fluorescent Light Exposure. Am J Epidemiol 1992; 135:749–62;  http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/135/7/749

(26)   http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/energy/cfls/index.html

(27)   Press Release: Study shines more light on benefit of vitamin D in fighting cancer: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/uoc–ssm082107.php

(28)   Dr Mercola: Lack of Sunshine Causes One Million Deaths a Year.  http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2007/08/24/lack-of-sunshine-causes-600-000-cancers-a-year.aspx

(29)   Garland C.F., Grant W.B. et al: What is the Dose-Response Relationship between Vitamin D and Cancer Risk?  Nutrition Reviews, Volume 65, Supplement 1, August 2007 , pp. 91-95(5)

(30)   Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Overweight and Obesity”, http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/index.htm

(31)   Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Number (in Millions) of Persons with Diagnosed Diabetes, United States, 1980–2005″, http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/statistics/prev/national/figpersons.htm

(32)   Yale Medical Group, “Type 2 Diabetes Tough on Teens”, August 2007, http://www.yalemedicalgroup.org/news/diabetes_807.html

(33)   Thompson, Dennis, “‘Double Diabetes’ a New Threat”, 3 December 2006, http://www.livescience.com/healthday/534999.html

(34)   http://www.whale.to/a/graphs.html and http://www.healthsentinel.com/graphs.php

(35)   Generation Rescue Press Release 25 September 2007, http://www.generationrescue.org/survey_pr.html

(36)   Archie Kalokerinos: Every Second Child. Thomas Nelson (Australia) Melbourne1974 and Keats Publishing New Canaan CT 1981

(37)   Walter Last: Persecution of Natural Cancer Therapists. www.health-science-spirit.com/cancerpersecution.html

(38)   Walter Last: How Scientific are Orthodox Cancer Treatments? NEXUS 2004; 11(4); also at  www.health-science-spirit.com/cancerscience.html

(39)    For details see Alliance for Natural Health http://www.alliance-natural-health.org/

(40)   http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/331/7531/1487#124851

(41)    Science Blog 2007-09-10: How vitamin C stops the big ‘C’ http://scienceblog.com/14162/how-vitamin-c-stops-the-big-c/

(42)    Namulemia, Edith; Sparling, James; Foster, Harold D. Nutritional supplements can delay the progression of AIDS in HIV-infected patients: results from a double-blinded, clinical trial at Mengo Hospital, Kampala, Uganda. Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine 2007; 22(3), 129-136. 

(43)    James DeMeo: The Suppression of Dissent and Innovative Ideas In Science and Medicine; http://www.orgonelab.org/suppression.htm

(44)    Brian Martin, “Suppression of Dissent in Science“, Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, Volume 7, edited by William R. Freudenburg and Ted I. K. Youn (Stamford, CT: JAI Press, 1999), pp. 105-135. Available on-line: http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/99rsppp.html

(45)   http://angryscientist.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/mother-jailed-put-on-trial-for-curing-her-son-of-melanoma/ and http://www.healthsalon.org/349/melanoma-cured-by-mother-mother-and-son-go-to-jail

(46)   New Scientist 19 October 2007: Scale of pharma payments to med schools revealed http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19626263.500

(47)   Professor Christopher Nordin: The pharmaceutical industry and doctors’ prescribing habits. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2007/2056879.htm

(48)    Campbell, E.G. et al: Institutional Academic – Industry Relationships. JAMA 2007, 298:1779-1786. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/86180.php?nfid=44282Heath Science Spirit

Questions Arise As To Coroner’s Cover Up In Sudden Death

Six months after Charles Castle suddenly and inexplicably died, the San Bernardino County Coroner has still not come up with a stated cause of death. And according to a Deputy in that office, a critical report is “missing” from Charlie Castle’s file

I had spoken with Charlie Castle on the evening of January 15 at around 8 pm. He was frustrated with how long he had been deprived of his freedom and specifically dismayed at the fact that his long awaited trial on his mental health detention had been delayed just the week before.

“They can’t hold you much longer,” I told him. “The accumulated evidence of fraud in your case is overwhelming, Charlie.” I then made a bold promise to him. “You will be free soon.”

Two hours later, Charlie Castle was pronounced dead.

His saga is a case study in attorney/court collusion in denying a conservatee his rights to contest a mental health conservatorship. In addition, responsible parties within the mental health and police systems declined to act according to their professional mandates. All of this stand down resulted in Castle being deprived of his freedom and eventually, it appears, his life.

Castle, who was homeless in Redlands, California, was picked up by court employees Bob Jabel and Wayne Henkelman in June of 2011 and taken to San Bernardino Arrowhead Regional Center, where he was placed under a conservatorship. The Public Guardian was named conservator and Castle was represented by the law firm of Bryan Hartnell, who has the County contract to represent mental health conservatees. Castle stated he was never in front of a judge but waited outside the courtroom while his attorney “took care of things.” His conservatorship was then transferred to a private conservator, Melodie Scott, who was represented in these proceedings by….. the law firm of Bryan Hartnell.

At one juncture, a judge pro tem, Walter Moore, was appointed to preside over the case. Moore had also been an attorney with the law firm of Bryan Hartnell.

When the issue of Hartnell’s representing both sides of the case hit the press  Hartnell resigned. Melodie Scott resigned shortly thereafter. Before Hartnell left the case, however, he fired a shot deep into the heart of Castle’s desire to have a jury trial in his case.

Hartnell indeed filed for a rehearing, as Castle had requested. Betraying his client’s desires, Hartnell’s petition specifically stated that a jury trial would be unnecessary.

Prior to resigning the case, Hartnell’s office refused to give Castle his legal file, telling him it would be a “felony” for the firm to provide its client his file. At one point in time, a lie like that would have cost an attorney his license. Hartnell, however, is still breezily representing conservatees apparently with the same reckless disregard for their rights.

When Castle filed a writ of habeas corpus to have his detention reviewed by a judge, Conservator Melodie Scott began moving him from facility to facility, like a pawn in a shell game. She attempted to have him admitted anonymously to at least one facility, making it difficult for those attempting to assist Castle in his pursuit of freedom to locate him. As a result of his repeated forced relocations, Castle was never served with the judge’s response to his writ. In the space of a few weeks, Castle was moved to four different facilities in two different counties.

Along the way, appeals were made to a number of different agencies which are mandated with addressing mental health concerns and pertinent legal issues. California Disability Rights refused to take Castle’s case, as did Mental Health Advocates in Los Angeles. The Ombudsman for Nursing Care facilities in Los Angeles took no steps to assist Castle. When an appeal was made to Patients’ Rights in Los Angeles County, Advocate Rashied Jibri hung up on the caller, after being queried as to the reasons for his refusal to look into the Castle matter.

When Castle was subsequently relocated to San Bernardino County in, the SB County Ombudsman went out to see him and declined to address his concerns. In one sole act that distinguished her from every other government worker who received an appeal concerning Castle, an employee from the Department of Public Health went out to Desert Manor in Yucaipa and cited the facility for violating Castle’s rights to make and receive phone calls and to receive visitors.

Adult Protective Services in San Bernardino County told the caller that they don’t investigate matters relevant to conservatees. When asked to provide the law which allows that agency to stand down when the at- risk elder is under a conservatorship, APS was unable to provide one.

Police agencies were no better.

Charlie Castle was scheduled to finally have his day in court this past January. However, on the appointed day Charlie was not in court. His new attorney, Mark Flory told him that his trial was again delayed because the conservator, the Public Guardian (re-appointed after Melodie Scott’s resignation) did not make the necessary arrangements to bring him into court that day. Less than a week later, Castle was dead.

The first three calls asking for a Coroner’s investigation were curiously deleted from the dispatch call center. After it became clear that the caller was not going to be so easily deterred, a Coroner’s office investigation was launched into Castle’s sudden demise.

Last week, Coroner’s Deputy Gabe Morales told me that the report had not been finished yet. Morales also admitted that the toxicology exam, which could be the pivotal evidence as to cause of death, had been curiously removed from the file.

Another suspicious death of a conservatee, Raymond Horspool, produced a Riverside County Coroner’s report that could only be considered finessed. According to reports, Horspool weighed only 137 pounds at the time of his death, a grave drop from his normal 190 lb. weight. His daughter, Barbara Howard, leveled accusations that her father was killed with morphine. Indeed, the Coroner’s report listed morphine as one of the drugs being given Raymond Horspool at the time of his death. Curiously, Horspool was not reported as having any condition which would have mandated him receiving morphine. His precipitous weight loss could well be ascribed to what happens when people are plied with morphine: They don’t eat.

The Coroner’s report oddly neglected to mention the weight of Horspool’s body at the time it showed up at that office. In addition, the Coroner refused to do a toxicology exam, over the protests of Howard and other family members. If it looks like a cover up and quacks like a cover up….well, what do you think?

Parenthetically, Raymond Horspool was the father of Melodie Scott’s attorney, J. David Horspool. After placing his father under a conservatorship and virtually kidnapping his Dad away from his wife, Horspool proceeded to use his extraordinary influence with the San Bernardino judges to loot his own father’s estate.

At the time of going to press, this reporter has learned that another concern surrounding an at -risk conservatee in Los Angeles has been assigned to LA County Patient’s rights advocate Rashied Jibri to investigate. Jibri, you recall, was the advocate who hung up the phone rather than reply to questions why he would not address Charlie Castle’s plight.

A request to have this transferred to another investigator has been ignored. In this case, LA County Department of Mental Health employee Steve Dobbs refused to honor a waiver of confidentiality signed by the individual prior to being conserved and effectively hid him from friends for over a year. The man was finally located in a Culver City board and care, depressed and drugged to the gills. The waiver of confidentiality subsequently “disappeared” from the DMH files, according to Steve Dobbs’ co -worker, Dr. Nilsa Gallardo.

Illinois attorney Ken Ditkowsky has called for an investigation of the nation wide prevalence of what he is calling “elder cleansing.” Ditkowsky has likened what is happening to conservatees to the plight of the elderly and disabled in Germany in the thirties and forties. They were the first victims of Hitler’s master race agenda. Ditkowsky’s repeated pleas to the United States Department of Justice have gone unresponded to.

Writes Ditkowsky: “We watch any attorney who opens his mouth in protest having to fight for his/her license as the IARDC (and similar organizations) think it unethical for attorneys to speak out against elder cleansing!”

In reference to questionable acts by attorneys in these cases, Ditkowsky also states: “From the reaction of government to “elder cleansing” you would think that it and ethic cleansing are laudable occupations and attorneys who spoke out were deviants!”

Another Illinois attorney, JoAnne Denison, is facing a challenge to her license for the act of blogging about these cases. Denison maintains that First Amendment rights also apply to attorneys.

The systemic collusion necessary to deprive our most vulnerable elders and disabled their due process rights requires some concerted and dedicated hanky panky. Many laws were violated in the Castle matter by numerous government agencies and employees. Conservatorships constitute a Constitutional loophole and an entire class of people are regularly being deprived of their rights to due process, their rights to their own property and even the right, it appears now, to stay alive.

Charming Couples: Nationalism And Hypocrisy

It’s not easy being a flag-waving American nationalist. In addition to having to deal with the usual disillusion, anger, and scorn from around the world incited by Washington’s endless bombings and endless wars, the nationalist is assaulted by whistle blowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, who have disclosed a steady stream of human-rights and civil-liberties scandals, atrocities, embarrassing lies, and embarrassing truths. Believers in “American exceptionalism” and “noble intentions” have been hard pressed to keep the rhetorical flag waving by the dawn’s early light and the twilight’s last gleaming.

That may explain the Washington Post story (July 20) headlined “U.S. asylum-seekers unhappy in Russia”, about Edward Snowden and his plan to perhaps seek asylum in Moscow. The article recounted the allegedly miserable times experienced in the Soviet Union by American expatriates and defectors like Lee Harvey Oswald, the two NSA employees of 1960 – William Martin and Bernon Mitchell – and several others. The Post’s propaganda equation apparently is: Dissatisfaction with life in Russia by an American equals a point in favor of the United States: “misplaced hopes of a glorious life in the worker’s paradise” … Oswald “was given work in an electronics factory in dreary Minsk, where the bright future eluded him” … reads the Post’s Cold War-clichéd rendition. Not much for anyone to get terribly excited about, but a defensive American nationalist is hard pressed these days to find much better.

At the same time Team USA scores points by publicizing present-day Russian violations of human rights and civil liberties, just as if the Cold War were still raging. “We call on the Russian government to cease its campaign of pressure against individuals and groups seeking to expose corruption, and to ensure that the universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of all of its citizens, including the freedoms of speech and assembly, are protected and respected,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary. 1

“Campaign of pressure against individuals and groups seeking to expose corruption” … hmmm … Did someone say “Edward Snowden”? Is round-the-clock surveillance of the citizenry not an example of corruption? Does the White House have no sense of shame? Or embarrassment? At all?

I long for a modern version of the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 at which Carney – or much better, Barack Obama himself – is spewing one lie and one sickening defense of his imperialist destruction after another. And the committee counsel (in the famous words of Joseph Welch) is finally moved to declare: “Sir, you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” The Congressional gallery burst into applause and this incident is widely marked as the beginning of the end of the McCarthy sickness.

US politicians and media personalities have criticized Snowden for fleeing abroad to release the classified documents he possessed. Why didn’t he remain in the US to defend his actions and face his punishment like a real man? they ask. Yes, the young man should have voluntarily subjected himself to solitary confinement, other tortures, life in prison, and possible execution if he wished to be taken seriously. Quel coward!

Why didn’t Snowden air his concerns through the proper NSA channels rather than leaking the documents, as a respectable whistleblower would do? This is the question James Bamford, generally regarded as America’s leading writer on the NSA, endeavored to answer, as follows:

I’ve interviewed many NSA whistleblowers, and the common denominator is that they felt ignored when attempting to bring illegal or unethical operations to the attention of higher-ranking officials. For example, William Binney and several other senior NSA staffers protested the agency’s domestic collection programs up the chain of command, and even attempted to bring the operations to the attention of the attorney general, but they were ignored. Only then did Binney speak publicly to me for an article in Wired magazine. In a Q&A on the Guardian Web Snowden cited Binney as an example of “how overly-harsh responses to public-interest whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope, and skill involved in future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.”

And even when whistleblowers bring their concerns to the news media, the NSA usually denies that the activity is taking place. The agency denied Binney’s charges that it was obtaining all consumer metadata from Verizon and had access to virtually all Internet traffic. It was only when Snowden leaked the documents revealing the phone-log program and showing how PRISM works that the agency was forced to come clean. 2

“Every country in the world that is engaged in international affairs and national security undertakes lots of activities to protect its national security,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said recently. “All I know is that it is not unusual for lots of nations.” 3

Well, Mr. K, anti-semitism is not unusual; it can be found in every country. Why, then, does the world so strongly condemn Nazi Germany? Obviously, it’s a matter of degree, is it not? The magnitude of the US invasion of privacy puts it into a league all by itself.

Kerry goes out of his way to downplay the significance of what Snowden revealed. He’d have the world believe that it’s all just routine stuff amongst nations … “Move along, nothing to see here.” Yet the man is almost maniacal about punishing Snowden. On July 12, just hours after Venezuela agreed to provide Snowden with political asylum, Kerry personally called Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elias Jaua and reportedly threatened to ground any Venezuelan aircraft in America’s or any NATO country’s airspace if there is the slightest suspicion that Snowden is using the flight to get to Caracas. Closing all NATO member countries’ airspace to Venezuelan flights means avoiding 26 countries in Europe and two in North America. Under this scenario, Snowden would have to fly across the Pacific from Russia’s Far East instead of crossing the Atlantic.

The Secretary of State also promised to intensify the ongoing process of revoking US entry visas to Venezuelan officials and businessmen associated with the deceased President Hugo Chávez. Washington will also begin prosecuting prominent Venezuelan politicians on allegations of drug trafficking, money laundering and other criminal actions and Kerry specifically mentioned some names in his conversation with the Venezuelan Foreign Minister.

Kerry added that Washington is well aware of Venezuela’s dependence on the US when it comes to refined oil products. Despite being one of the world’s largest oil producers, Venezuela requires more petrol and oil products than it can produce, buying well over a million barrels of refined oil products from the United States every month. Kerry bluntly warned that fuel supplies would be halted if President Maduro continues to reach out to the fugitive NSA contractor. 4

Wow. Heavy. Unlimited power in the hands of psychopaths. My own country truly scares me.

And what country brags about its alleged freedoms more than the United States? And its alleged democracy? Its alleged civil rights and human rights? Its alleged “exceptionalism”? Its alleged everything? Given that, why should not the United States be held to the very highest of standards?

American hypocrisy in its foreign policy is manifested on a routine, virtually continual, basis. Here is President Obama speaking recently in South Africa about Nelson Mandela: “The struggle here against apartheid, for freedom; [Mandela’s] moral courage; this country’s historic transition to a free and democratic nation has been a personal inspiration to me. It has been an inspiration to the world – and it continues to be.” 5

How touching. But no mention – never any mention by any American leader – that the United States was directly responsible for sending Nelson Mandela to prison for 28 years. 6

And demanding Snowden’s extradition while, according to the Russian Interior Ministry, “Law agencies asked the US on many occasions to extradite wanted criminals through Interpol channels, but those requests were neither met nor even responded to.” Amongst the individuals requested are militant Islamic insurgents from Chechnya, given asylum in the United States. 7

Ecuador has had a similar experience with the US in asking for the extradition of several individuals accused of involvement in a coup attempt against President Rafael Correa. The most blatant example of this double standard is that of Luis Posada Carriles who masterminded the blowing up of a Cuban airline in 1976, killing 73 civilians. He has lived as a free man in Florida for many years even though his extradition has been requested by Venezuela. He’s but one of hundreds of anti-Castro and other Latin American terrorists who’ve been given haven in the United States over the years despite their being wanted in their home countries.

American officials can spout “American exceptionalism” every other day and commit crimes against humanity on intervening days. Year after year, decade after decade. But I think we can derive some satisfaction, and perhaps even hope, in that US foreign policy officials, as morally damaged as they must be, are not all so stupid that they don’t know they’re swimming in a sea of hypocrisy. Presented here are two examples:

In 2004 it was reported that “The State Department plans to delay the release of a human rights report that was due out today, partly because of sensitivities over the prison abuse scandal in Iraq, U.S. officials said. One official … said the release of the report, which describes actions taken by the U.S. government to encourage respect for human rights by other nations, could ‘make us look hypocritical’.” 8

And an example from 2007: Chester Crocker, a member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion, and formerly Assistant Secretary of State, noted that “we have to be able to cope with the argument that the U.S. is inconsistent and hypocritical in its promotion of democracy around the world. That may be true.” 9

In these cases the government officials appear to be somewhat self-conscious about the prevailing hypocrisy. Other foreign policy notables seem to be rather proud.

Robert Kagan, author and long-time intellectual architect of an interventionism that seeks to impose a neo-conservative agenda upon the world, by any means necessary, has declared that the United States must refuse to abide by certain international conventions, like the international criminal court and the Kyoto accord on global warming. The US, he says, “must support arms control, but not always for itself. It must live by a double standard.” 10

And then we have Robert Cooper, a senior British diplomat who was an advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq war. Cooper wrote:

The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. 11

His expression, “every state for itself”, can be better understood as any state not willing to accede to the agenda of the American Empire and the school bully’s best friend in London.

So there we have it. The double standard is in. The Golden Rule of “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” is out.

The imperial mafia, and their court intellectuals like Kagan and Cooper, have a difficult time selling their world vision on the basis of legal, moral, ethical or fairness standards. Thus it is that they simply decide that they’re not bound by such standards.

Hating America

Here is Alan Dershowitz, prominent American lawyer, jurist, political commentator and fervent Zionist and supporter of the empire, speaking about journalist Glenn Greenwald and the latter’s involvement with Edward Snowden: “Look, Greenwald’s a total phony. He is anti-American, he loves tyrannical regimes, and he did this because he hates America. This had nothing to do with publicizing information. He never would’ve written this article if they had published material about one of his favorite countries.” 12

“Anti-American” … “hates America” … What do they mean, those expressions that are an integral part of American political history? Greenwald hates baseball and hot dogs? … Hates American films and music? … Hates all the buildings in the United States? Every law? … No, like most “anti-Americans”, Glenn Greenwald hates American foreign policy. He hates all the horrors and all the lies used to cover up all the horrors. So which Americans is he anti?

Dershowitz undoubtedly thinks that Snowden is anti-American as well. But listen to the young man being interviewed:

“America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing.”

The interviewer is Glenn Greenwald. 13

Is there any other “democratic” country in the world which regularly, or even occasionally, employs such terminology? Anti-German? Anti-British? Anti-Mexican? It may be that only a totalitarian mentality can conceive of and use the term “anti-American”.

“God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America’s Middle Eastern policy and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.” – John LeCarré, London Times, January 15, 2003

1. White House Press Briefing, July 18, 2013 ↩
2. Washington Post, June 23, 2013 ↩
3. Reuters news agency, July 2, 2013 ↩
4. RT television (Russia Today), July 19, 2013, citing a Spanish ABC media outlet ↩
5. White House press release, June 29, 2013 ↩
6. William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, chapter 23 ↩
7. Reuters, July 22, 2013 ↩
8. Los Angeles Times, May 5, 2004 ↩
9. Washington Post, April 17, 2007 ↩
10. Hoover Institute, Stanford University, Policy Review, June 1, 2002 ↩
11. The Observer (UK), April 7, 2002 ↩
12. “Piers Morgan Live”, CNN, June 24, 2013 ↩
13. Video of Glen Greenwald interviewing Edward Snowden (at 2:05 mark) ↩

America: Super-Bully Nation

Count the ways. Obama’s waging financial war on humanity. He’s waging multiple direct and indirect hot ones. He bears full responsibility.

He represents the worst of rogue leadership. He heads America’s coup d’etat government. It “lacks constitutional and legal legitimacy,” said Paul Craig Roberts.

Washington’s ruled by “usurpers,” he added. “An unconstitutional government is an illegal government.” Regimes operating extrajudicially have no legitimacy. America’s by far the worst.

State terror is official policy. So is rogue state lawlessness. It operates at home and abroad. Tyranny’s the law of the land. Diktat power rules.

FBI, DEA, Homeland Security, other repressive government agencies, and militarized local police collude. They’re America’s Gestapo. They operate extrajudicially.

US special forces death squads infest over 120 countries. They operate openly and covertly. CIA agents operate everywhere. They do so destructively.

America’s no fit place to live in. It’s unsafe. Its long arm is repressive. Police state laws target nonbelievers. Rule of law principles don’t matter.

Democracy’s an illusion. It’s a convenient fiction. Equity and justice are four-letter words. Freedom’s on the chopping block for elimination. It’s practically gone already.

Supporting right over wrong is criminalized. Espionage and other charges follow. Kangaroo court justice awaits. Bradley Manning’s victimized. He’s a world hero. He’s a 2013 Nobel Peace Prize nominee. He faces possible life in prison.

Edward Snowden’s a wanted man. He connected the dots for millions. He told them what they need to know. He’s heroic for doing so. He’s a 2014 Nobel Peace Prize nominee. He can’t go home again.

He’ll be imprisoned, tortured, and abused. He’ll be denied all rights like Manning. America honors its worst. It persecutes its best. It bullies other countries. Obey or else.

On Thursday, Senate Appropriation Committee members unanimously approved sanctions on nations offering Snowden help. Doing so is lawless. It doesn’t matter.

Russia’s targeted. So are Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela. More on Russia below. According to Venezuela Analysis, Washington has more than sanctions in mind.

VA headlined ” ‘Overwhelming’ Evidence of Plot to Assassinate Venezuela’s Maduro,” saying:

National Assembly head Diosdado Cabello has “hard evidence of assassination attempts.” He and Maduro are targeted.

“We know who they are, what they are, what they want, and we will find them,” said Cabello. Maduro calls them “fascist” groups. They have “crazy plans.” Washington backs them.

“I have appointed Diosdado Cabello as (ruling PSUV political head) to find the truth of how they have prepared for attacks against me for months,” said Maduro.

If either leader is killed, “the wrath of god and the people would be unstoppable,” he added.

Lindsey Graham (R. SC) represents the worst of Washington. He’s a right wing extremist. He’s a neocon rogue. He sponsored the Senate measure. It’s an appropriations bill amendment.

It’s a work in progress. It requires imposition of sanctions. It targets countries helping Snowden.

It directs John Kerry “to consult with the appropriate congressional committees on sanction options against any country that provides asylum to Mr. Snowden, including revocation or suspension of trade privileges and preferences.”

According to Graham:

“I don’t know if he’s going to stay in Russia forever. I don’t know where he’s going to go.”

“But I know this: That the right thing to do is to send him back home so he can face charges for the crimes he allegedly committed.”

Graham represents the worst of US ruthlessness. On July 19, his joint press release headlined “Graham, Schumer Resolution Encourages Russia to Turn Over Edward Snowden to American Authorities,” saying:

Both senators “introduced a partisan resolution.” It’s typical American bullying. It demands Russia hand over Snowden. Obey or else.

It states:

“The Russian Federation’s continued willingness to provide shelter to Edward Snowden is negatively impacting the US-Russia relationship.”

“Russia should immediately turn Edward Snowden over to the appropriate United States authorities so he can stand trial in the United States.”

“President Obama should consider other options, including recommending a different location for the September 2013 G20 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, should Russia continue to allow shelter for Mr. Snowden.”

According to Graham:

“On multiple fronts, Russia is becoming one of the bad actors in the world.”

“Russia continues to provide cover to the Iranian nuclear program and sell sophisticated weapons to the Assad regime in Syria to butcher tens of thousands of its own citizens.”

“For Russia to grant temporary asylum to Mr. Snowden on top of all this would do serious damage to our relationship.”

“It is past time we send a strong message to President Putin about Russia’s actions and this resolution will help accomplish that goal.”

Schumer is AIPAC’s man in Washington. He’s no democrat. He represents Israel. He supports its worst crimes. He backs Obama’s war on humanity. He’s a war criminal multiple times over.

“Time and time again,” he said, “President Putin is too eager to stick a finger in the eye of the United States – whether it is arming the murderous Assad regime in Syria, supporting Iran’s nuclear development or now providing shelter and Russian state protection to Edward Snowden.”

“Enough is enough. It’s time to send a crystal clear message to President Putin about Russia’s deplorable behavior, and this resolution will do just that.”

Washington targets independent countries. Sanctions have no legitimacy. America imposes them ruthlessly. They’re unjustly punitive.

They used to intimidate and bully nations into compliance. They don’t work. Russia’s strong enough to retaliate. It values good bilateral relations. It won’t sacrifice its sovereignty. It’s not for sale.

America’s a Big Brother society. It’s no longer fiction. It’s real. It’s institutionalized. It’s universal. It’s lawless. It doesn’t matter. It’s hard-wired.

Manufactured national security threats override fundamental freedoms. Anyone can be monitored for any reason or none at all.

Privacy rights are lost. Patriot Act legislation authorized unchecked government surveillance powers. Everyone’s potentially watched. There’s no place to hide.

Obama bears fully responsibility. He targets fundamental freedoms. He does so ruthlessly. He’s done it throughout his tenure.

Constitutional rights don’t matter. America’s High Court supports him. So do congressional leaders.

On Wednesday, House members defeated a Defense Department appropriations bill amendment. It prohibited NSA from collecting bulk telephone metadata.

It “requir(ed) the FISA court under (the Patriot Act’s) Sec. 215 to order the production of records that pertain only to a person under investigation.”

Voting was close. The measure nearly passed. It had bipartisan support. It was defeated 217 – 205. Obama strongly opposed it.

Heavy-handed administration tactics demanded congressional compliance. Ahead of the vote, NSA head General Keith Alexander met with congressional leaders.

He did so secretly. He was dispatched to bully and pressure. He got enough support to win. A White House press release was typical Obama.

Doublespeak duplicity headlined. Lies, damn lies, and ObamaSpeak said:

“In light of the recent unauthorized disclosures, the President has said that he welcomes a debate about how best to simultaneously safeguard both our national security and the privacy of our citizens.”

“The Administration has taken various proactive steps to advance this debate including the President’s meeting with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, his public statements on the disclosed programs, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s release of its own public statements, ODNI General Counsel Bob Litt’s speech at Brookings, and ODNI’s decision to declassify and disclose publicly that the Administration filed an application with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

“We look forward to continuing to discuss these critical issues with the American people and the Congress.”

“However, we oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools.”

“This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process.”

“We urge the House to reject the Amash Amendment, and instead move forward with an approach that appropriately takes into account the need for a reasoned review of what tools can best secure the nation.”

In other words, Obama demands continued lawless NSA spying. House members approved. For sure Senate ones would. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) attorney Kurt Opsahl:

“This amendment reflected the deep discomfort of Americans who don’t want the government collecting data on them indiscriminately.”

“This type of surveillance is unnecessary and unconstitutional, a needless return to the general warrants that our country’s founders fought against.”

EFF’s Rainey Reitman added:

“We were heartened by the many supporters from across the country who called their representative to support the amendment, laying the foundation for further Congressional action to investigate the NSA spying and enact greater privacy protections.”

The fight for justice continues. First Unitarian v. NSA pursues it. EFF represents plaintiffs. Nineteen organizations, Los Angeles Unitarian Church groups and others filed suit.

NSA’s charged with violating First, Fourth and other constitutional rights. In early July, Northern District of California federal Judge Jeffrey White ruled for EFF.

He rejected Obama’s secret privilege claims. Doing so permits EFF’s Jewel v. NSA and Shubert v. Obama suits to proceed.

According to EFF’s Cindy Cohn:

“The court rightly found that the traditional legal system can determine the legality of the mass, dragnet surveillance of innocent Americans and rejected the government’s invocation of the state secrets privilege to have the case dismissed.”

“Over the last month, we came face-to-face with new details of mass, untargeted collection of phone and Internet records, substantially confirmed by the Director of National Intelligence.”

“Today’s decision sets the stage for finally getting a ruling that can stop the dragnet surveillance and restore Americans’ constitutional rights.”

In his ruling, Judge White said the heart of EFF’s suit isn’t a state secret. Classified details can be litigated. FISA Act provisions apply.

“Congress intended for FISA to displace the common law rules such as the state secrets privilege with regard to matter within FISA’s purview,” he explained.

EFF suits target lawless NSA spying. Millions of ordinary Americans are affected. Government officials remain unaccountable. Hard evidence document’s what’s intolerable.

“We will continue to push Congress to rein in unconstitutional surveillance,” said EFF. It’s Stopwatching.us campaign continues.

It targets police state lawlessness. It persists. It’s worse than ever. It threatens freedom everywhere. Occupy Wall Street is right. The only solution is world revolution.

Regime change begins at home. It’s a national priority. It’s essential. The stakes are too high. Challenging extrajudicial authority’s essential.

Electoral politics doesn’t work. It never did. It doesn’t now. Monied interests rule. Politicians are bought like toothpaste. Duopoly power runs America. Vital change is necessary.

Popular struggles matter. Sustained commitment works. Collective activism has power. What better time to use it than now.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at .

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The Illuminati Depopulation Agenda

While the global elite construct underground bunkers, eat organic and hoard seeds in Arctic vaults; the global poor are being slowly starved thanks to high commodity prices and poisoned with genetically modified (GMO) food. Austerity measures aimed largely at the poor are being imposed on all the nations of the world. Weather events grow more deadly and brushfire wars more frequent. An AK-47 can be obtained for $49 in the markets of West Africa. The depopulation campaign of the inbred Illuminatibankers is accelerating.

In 1957 President Dwight Eisenhower, who later warned of a “military-industrial complex”, commissioned a panel of scientists to study the issue of overpopulation. The scientists put forth Alternatives I, II and III, advocating both the release of deadly viruses and perpetual warfare as means to decrease world population.

The first supposition dovetailed nicely with the pharmaceutical interests of the Rockefellers. According to Nexus magazine, the Rockefellers own one-half of the US pharmaceutical industry, which would reap billions developing medicines to “battle” the deadly viruses about to be released.

In 1969 the Senate Church Committee discovered that the US Defense Department (DOD) had requested a budget of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars for a program to speed development of new viruses which target and destroy the human immune system. DOD officials testified before Congress that they planned to produce, “a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could be acquired… Most important is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.” House Bill 5090 authorized the funds and MK-NAOMI was carried out at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Out of this research came the AIDS virus which was targeted at “undesirable elements” of the population. The first AIDS viruses were administered through a massive smallpox vaccine campaign in central and southern Africa by the World Health Organization in 1977. A year later ads appeared in major US newspapers soliciting “promiscuous gay male volunteers” to take part in a Hepatitis B vaccine study. [1]

The program targeted male homosexuals age 20-40 in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco. It was administered by the US Centers for Disease Control which, under its earlier incarnation as the US Public Health Department in Atlanta, oversaw the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on African American males. [2]

San Francisco has been a target of numerous CIA experiments, due to its high population of left-leaning and gay citizens, which the Illuminati views as “undesirables”. According to Dr. Eva Snead, San Francisco has one of the highest cancer rates in the country. For years, malathion – first developed by the Nazis – was sprayed over the city by helicopters from the CIA’s Evergreen Air, whose Arizona base is used, according to author William Cooper, as CIA transshipment point for Columbian cocaine. The mysterious Legionnaire’s Disease occurs often in San Francisco and the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind control bad acid program was based there.

The intellectual force behind the introduction of AIDS was the Bilderberger Group, which became fixated on population control after WWII. Author Cooper says the Policy Committee of the Bilderbergers gave orders to DOD to introduce the AIDS virus. The Bilderbergers are close to the Club of Rome, which was founded on a Rockefeller estate near Bellagio, Italy and is backed by the same European Black Nobility who frequent Bilderberger meetings. A 1968 study by the Club of Rome advocated lowering the birth rate and increasing the death rate. Club founder Dr. Aurelio Peccei made a top-secret recommendation to introduce a microbe that would attack the auto-immune system, then develop a vaccine as a prophylactic for the global elite. [3]

One month after the 1968 Club of Rome meeting Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The book hints at a draconian depopulation plan in the works. On page seventeen Ehrlich writes, “The problem could have been avoided by population control…so that a ‘death rate solution’ did not have to occur.” A year later MK-NAOMI was born. Peccei himself authored the Club of Rome’s much-touted Global 2000 report, which President Jimmy Carter pushed on his BCCI shakedown cruise of Africa. Peccei wrote in the report, “Man is now vested with unprecedented, tremendous responsibilities and thrown into the role of moderator of life on the planet- including his own”.

The Bilderbergers were behind the Haig-Kissinger Depopulation Policy, a driving force at the State Department and administered by the National Security Council. Pressure is applied to Third World countries to reduce their populations. Those that do not comply see their US aid withheld or are subject to Pink Plan low-intensity war that targets civilians, especially women of child-bearing age. In Africa famine and brush-fire wars are encouraged. AK-47 rifles can be bought at West African markets for under $50. The same is true in the markets of Peshawar, Pakistan. In 1975, a year after attending a Club of Rome conference on the topic, Secretary of State Kissinger founded the Office of Population Affairs (OPA).

DOD officials testified before Congress that they planned to produce, “a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could be acquired… Most important is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.”

Latin American OPA case officer Thomas Ferguson spilled the beans on OPA’s agenda when he stated, “There is a single theme behind all our work; we must reduce population levels. Either they do it our way, through nice clean methods or they will get the kind of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran, or in Beirut…Once population is out of control it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it…The professionals aren’t interested in reducing population for humanitarian reasons…Civil wars are somewhat drawn-out ways to reduce population. The quickest way to reduce population is through famine like in Africa. We go into a country and say, here is your goddamn development plan. Throw it out the window. Start looking at your population…if you don’t …then you’ll have an El Salvador or an Iran, or worse, a Cambodia”. [4]

Ferguson said of El Salvador, “To accomplish what the State Department deems adequate population control, the civil war (run by CIA) would have to be greatly expanded. You have to pull all the males into fighting and kill significant numbers of fertile, child-bearing age females. You are killing a small number of males and not enough fertile females to do the job…If the war went on 30-40 years, you might accomplish something. Unfortunately, we don’t have too many instances of this to study”.

Report from Iron Mountain

In 1961 Kennedy Administration officials McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk, all CFR and Bilderberger members, led a study group which looked into “the problem of peace”. The group met at Iron Mountain, a huge underground corporate nuclear shelter near Hudson, New York, where CFR think tank The Hudson Institute is located. The bunker contains redundant offices in case of nuclear attack for Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell and JP Morgan Chase. [5] A copy of the group discussions, known as , was leaked by a participant and published in 1967 by Dial Press.

The report’s authors saw war as necessary and desirable stating “War itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire. (War is) the principal organizing force…the essential economic stabilizer of modern societies.” The group worried that through “ambiguous leadership” the “ruling administrative class” might lose its ability to “rationalize a desired war”, leading to the “actual disestablishment of military institutions”.

The report goes on to say, “…the war system cannot responsibly be allowed to disappear until…we know exactly what we plan to put in its place…The possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which no government can long remain in power…The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in its war powers. War has served as the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary classes.”

Historian Howard Zinn described this conundrum when he wrote, “American capitalism needed international rivalry- and periodic war- to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor, supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements”.

The Iron Mountain gang was not the first to discover the virtues of war. In 1909 the trustees of the Andrew Carnegie Foundation for International Peace met to discuss pre-WWI American life. Many of the participants were members of Skull & Bones. They concluded, “There are no known means more efficient than war, assuming the objective is altering the life of an entire people…How do we involve the United States in a war?”

The Report from Iron Mountain goes on to propose a proper role for those of the lower classes, crediting military institutions with providing “antisocial elements with an acceptable role in the social structure.  The younger and more dangerous of these hostile social groupings have been kept under control by the Selective Service System…A possible surrogate for the control of potential enemies of society is the reintroduction, in some form consistent with modern technology and political process, of slavery…The development of a sophisticated form of slavery may be an absolute prerequisite for social control in a world at peace.”

“…the war system cannot responsibly be allowed to disappear until… we know exactly what we plan to put in its place… The possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which no government can long remain in power… The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in its war powers. War has served as the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary classes.”  

The Iron Mountain goons, though thrilled by the idea of slavery, listed as other socioeconomic substitutions for war: a comprehensive social welfare program, a giant open-ended space program aimed at unreachable targets, a permanent arms inspection regime, an omnipresent global police and peacekeeping force, massive global environmental pollution which would require a large labor pool to clean up, socially-oriented blood sports and a comprehensive eugenics program. [6]

The Iraqi genocide fulfilled the dreams of the Club of Rome Zero Population Growth maniacs, while also providing a testing ground for two of the war substitutes proposed by the Iron Mountain fascists: an arms inspection regime and UN peacekeepers.  Both concepts gained traction in the international community thanks to the Gulf War.

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Let the Iraqi Genocide Begin

Estimates of Iraqi casualties during the Gulf War are sobering.  Some organizations like Greenpeace put the death toll at near one million people.  It was a war in which the media was denied access on a scale never before seen, so casualty figures vary greatly.  According to Tony Murphy, a researcher at the International War Crimes Tribunal, the US attack on Iraq killed 125,000 civilians, while destroying 676 schools, 38 hospitals, 8 major hydroelectric dams, 11 power plants, 119 power substations and half the country’s telephone lines.  The attacks occurred mostly at night when people were most vulnerable.

In the months following the war the death rate of Iraqi children under five tripled.  Thirty-eight percent of these deaths were caused by diarrhea. [7]  Victor Filatov, a Russian journalist reporting for Sovetskaya Rossiya from post-war Baghdad wrote, “What further bloodshed do these barbarians of the 20th century need?  I thought the Americans had changed since Vietnam…but no, they never change.  They remain true to themselves.”

According to former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, the US was found guilty of nineteen war crimes against Iraq before the .  The US dropped 88,000 tons of bombs on Iraq during the Gulf War and has rained down countless more bombs since.  Many bombs were tipped with armor piercing depleted uranium (DU) warheads, which may account for chronic Iraqi health problems.  Dr. Siegwart-Horst Gunther, a German physician who came to Iraq to help its people, became gravely ill when he handled just one cigar-sized fragment from a DU warhead.  Dr. Gunther measured the tiny object’s radioactivity to be 11 microSv per hour, whereas an acceptable exposure is no more than 300 microSv per year. [8]  Three hundred tons of DU ammunition was deployed during the war.

Many believe DU is responsible for Gulf War Syndrome, which has killed and permanently injured many US soldiers who fought in the Persian Gulf theater.  Since 2000, nearly 11,000 US Gulf War veterans have died from Gulf War Syndrome, while the Pentagon continues to cover up this travesty.

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Satanism & Psychotronic Warfare

The US also tested numerous top-secret high-tech weapons systems in the Gulf theatre, while utilizing some old low-frequency favorites.  When Iraqi ground forces surrendered, many of them were in a state of delirium and lethargy that could have been induced by extremely low-frequency radio waves, which the US used as a weapon as early as the Vietnam conflict.

Yale University and CIA psychiatrist Dr. Jose Delgado studied mind control for the Company during the 1950’s as part of the MK-ULTRA program.  Delgado determined, “Physical control of many brain functions is a demonstrated fact…it is even possible to create and follow intentions…By electronic stimulation of specific cerebral structures, movements can be induced by radio command…by remote control.”

According to a military document written by Colonel Paul Valley and Major Michael Aquino titled From PSYOP to Mindwar: The Psychology of Victory, the US Army used an operational weapons system “to map the minds of neutral and enemy individuals and then to change them in accordance with US national interests”.  The technique was used to secure the surrender of 29,276 armed Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers in 1967 and 1968.  The US Navy was also heavily involved in “psychotronic” research. [9]  Many US soldiers who served near the DMZ that divided North and South Vietnam claimed to see UFOs on a regular basis.  The Pentagon Papers revealed that an electronic barrier was placed along the DMZ by the secretive JASON Society.

Major Michael Aquino was an Army psyops specialist in Vietnam, where his unit specialized in drug-inducement, brainwashing, virus injection, brain implants, hypnosis, and use of electromagnetic fields and extremely low-frequency radio waves.  After Vietnam, Aquino moved to San Francisco and founded the Temple of Set.  Set is the ancient Egyptian name for Lucifer.  Aquino was now a senior US Military Intelligence official. [10]  He’d been given a Top Secret security clearance on June, 9, 1981.  Less than a month later an Army intelligence memo revealed that Aquino’s Temple of Set was an off-shoot of Anton La Vey’s Church of Satan, also headquartered in San Francisco. Two other Set members were Willie Browning and Dennis Mann.  Both were Army Intelligence officers.

The Temple of Set was obsessed with military matters and political fascism.  It was especially preoccupied with the Nazi Order of the Trapezoid.  Aquino’s “official” job was history professor at Golden Gate College.  The Temple recruited the same Hells Angels who Billy Mellon Hitchcock had used to dole out his bad CIA acid.  Its members frequented prostitutes where they engaged in all manner of sadomasochistic activities. [11]  Director of Army Counter-Intelligence Donald Press revealed that Dennis Mann was assigned to the 306 PSYOPS Battalion and that Aquino was assigned to a top secret program known as Presidio.

Presidio is also the name of a spooky complex in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which Mikhail Gorbachev reportedly frequented as the Soviet Union was falling apart.  Was Aquino part of an operation to “map the mind” of the Soviet Union’s last leader and induce him into proposing both glasnost and perestroika, the two free market policies that ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s demise?  Remember the curious mark which suddenly appeared on Gorbachev’s forehead?  Was he implanted with some sort of microchip mind-control device to make him think “in accordance with US national interests”?

Such Orwellian technology is marketed on a regular basis throughout the world.  International Healthline Corporation and others sell microchip implants in the US, Russia and Europe.  The Humane Society has adopted a policy of micro-chipping all stray pets. The State of Hawaii requires that all pets be micro-chipped.  Six thousand people in Sweden have accepted a microchip in their hand, which they use for all purchases. Trials are also underway in Japan.  In July 2002, National Public Radio reported a similar trial beginning in Seattle.  Later in 2002, after a rash of suspicious abductions of young girls, BBC reported that a British company plans to implant children with microchips so that their parents can monitor their whereabouts.

Dr. Carl Sanders, a highly acclaimed electronics engineer, revealed that a microchip project he launched to help people with severed spinal cords was taken over by Bill Colby’s in a series of meetings organized by Henry Kissinger.  Sanders says the optimal spot for a microchip implant is just below the hairline on a person’s forehead, since the device can be recharged by changes in body temperatures, which are most pronounced there.  Interestingly, this is the location of the pineal gland or Third Eye.

The 1986 Emigration Control Act grants the President the power to mandate any kind of ID he deems necessary. [12]  Researchers at Southern California have developed a chip which mimics the hippocampus, the part of the brain that deals with memory.  Pentagon officials are interested in using it in experiments to create a “super-soldier”. [13]  Another microchip called Brain Gate is being implanted in paralyzed people.  It allows them to control their environment by simply thinking. [14]

In Iraq, psychological warfare gave way to slow genocide.  According to UNICEF, as of late 2001, 1.5 million Iraqi children had died as a result of sanctions, while one child in ten died before their first birthday.  Thalassemia, anemia and diarrhea were the biggest killers and could have been prevented were it not for a chronic shortage of blood and medicine in Iraq due to the sanctions.  UN Committee 661 served as arbiter of what constituted a “dual use” item and therefore banned for import into Iraq.  As of 2001, over 1,600 Iraqi contracts with Western companies for medical equipment had been blocked by 661. [15]

Yale University and CIA psychiatrist Dr. Jose Delgado studied mind control for the Company during the 1950’s as part of the MK-ULTRA program.  Delgado determined, “Physical control of many brain functions is a demonstrated fact…it is even possible to create and follow intentions…By electronic stimulation of specific cerebral structures, movements can be induced by radio command…by remote control.”

The Gulf War decimated Iraq’s sewer and water treatment systems.  Iraqis were forced to drink polluted water, leading to numerous health problems.  Iraq was not allowed to import chlorine to clean the water since 661 deemed it a potential chemical weapon.  Electrical power was rationed in three-hour daily increments per household since the Iraqi government couldn’t get the parts it needed to fix its power plants after the US bombed its entire power grid.  With the devaluation of the Iraqi dinar and the ban on the export of 2.4 million barrels of oil per day, the average Iraqi lived on $2.50 a month- enough to buy a pair of shoes.  The only Iraqis not affected were the wealthy elite, who had long ago stashed their savings overseas in US dollars.

UNICEF estimates that 28% of Iraqi children no longer went to school.  Before the war almost all children attended.  Often families could only afford to send one child to school because of the cost of simple things like backpacks, shoes and notebooks.  Rafah Salam Aziz, Director of Mansour Children’s Hospital, said parents were often forced to make similar decisions about their children’s lives.  Aziz said, “Many times it’s easier for a family to let a baby die rather than let the whole family go hungry and get sick.”[16]

In 1996 Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry announced a new military buildup in the Persian Gulf.  Soon cruise missiles were again raining down on Baghdad.  Many nations now grew weary of both US bombing and the sanctions regime, which was brutalizing the Iraqi people while strengthening the grip of Saddam Hussein.  Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whose country signed a deal with Iraq to rebuild its shattered oil sector, said he was disturbed at the use of “extreme and radical force against the Arab world”.  The Russian opposition offered a more scalding appraisal.  Alexander Lebed stating angrily, “The US is like a strong master who spits on everybody.”[17]

Turkey, Jordan and Syria all expressed unease over the new round of bombing.  Even the Saudis, where Islamic fundamentalism was on the rise and two major bombings had occurred at US bases, now refused to allow the US to use its bases to bomb Iraq.  Many countries, including France, began openly flaunting the UN embargo against Iraq in the late 1990’s.

Dennis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary of the UN who initially headed the UN Humanitarian Program to Iraq, resigned his post in protest. He said sanctions were demolishing the very class of Iraqi people who wanted to create a better government in the country.  He was scornful of the UN Oil for Food Program under which the US received 70% of Iraqi oil.  Halliday stated plainly, “We are guilty of committing genocide, through the Security Council, against Iraq.”[18]

Halliday’s 1998 successor was Hans Van Sponeck, who watched as the UN unfurled the UNSCOM arms inspection regime, paid for by Iraqi oil sales.  US inspector Scott Ritter confirmed Iraqi suspicions that UNSCOM was gathering intelligence for CIA and Mossad.  UNSCOM was just the latest CIA tool.  In 1996 the Iraqi government claimed international relief agencies, including the World Food Program, which claimed to be helping the Kurds, were actually CIA operatives attempting to destabilize the country.

In fact the CIA had spent more than $20 million in its support of the Iraqi National Congress, led by long-time CIA surrogate Jalal Talibani’s PKK Kurdish faction. [19]  In January 1997 Iraq uncovered two Mossad spy rings in one month following the attempted assassination of Saddam Hussein’s son. [20]  Hans Van Sponeck had seen enough. He too resigned in protest.

In early 1999 it was revealed that the US had used UNSCOM to plant electronic bugging devices in the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.  Arms inspector Scott Ritter said the CIA was using UNSCOM to “provoke a crisis”.  In December 1998 UNSCOM, faced with the embarrassing accusations of espionage, pulled out of Iraq.  On December 15th the US launched a new round of bombing.  Ritter says intelligence gathered by UNSCOM was used for targeting. UNSCOM spokesman David Kay resurfaced in 2003 calling for a US invasion of Iraq. He now worked for SAIC, which landed numerous Pentagon contracts to rebuild Iraq.

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Dean Henderson is the author of four books: , ,  and Das Kartell der Federal Reserve.To subscribe to Dean’s weekly blog, Left Hook, go to www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

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Footnotes:

• [1] Behold a Pale Horse. William Cooper. Light Technology Press. Sedona, AZ. 1991. p.166
• [2] Robot’s Rebellion: The Story of the Spiritual Renaissance. David Icke. Gateway Books. Bath, UK. 1994. p.305
• [3] Cooper. p.166
• [4] Ibid
• [5] Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Great Pyramids. Jim Marrs. HarperCollins Publishers. New York. 2000. p.114
• [6] Ibid. 116
• [7] “Child Death Rate Jumps in Iraq”. AP. Great Falls Tribune. 9-24-92. p.8
• [8] “Depleted Uranium”. Siegwart-Horst Gunther. Covert Action Quarterly. Winter 2001. p.2
• [9] Cooper. p.369
• [10] Icke. p.221
• [11] Cooper. p.361
• [12] Icke. p.223
• [13] Inquirer. UK. 10-25-05
• [14] PhysOrg News. 11-1-95 www.physorg.com/news7746.html
• [15] “Greetings from Missile Street”. Free Speech TV. Boulder, CO. 12-23-01
• [16] “US Economic Sanctions Taking Very Human Toll in Iraq”. Great Falls Tribune. 9-13-92.
• [17] “Slamming Saddam”. Time. 9-16-96. p.31
• [18] “The Unfinished War”. CNN. 1-6-02
• [19] Evening Edition. National Public Radio. 9-10-96
• [20] BBC World News. 1-8-97

Source: Dean Henderson | VeteransToday

The Politics of The Human Heart

When I was in grade school, the alarms would begin and, whether we were in instruction or at lunch or recess, we knew what those sirens meant. We would put down whatever was in our hands—pencils, forks, a softball—and file into the auditorium. There we would put our heads between our knees, cover our little necks with our forearms and wait for either doomsday or the all clear.

Some little girls would always begin to sob. We never knew whether it was a drill or not until the all clear sounded.

Unlike so many of my classmates, I was never worried. A small voice inside me told me there was no real danger from Soviet missiles and, bolstered by this, I remained aloof, calm.

But the small still voice told me something else. Later, it told me. The danger will come later.

We are no longer children, those of us who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Red Threat. We have accumulated layers of knowledge, wisdom and, unlike seven year olds unable to quite stifle their terror, we have learned methods to deal with a sense of imminent threat.

Or have we?

At the core of the sensibility of weeping children, filing into an auditorium for an unknown conclusion, was fear. Fear for self and fear for those we loved.

That fear is still ostensibly at the core of what drives our most personal and political of actions. This fear could also be called the “survival instinct,” “fight or flight” and forms a substantial tributary into how we form our lives. Do we speak out when we see someone being hurt? Do we first take stock of the personal ramifications for so doing? Do we post anonymously on the Internet, attacking or supporting others under a comfortable veil of hidden identity? Do we give of our time and energies when there is no ostensible personal gain attached? Does our work take us into realms of information access that would be safer for us to not acknowledge having?

The human heart has always been divided in its desire to protect itself, set against its desire to expand, to embrace and identify with others—to be of use. The list of those whose lives were dictated by the latter mandate reads like a list of the crucified—Martin Luther King and Gandhi may be two of the most distinguished modern day martyrs—-but the actual list of names casts back to the beginnings of history and many of the names of those martyred for love—and isn’t that what we are talking about?—love vs. self obsession—have been buried in the wake of their extreme acts of goodness—-a goodness which has always been perilous to possess.

But the stakes are higher now. Joan d’Arc went up in flames because she obeyed the voice of God and angered the British. Her crimes of heresy and insubordination echo both backwards and forwards through history. Karen Silkwood took on a chemical Goliath and paid for it with her very breath—once again, defying the powerful in acts of both heresy and disrespect for authority. Random acts of rebellion seem less random and garner more attention because the world is smaller now. The density and focus of accumulated power gives every gesture of goodness, every act of self transcendence a concomitant greater potential for tipping the balance.

In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations of the degree and extent to which the U.S has constructed a Stasi like surveillance society, we can see again how the two competing desires of the human heart—self protection and self expansion—are duking it out. Some individuals will want to retract even further, given the shocking knowledge that what they thought were private and secure communications may have lit up the NSA computers like a pinball arcade. Others may react as if a gauntlet has been thrown down—You are listening to WHAT? You are keeping files on me for WHAT?–and as a result only multiply efforts to establish connections and reach out to others, defying the watchers.

The most revolutionary act has always been an act of self transcendence. There is no upheaval, no paradigm shift attached to bean counting, whether in monetary transactions or in how we relate energetically to others. To activate one’s knowledge, one’s potential for making the leap from “ME” to ”NOT ME” may be one of the most radical acts possible, given the pervasiveness of the politics of fear and self protection.

We live in exceptional times. We are faced with exceptional opportunities—to change the course of history, which is tunneling deeper and deeper towards global totalitarianism. This challenge is being delivered to each and every one of us. We can shut ourselves down and hope we have escaped attention, all too understandable in light of the human propensity for self protection. This decision will only ensure the success of the global lockdown being thrust upon us.

Or, we can take another route. This other route is bathed in the incandescence of something we have been taught to scoff at—a moral absolute. It is both thrilling and sobering to realize that one is participating in the resistance against something so enormous, baffling in its complexity and shadowy reach. This other road defines in the most fundamental sense what it means to be human. It also redefines a symbol—the crossroads—which we have been taught to accept as the sign of the death and resurrection of God.

The crossroads, however, is also a symbol of the intersection between earth and sky, the juncture at which what is flesh connects with that which is greater and more enduring. This is the opportunity that has been afforded us—to participate in the future of our world in ways that provide the possibility that there will be a future.

The crossroads is also a symbol of choice. This other road—the road of fearlessness and love—invites us to live largely. It does not ensure our personal safety and security. It only offers us something far greater than that.

The Last Step For War – Keeping Saddam Hussein In Iraq

Why did Saddam Hussein stay in Iraq? There was every motive to leave. He had seen what happened to leaders who attempt to withstand the corporate interests who are looking for an opportunity to loot a country. While John Perkins had not yet written his book, “Confessions of an Economic Hitman,” he knew the score. He could never withstand an invasion by America. He was not suicidal. He had gotten his start as a hire for the CIA and knew what was poised to happen to him, his family, and his nation.

Cast you mind back to those dark days when we were reeling, the images of towers falling from the sky still engraved on our retinas.

Voices were being raised in objection and silenced.

Look over the time line appearing in Mother Jones, September/October 2006 Issue, titled, by Jonathan Stein and Tim Dickinson.

The war against Iraq began June, 2002, with intense bombing. The U. S. military flew 21,736 sorties and attacked 349 targets between June and the official start of the war in 2003.

Bombing is an act of war.

Rove, Cheney, and the Bush Administration, thwarted with the lack of evidence Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, falsified evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Reports by debunked sources, specifically Curveball, who is known to be unreliable, are treated as trusted sources.

Every conceivable action is taken to suppress the truth and allow the spin campaign, which began as the White House Iraq Group in August of 2002. This included, Rove, Libby, Rice, as well as Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin.

Cheney personally lied, over and over again, to get Congress to acquiesce, to the media and to the public.

The Administration knew they were manufacturing, spinning, to start a war even while Saddam Hussein was offering to allow UN inspectors in (September 18, 2002) and all reports from returning CIA moles affirmed Saddam had abandoned WMD programs. This information is buried in the CIA bureaucracy.

Anything which disagrees with the drive for war in Iraq is suppressed. Lies, ‘sexing up,’ reports, are reported publicly.

The use of torture has been rationalized and is being used, despite the Geneva Conventions and Protocols on Human Rights and the Conduct of Hostilities.

The Bush Administration is, collectively, behaving like a bunch of chimps working themselves up to violence, to a person, ignoring their actions are, effectively, converting a nation dedicated to individual freedom and human rights into its antitheses.

One September 26, 2002, during a Rose Garden speech, Bush said, “”The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons.”” The same day, during a speech in Houston Bush said of Saddam, “After all, this is a guy who tried to kill my dad.”

Two days later Bush said in his address to nation: “‘The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more, and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given.”‘

In an ominous foreshadowing of what was to come, Bush delivered a speech on October 7, 2002, in which he stated, “‘Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”‘ Today we know effective deployment of drone technology was far beyond anything available to anyone – but the U. S.

Battered and intimidated, on October 11th, “Congress—including all serious Democratic contenders—votes to grant Bush power to go to war.”  On November 5th, control of the Congress moved to the GOP. The campaign of lies, using fear and their love of country, had allowed the ongoing theft of elections by Karl Rove to work again.

On November 10th the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1441 offering Iraq ‘”a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.”” Iraq immediately agreed and UN weapons inspectors returned.

Saddam Hussein would have known of every comment and been forced to consider his options. His country was being hammered by bombs, his plans to sell oil to partners other than the U. S. were, therefore stymied. It would be a compelling reality for him to consider an exit strategy at this point.

Only one event could now stop the War in Iraq from going forward, for Saddam to offer to leave Iraq. Given his options, this would have been the only safe thing for him to do. All previous events, now clear to us and documented, show he was being set up. His very life, and those of his family members, were on the line.

Saddam made just this offer in November of 2002.

Clearly, the Bush Administration would ignore this request. Saddam, therefore, made contact with the previous administration. The Clintons, through their associate Sidney Blumenthal, former White House and his son, Max, pulled out all of the stops to ensure the one event which could derail plans to invade Iraq.

The offer was made by Saddam, via email, through Max Blumenthal, this forwarded on to his father. With the Clintons assurances, they were able to persuade Saddam to stay in Iraq.

Sidney was then unaware his computer had been hacked. A keylogger was sending his emails to another party, who reported this to the CIA. The same party then found themselves subject to a barrage of harassment and threats beginning as the Iraqi Invasion began.

How much was it worth to keep Saddam in place? Could pay-offs have been made to ensure the cooperation, and silence, of the Clintons and Blumenthals?

According to a Los Angeles Times article, titled, “Clintons disclose wealth,”published April 05, 2008| written by Peter Nicholas, Robin Fields and Dan Morain,when the Clinton’s left the White House, “in January 2001, they (The Clintons) had amassed more than $11 million in legal debts, incurred during investigations into the Whitewater controversy and the former president’s affair with Monica S. Lewinsky.” Within the next year or so their, “returns show that the family’s annual income shot up after her husband left the White House, rising from $358,000 in 2000 to $16 million a year later, when Bill Clinton listed his occupation as “speaking and writing.” “

Sidney Blumenthal also left the White House in less than prosperous financial condition. The cause was also a law suit stemming from elements of the NeoCon cabal which went into the White House in 2001.

In 1997, Blumenthal had filed a $30 million libel lawsuit against Internet blogger Matt Drudge and AOL, Drudge’s employer, because of a false claim Drudge made of spousal abuse.

In fact, the article was the brain child of Drudge and John Fund, then still on the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal. Drudge had attributed the story to “top GOP sources.” Drudge later retracted the story.

Drudge publicly apologized to the Blumenthals and the lawsuit was dropped with Blumenthal, who, ironically, settled by making a small payment to Drudge over a missed deposition.

In his book, The Clinton Wars, Blumenthal claimed he was forced to settle because he could no longer financially afford the suit, which had proven to be expensive. Drudge, who was guilty, had managed to receive support from both solicitations, claiming he was being harassed, and likely from operatives working for the NeoCons.

Saddam’s actions, in offering to leave, were entirely predictable.

Soliciting support from the Clintons, by the Bush White House, resulted a cooperative relationship between the former and then president which was mutually beneficial, ending any threat from the Clintons and sealing them into a role within the power elite, which they continue to enjoy today.

Boston Marathon, This Thing Called Terrorism, And The United States

What is it that makes young men, reasonably well educated, in good health and nice looking, with long lives ahead of them, use powerful explosives to murder complete strangers because of political beliefs?

I’m speaking about American military personnel of course, on the ground, in the air, or directing drones from an office in Nevada.

Do not the survivors of US attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and elsewhere, and their loved ones, ask such a question?

The survivors and loved ones in Boston have their answer – America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That’s what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston bomber has said in custody, and there’s no reason to doubt that he means it, nor the dozens of others in the past two decades who have carried out terrorist attacks against American targets and expressed anger toward US foreign policy. 1 Both Tsarnaev brothers had expressed such opinions before the attack as well.  2 The Marathon bombing took place just days after a deadly US attack in Afghanistan killed 17 civilians, including 12 children, as but one example of countless similar horrors from recent years. “Oh”, an American says, “but those are accidents. What terrorists do is on purpose. It’s cold-blooded murder.”

But if the American military sends out a bombing mission on Monday which kills multiple innocent civilians, and then the military announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” And then on Tuesday the American military sends out a bombing mission which kills multiple innocent civilians, and then the military announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” And then on Wednesday the American military sends out a bombing mission which kills multiple innocent civilians, and the military then announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” … Thursday … Friday … How long before the American military loses the right to say it was an accident?

Terrorism is essentially an act of propaganda, to draw attention to a cause. The 9-11 perpetrators attacked famous symbols of American military and economic power. Traditionally, perpetrators would phone in their message to a local media outlet beforehand, but today, in this highly-surveilled society, with cameras and electronic monitoring at a science-fiction level, that’s much more difficult to do without being detected; even finding a public payphone can be near impossible.

From what has been reported, the older brother, Tamerlan, regarded US foreign policy also as being anti-Islam, as do many other Muslims. I think this misreads Washington’s intentions. The American Empire is not anti-Islam. It’s anti-only those who present serious barriers to the Empire’s plan for world domination.

The United States has had close relations with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Qatar, amongst other Islamic states. And in recent years the US has gone to great lengths to overthrow the leading secular states of the Mideast – Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Moreover, it’s questionable that Washington is even against terrorism per se, but rather only those terrorists who are not allies of the empire. There has been, for example, a lengthy and infamous history of tolerance, and often outright support, for numerous anti-Castro terrorists, even when their terrorist acts were committed in the United States. Hundreds of anti-Castro and other Latin American terrorists have been given haven in the US over the years. The United States has also provided support to terrorists in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran, Libya, and Syria, including those with known connections to al Qaeda, to further foreign policy goals more important than fighting terrorism.

Under one or more of the harsh anti-terrorist laws enacted in the United States in recent years, President Obama could be charged with serious crimes for allowing the United States to fight on the same side as al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Libya and Syria and for funding and supplying these groups. Others in the United States have been imprisoned for a lot less.

As a striking example of how Washington has put its imperialist agenda before anything else, we can consider the case of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan warlord whose followers first gained attention in the 1980s by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. This is how these horrible men spent their time when they were not screaming “Death to America”. CIA and State Department officials called Hekmatyar “scary,” “vicious,” “a fascist,” “definite dictatorship material”. 3 This did not prevent the United States government from showering the man with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan. 4 Hekmatyar is still a prominent warlord in Afghanistan.

A similar example is that of Luis Posada who masterminded the bombing of a Cuban airline in 1976, killing 73 civilians. He has lived a free man in Florida for many years.

USA Today reported a few months ago about a rebel fighter in Syria who told the newspaper in an interview: “The afterlife is the only thing that matters to me, and I can only reach it by waging jihad.” 5 Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have chosen to have a shootout with the Boston police as an act of suicide; to die waging jihad, although questions remain about exactly how he died. In any event, I think it’s safe to say that the authorities wanted to capture the brothers alive to be able to question them.

It would be most interesting to be present the moment after a jihadist dies and discovers, with great shock, that there’s no afterlife. Of course, by definition, there would have to be an afterlife for him to discover that there’s no afterlife. On the other hand, a non-believer would likely be thrilled to find out that he was wrong.

Let us hope that the distinguished statesmen, military officers, and corporate leaders who own and rule America find out in this life that to put an end to anti-American terrorism they’re going to have to learn to live without unending war against the world. There’s no other defense against a couple of fanatic young men with backpacks. Just calling them insane or evil doesn’t tell you enough; it may tell you nothing.

But this change in consciousness in the elite is going to be extremely difficult, as difficult as it appears to be for the parents of the two boys to accept their sons’ guilt. Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, stated after the Boston attack: “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world. In some respects, the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks … We should be asking ourselves at this moment, ‘How many canaries will have to die before we awaken from our geopolitical fantasy of global domination?’” 6

Officials in Canada and Britain as well as US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice have called for Falk to be fired. 7

President Kennedy’s speech, half a century ago

I don’t know how many times in the 50 years since President John F. Kennedy made his much celebrated 1963 speech at American University in Washington, DC. 8  I’ve heard or read that if only he had lived he would have put a quick end to the war in Vietnam instead of it continuing for ten more terrible years, and that the Cold War might have ended 25 years sooner than it did. With the 50th anniversary coming up June 13 we can expect to hear a lot more of the same, so I’d like to jump the gun and offer a counter-view.

Kennedy declared:

Let us re-examine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims such as the allegation that “American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of war … that there is a very real threat of a preventative war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union” … [and that] the political aims – and I quote – “of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries … [and] to achieve world domination … by means of aggressive war.”

It is indeed refreshing that an American president would utter a thought such as: “It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write.” This is what radicals in every country wonder about their leaders, not least in the United States. For example, “incredible claims such as the allegation that ‘American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of war’.”

In Kennedy’s short time in office the United States had unleashed many different types of war, from attempts to overthrow governments and suppress political movements to assassination attempts against leaders and actual military combat – one or more of these in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, British Guiana, Iraq, Congo, Haiti, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Brazil. This is all in addition to the normal and routine CIA subversion of countries all over the world map. Did Kennedy really believe that the Soviet claims were “incredible”?

And did he really doubt that that the driving force behind US foreign policy was “world domination”? How else did he explain all the above interventions (which have continued non-stop into the 21st century)? If the president thought that the Russians were talking nonsense when they accused the US of seeking world domination, why didn’t he then disavow the incessant US government and media warnings about the “International Communist Conspiracy”? Or at least provide a rigorous definition of the term and present good evidence of its veracity.

Quoting further: “Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint.” No comment.

“We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people.” Unless of course the people foolishly insist on some form of socialist alternative. Ask the people of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, British Guiana and Cuba, just to name some of those in Kennedy’s time.

“At the same time we seek to keep peace inside the non-Communist world, where many nations, all of them our friends …” American presidents have been speaking of “our friends” for many years. What they all mean, but never say, is that “our friends” are government and corporate leaders whom we keep in power through any means necessary – the dictators, the kings, the oligarchs, the torturers – not the masses of the population, particularly those with a measure of education.

“Our efforts in West New Guinea, in the Congo, in the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, have been persistent and patient despite criticism from both sides.”

Persistent, yes. Patient, often. But moral, fostering human rights, democracy, civil liberties, self-determination, not fawning over Israel … ? As but one glaring example, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, perhaps the last chance for a decent life for the people of that painfully downtrodden land; planned by the CIA under Eisenhower, but executed under Kennedy.

“The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.”

See all of the above for this piece of hypocrisy. And so, if no nation interfered in the affairs of any other nation, there would be no wars. Brilliant. If everybody became rich there would be no poverty. If everybody learned to read there would be no illiteracy.

“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.”

So … Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, and literally dozens of other countries then, later, and now, all the way up to Libya in 2012 … they all invaded the United States first? Remarkable.

And this was the man who was going to end the war in Vietnam very soon after being re-elected the following year? Lord help us.

Bush’s legacy

This is not to put George W. Bush down. That’s too easy, and I’ve done it many times. No, this is to counter the current trend to rehabilitate the man and his Iraqi horror show, which partly coincides with the opening of his presidential library in Texas. At the dedication ceremony, President Obama spoke of Bush’s “compassion and generosity” and declared that: “He is a good man.” The word “Iraq” did not pass his lips. The closest he came at all was saying “So even as we Americans may at times disagree on matters of foreign policy, we share a profound respect and reverence for the men and women of our military and their families.” 9 Should morality be that flexible? Even for a politician? Obama could have just called in sick.

At the January 31 congressional hearing on the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense, Senator John McCain ripped into him for his critique of the Iraq war:

“The question is, were you right or were you wrong?” McCain demanded, pressing Hagel on why he opposed Bush’s decision to send 20,000 additional troops to Iraq in the so-called ‘surge’.

“I’m not going to give you a yes-or-no answer. I think it’s far more complicated than that,” Hagel responded. He said he would await the “judgment of history.”

Glaring at Hagel, McCain ended the exchange with a bitter rejoinder: “I think history has already made a judgment about the surge, sir, and you are on the wrong side of it.” 10

Before the revisionist history of the surge gets chiseled into marble, let me repeat part of what I wrote in this report at the time, December 2007:

The American progress is measured by a decrease in violence, the White House has decided – a daily holocaust has been cut back to a daily multiple catastrophe. And who’s keeping the count? Why, the same good people who have been regularly feeding us a lie for the past five years about the number of Iraqi deaths, completely ignoring the epidemiological studies. A recent analysis by the Washington Post left the administration’s claim pretty much in tatters. The article opened with: “The U.S. military’s claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.”

To the extent that there may have been a reduction in violence, we must also keep in mind that, thanks to this lovely little war, there are several million Iraqis either dead, wounded, in exile abroad, or in bursting American and Iraqi prisons. So the number of potential victims and killers has been greatly reduced. Moreover, extensive ethnic cleansing has taken place in Iraq (another good indication of progress, n’est-ce pas? nicht wahr?) – Sunnis and Shiites are now living more in their own special enclaves than before, none of those stinking mixed communities with their unholy mixed marriages, so violence of the sectarian type has also gone down. On top of all this, US soldiers have been venturing out a lot less (for fear of things like … well, dying), so the violence against our noble lads is also down.

One of the signs of the reduction in violence in Iraq, the administration would like us to believe, is that many Iraqi families are returning from Syria, where they had fled because of the violence. The New York Times, however, reported that “Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the [Iraqi] government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq”; as well as exaggerating “Iraqis’ confidence that the current lull in violence can be sustained.” The count, it turns out, included all Iraqis crossing the border, for whatever reason. A United Nations survey found that 46 percent were leaving Syria because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.

How long can it be before vacation trips to “Exotic Iraq” are flashed across our TVs? “Baghdad’s Beautiful Beaches Beckon”. Just step over the bodies. Indeed, the State Department has recently advertised for a “business development/tourism” expert to work in Baghdad, “with a particular focus on tourism and related services.” 11

Another argument raised again recently to preserve George W.’s legacy is that “He kept us safe”. Hmm … I could swear that he was in the White House around the time of September 11 … What his supporters mean is that Bush’s War on Terrorism was a success because there wasn’t another terrorist attack in the United States after September 11, 2001 while he was in office; as if terrorists killing Americans is acceptable if it’s done abroad. Following the American/Bush strike on Afghanistan in October 2001 there were literally scores of terrorist attacks – including some major ones – against American institutions in the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific: military, civilian, Christian, and other targets associated with the United States.

Even the claim that the War on Terrorism kept Americans safe at home is questionable. There was no terrorist attack in the United States during the 6 1/2 years prior to the one in September 2001; not since the April 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. It would thus appear that the absence of terrorist attacks in the United States is the norm.

William Blum speaking in Wisconsin, near Minnesota

Saturday, July 13th, the 11th Annual Peacestock: A Gathering for Peace will take place at Windbeam Farm in Hager City, WI. Peacestock is a mixture of music, speakers, and community for peace in an idyllic location near the Mississippi, just one hour’s drive from the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Peacestock is sponsored by Veterans for Peace, Chapter 115, and has a peace-themed agenda. Kathy Kelly, peace activist extraordinaire, will also speak.

You can camp there and be fed well, meat or vegetarian. Full information at:http://www.peacestockvfp.org 11

Notes

1. William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, chapters 1 and 2, for cases up to about 2003; later similar cases are numerous; e.g., Glenn Greenwald, “They Hate US for our Occupations”, Salon, October 12, 2010 ↩
2. Huffington Post, April 20, 2013; Washington Post, April 21 ↩
3. Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990), p.149-50. ↩
4. William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II ↩
5. USA Today, December 3, 2012 ↩
6. ForeignPolicyJournal.com, April 21, 2013 ↩
7. The Telegraph (London), April 25, 2013; Politico.com, April 24 ↩
8. Full text of speech ↩
9.  ↩
10. Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2013 ↩
11. Anti-Empire Report, #52, December 11, 2007 ↩

Creating A Pretext For War On Syria

What’s ongoing now bears eerie resemblance to events preceding Bush’s Iraq war. Obama’s replicating a familiar scenario.
Waging war requires a pretext to do so. When none exists, it’s invented. It’s easy. Lies substitute for truth. Claims about Syria using chemical weapons don’t wash. Repetition gets people to believe them. We’ve seen it all before.

Colin Power’s infamous February 5, 2003 Security Council speech led to war. It was shameless deception. Later he admitted WMD claims were false. It was too late to matter.

Plans were set. The die was cast. Weeks later, America bombed, invaded and occupied Iraq. The cradle of civilization was destroyed. No WMDs existed. It was well-known but ignored. More on that below.

Powell lied claiming them. US media scoundrels repeated what demanded renunciation. A New York Times editorial headlined “The Case Against Iraq,” saying:

“Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the United Nations and a global television audience yesterday with the most powerful case to date that Saddam Hussein stands in defiance of Security Council resolutions and has no intention of revealing or surrendering whatever unconventional weapons he may have.”

A (no longer available online) Washington Post editorial headlined “Irrefutable,” saying:

“….it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

Months later, a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report titled “WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications” said the Bush administration “systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq’s WMD and ballistic missile programs.”

Asked about the report, Powell stood by his Security Council testimony, saying:

“I am confident of what I presented last year. The intelligence community is confident of the material they gave me. I was representing them.”

“It was information they presented to the Congress. It was information they had presented publicly and they stand behind it, and this game is still unfolding.”

Powell’s speech was bald-faced deception. He willfully lied, saying:

“The material I will present to you comes from a variety of sources. Some are US sources. And some are those of other countries.”

“Some of the sources are technical, such as intercepted telephone conversations and photos taken by satellites. Other sources are people who have risked their lives to let the world know what Saddam Hussein is really up to.”

“….Iraq’s behavior show(s) that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.”

“We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities.”

“The Iraqis have never accounted for all of the biological weapons they admitted they had and we know they had. They have never accounted for all the organic material used to make them.”

“And they have not accounted for many of the weapons filled with these agents such as there are 400 bombs. This is evidence, not conjecture. This is true. This is all well-documented.”

He claimed Saddam stockpiled “between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agents.” He added that “(t)here can be no doubt that (he) has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.”

In August 1995, Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected to the West. He headed Iraq’s weapons programs. US intelligence officials debriefed him. He said “All weapons – biological, chemical, missile and nuclear were destroyed….Nothing remained.”

The New York Times and other US media sources reported his comments.

CNN’s Brent Sadler asked him: “Can you state here and now – does Iraq still to this day hold weapons of mass destruction?”

He responded: “No. Iraq does not possess any weapons of mass destruction. I am being completely honest about this.”

In the run-up to March 2003, media misinformation replaced earlier headlines. It’s standard practice. It repeating again now. Obama appears heading for full-scale war on Syria.

Big lies launch wars. In “,” Sun Tzu said “All war is based on deception.” Fear, misinformation and duplicity enlist public support. Naked aggression is called humanitarian intervention.

Libya 2.0 looms. Fabricating chemical weapons use looks like pretext for full-scale war. Secretary of State John Kerry claims Syria launched two chemical weapons attacks.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said using them “violates every convention of warfare.”

On April 25, the Los Angeles Times headlined “US lawmakers call for action on Syria’s chemical weapons,” saying:

They want quick action.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D. CA) warned that without decisive action, “President Assad may calculate he has nothing more to lose.” He might “further escalate this conflict.”

“It is clear that ‘red lines’ have been crossed and action must be taken to prevent larger scale use,” she added. “Syria has the ability to kill tens of thousands with its chemical weapons.”

Senator John McCain (R. AZ) said “(i)t’s pretty obvious the red line has been crossed.”

Rep. Adam Schiff (D. CA) believes Assad’s testing the international community. “The administration has said (chemical weapons use is) a game changer, but it’s not clear what that new game will look like.”

“I think it is incumbent on the international community to take strong action.”

A same day LA Times editorial headlined “A ‘red line’ on Syria,” saying:

“If the Assad regime has indeed used chemical weapons, the US must honor its commitment to act.”

“(U)se of chemical weapons would represent a reckless escalation of Assad’s war on his own people.”

“Yes, the president must be sure before he acts; but if it is proved that Assad has crossed the ‘red line,’ Obama must respond.”

headlined “The pink line,” asking: “If Assad used chemical weapons, what will Obama do?”

He “drew a clear red line last August….(He) ‘put together a range of contingency plans,’ but he didn’t spell them out.”

“Now there’s mounting, though not yet conclusive, evidence that if Assad hasn’t stormed across that red line, he may be tiptoeing on it.”

Tribune editors want more decisive action. “We’ve long argued that the US should directly arm the rebels.”

Operating covertly from southern Turkey, CIA operatives have been doing it all along. It’s handled through a network of intermediaries. Weapons are also entering from Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.

Tribune editors urge more. Impose a no-fly zone “to ground Assad’s air force.” Doing so is an act of war.

“(B)omb access roads where chemical weapons are transported, to make moving (them) difficult if not impossible.”

Bombing anywhere assures doing it everywhere considered strategically important. Tribune editors urge war. They’re not alone.

On April 25, Wall Street Journal editors headlined “Chemical Weapons and Consequences: Syria calls President Obama’s bluff on WMD,” saying:

“As President of the United States, I don’t bluff,” said Obama.

He “famously said (it) in March 2012, warning Iranian leaders that he would not allow them to acquire nuclear weapons.”

Last month he said:

“I’ve made it clear to Bashar al-Assad and all who follow his orders: We will not tolerate the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people, or the transfer of those weapons to terrorists.”

“The world is watching; we will hold you accountable.”

“Or not,” said Journal editors. “Israel will have to consider its own military options to secure the stockpiles if the US won’t act….”

“Presidents who are exposed as bluffers tend to have their bluff called again and again, with ever more dangerous consequences.”

Official accusations are familiar. So is heated rhetoric that follows. Obama heads closer to full-scale intervention. Reports say around 20,000 US troops will be deployed in Jordan.

On April 26, Obama hosted Jordan’s King Abdullah II in Washington. Perhaps they discussed invasion plans.

A Final Comment

While meeting with King Abdullah, Obama stopped short of saying Assad crossed a “red line.” Earlier he warned doing so would unleash “unspecified consequences.” Likely he meant direct US intervention.

“Horrific as it is when mortars are being fired on civilians and people are being indiscriminately killed, to use potential weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations crosses another line with respect to international norms and international law,” he told reporters.

“That is going to be a game changer. We have to act prudently.”

“We have to make these assessments deliberately. But I think all of us….recognize how we cannot stand by and permit the systematic use of weapons like chemical weapons on civilian populations.”

Sorting things out requires “increased urgency,” he stressed.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said “(h)e retains all options to respond.” Further reports will explain more.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at . His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hourhttp://www.dailycensored.com/the-bush-legacy/

Source: ICH

The 1965 Congressional Lie On Immigration; The 2013 Lie Even Bigger

In 1965, as a college student, I felt the U.S. Government and Congress worked for and represented the best interests of the American people.  As I learned more, and later as I understood more as a U.S. Army officer, I discovered presidents and Congress lie.  When I became a math-science teacher in Denver, Colorado, I discovered that superintendents lie when it benefits them.  I discovered people lie.

Lyndon Baines Johnson lied to plunge us into the Vietnam War. Bill Clinton lied from the day of his birth.  George W. Bush lied us into Iraq War.  Barack H. Obama continually lies to us as to immigration, Afghanistan War, Obamacare, his past history and more than we can count.

But the one lie that will go down in history as the beginning of the end of the United States of America goes to the late Senator Teddy Kennedy (D-MA) and his 1965 Immigration Reform Act. He exploded immigration from 175,000 annually to over 1.2 million year after year, decade after decade.  He jumped our population from a reasonable 194 million to its current 316 million on our way to 625 million in this century.

In front of Congress he said, “First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same.  Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset. Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.

“In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.  The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants.  It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.   It will not relax the standards of admission. The bill will not place a burden on the legal citizens by increasing taxes to pay the huge costs for care-and-feeding, medical care, education, etc of the “immigrants”… and additional social-services for their family members.  It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.” [Ted Kennedy at Judiciary Committee hearing on Feb. 10, 1965, commenting on the Hart-Celler Act]

Kennedy’s bill DID flood the country with another 100 million people. It created intractable poverty and entrenched illiteracy.  It created cultural conflicts being played out across America in 2013, i.e. Mexicans battling African-Americans in Los Angeles, Muslims taking over entire cities like Detroit and running out everyone else; it imported many third world immigrants lost in the morass of this high speed society and unable to assimilate. We feature “Black flash mobs” terrorizing citizens in Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Chicago.  We feature female genital mutilation, arranged marriages and honor killings in America in 2013.  We see exploding illiteracy rates among citizens.  We house 47 million people who cannot secure a job: thus, they exist on food stamps.  Over 14 million Americans cannot secure a job at a living wage.

This new Comprehensive Immigration Bill expects to swamp our country with another 100 million immigrants within 37 years.  From 2050, we face another 200 million beyond that.

In the meantime, Congress, led by a “Gang of Eight” senators expects to unload the gates of hell upon our country.  Not only will Congress give total amnesty to 20 million, they in turn, can and will chain-migrate endless millions of their families into our country.  This thing will become SO ugly on SO many levels, but we will become the victims and no one wins and everyone loses.

Amazingly enough, after the failure of the 1986 amnesty, our borders remain as porous as ever. Nothing in this bill shows any intention of enforcing past or current immigration employment, housing or transporting of illegal migrant laws. Thus, illegals will careen into our country in ever greater numbers.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York said, “This is not amnesty — amnesty is the forgiveness of something. We’re going to create an alternative that says OK, you want to stay here, you’ll have to wait more than 10 years, you’ll have to pay this fine, you’ll have to pay your registration fee, you’ll have to be gainfully employed, you won’t qualify for any federal benefit, and then after all of that you don’t get to apply for anything until the enforcement mechanisms are in place.”

Schumer lies like a rug, like Al Capone, like a snake, like the 19 terrorists who flew airplanes into the Twin Towers and elsewhere.

The truth:

1. When the bill becomes law, every single illegal alien in America becomes legal.
2. Legal status will never be revoked; it can and will only be expanded with every inevitable subsequent act of Congress.
3. This amnesty will leader to more amnesties for millions of other aliens crossing our borders or overstaying their visas.

If you expect to save your own rear end and that of your children’s future, I implore you to join the following organizations for free and start sending pre-written faxes to your reps to defeat this bill.

Congress Repeating The Second Basic Law of Stupidity: Mass Amnesty

As you read in the First Basic Law of Stupidity, our U.S. Congress works on yet another mass amnesty for 20 million illegal alien migrants now working and residing in our country in violation of dozens of our laws. Notice that Congress failed to enforce the employment laws from the 1965 Immigration Reform Law as well as the 1986 Amnesty that gave four million Mexicans instant citizenship. All totaled, those two new laws by Congress flooded this country with over 120 million more people since 1965. This next amnesty will flood the country with yet another 100 million immigrants at the bare minimum.

Today, we live in 2013 with a few other interesting facts Congress bestowed on the American people:

• Congress placed our country into a $16.5 trillion national debt. It’s wrecking the foundation of our republic and our financial ability to survive.
• Congress waged two useless, worthless and meaningless wars for the past 10 years at a cost of $3 trillion. Trillions more when it comes to the emotional, physical and psychological chaos incurred by our military veterans.
• Congress outsource, insourced and offshored millions of US jobs so we now suffer 14 million unemployed and 7 million underemployed.
• Congress killed so many jobs and job training that 47 million Americans subsist on food stamps in April of 2013.
• Congress refuses to enforce internal immigration employment, housing and transport laws—so that we face 20 million illegal aliens scamming American workers out of jobs as well as using $346 billion annually in taxpayer services like education, medical care, anchor babies, incarceration, drug distribution, shop lifting and more.
• Congress refuses to aid lawful American citizens with jobs, but it works its magic in allowing over eight million illegal aliens full time work in our country—and much of it off the books and no taxes collected, but we subsidize their children, health care and prison costs.
• Congress huddles in Washington, DC to gift another 20 million illegal aliens with instant citizenship and all the cash and welfare benefits that entails. Heritage Foundation estimates $3 to $5 trillion for the cost of this new amnesty paid for by you, the legal American taxpayer.

Which brings us to the “Second Basic Law of Stupidity” by Carlo M. Cipolla, Professor of
Economics, UC Berkeley in Whole Earth Review, Spring 1987
Cipolla said in the Second Basic Law of Stupidity, “Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favor an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal that others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature.

“I take an exception to this general view. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.”

The collective IQ of America declines below three digits. Notice that 7,000 high school kids drop out or flunk out of high school every day in America. Notice those failure rates correspond to the millions of third world immigrants imported into America. Not only does our Congress import illiteracy, it imports poverty and cultures of poverty. One look at Los Angeles today provides ample proof where a teenager cannot read the bus schedule. Unemployment screams off the charts and immigrants ride the welfare gravy train like a new art form.

“Although convinced that fractions of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits,” said Cipolla. “I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination, I firmly believe stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion. This fact is scientifically expressed by the Second Basic Law with states that: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.”

Today in America 42 million Americans cannot read, write or perform simple math problems. Another 50 million cannot read past the 4th grade level. It will be interesting when we import the projected 100 million more immigrants from the burgeoning third world by 2050—as to what kind of a completely stupid, dumb, dysfunctional and totally illiterate civilization the majority of our citizens will have become.

The democrats and republicans will probably tell us we need more immigrants to revitalize the nation, freshen it and bring new ideas to solve all our problems.

Drone World

In the not so distant future, America’s skies will be full of . . . drones.

What could go wrong?

“Although the prospect of drones flying over U.S. cities is generating cries of spies in the skies,” writes the Los Angeles Times, “groups from California to Florida are fiercely competing to become one of six federally designated sites for testing how the remotely piloted aircraft can safely be incorporated into the nation’s airspace.”

It’s just technology and technology is neutral, or so the forces of mainstream capitalism assure us. Drones are an emerging market, with worldwide sales expected to double in the next decade, to $11 billion, if not much more. And these will be good drones, the kind that look for lost children or leaks in pipelines, the kind that catch criminals.

What disturbs me about all this — what feels utterly unexamined in the mainstream coverage of this looming techno-makeover of our world — is:

A. Why is there such an emerging market for drones?

B. Why does the fact that some people will make lots of money on drones make their domestic mega-debut a done deal and what are the implications of the fact that potential profit for the well-connected is the lodestar of our future?

C. What might Drone World look like 10 or 20 years — or seven generations — down the road? And why does that not seem to be a concern of government; that is to say, why in an alleged democracy is there so little public discussion about the world we’re creating for our children and all succeeding generations?

Even the red flags of concern — about privacy or “Big Brother” — that some people are waving about domestic drone proliferation seem depressingly limited, especially because this is the only downside the corporate media bother to acknowledge. Passing legislation that prohibits drone surveillance without a warrant is a good idea, of course, but I have no faith in the power of law to protect us from the sort of social forces that drones enable.

Even unarmed drones are extraordinary tools of domination. But how strange, how naïve, to ponder the future of domestic drones without bothering to notice their current widespread usage as tools of murder and terror.

They’ve seduced the Obama administration into playing video game war in Central Asia on the pretense that killing alleged terrorists, and anyone else in the vicinity, is keeping America safe. Drones are more than just useful tools; the fact that they bestow such remarkably precise power on those who control them makes them truly dangerous appendages if the controllers are smitten with their own righteousness.

And righteousness combined with lethal power is militarism — which Jeff Cohen, in a recent speech at the National Conference on Media Reform in Denver, called “the elephant in the room” and “arguably our country’s biggest problem.” Only the rest of the world is aware of the U.S. addiction to militarism. In the circles of consensus power that govern the United States, including the mainstream media, there’s no such thing. In those circles, there are only our economic interests and our security, which add up to perpetual war.

We live in a society that requires enemies, and my guess is that, however much the promoters of drone technology extol the positive uses of drones — finding lost children and lost hikers, aiding in wildfire containment, natural disaster rescue assistance, monitoring the weather, scouting film locations (!) — their primary use will be in us-vs.-them situations. People who live in gated communities, secure in their “us” status, may see no problem with this, but for members of oft-targeted groups, the concerns about domestic drone usage, and the possibility of what the ACLU called “mission creep,” are hardly abstract.

“Even when laws do apply, constraints on law enforcement have a tendency to slacken when communities of color are the subjects of observation,” Seth Freed Wessler and Jamilah King note on the website Colorlines.

Citing a warning from digital watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation, they add that “there’s currently no legal firewall stopping the government from equipping drones with rubber bullets, tasers or other so-called ‘non-lethal weapons’ that research suggests get deployed on people of color at higher rates and that mirror other kinds of police violence.”

How hard is it to imagine the “war on terror” going domestic? It already has, of course, by other names. My point is that it’s absurdly naïve to envision domestic Drone World without factoring the dark side of U.S. militarism into the mix. Drones do not empower empathy. They empower its opposite.

Even the LA Times story quoted above, about the competition among states to get selected by the FAA as a drone test site, alludes — humorously — to the militarism lurking behind the drone craze. The story pointed out that Ohio’s pitch to get a test site included the fact that the state “was home to development of the ‘world’s first unmanned aerial system,’ a sort of flying bomb known as an ‘aerial torpedo’ developed in 1918.”

The fun is just beginning.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book,Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at , visit his website at commonwonders.com or listen to him at Voices of Peace radio.

Source: Common Wonders

We Sweep So Much Under The Rug In America

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

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

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

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

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

What about human nature in America?

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

Domestic violence in America:

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

(Source: Centers for Disease Control)

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

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

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

War on Mother Nature succeeding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bond Bubble Expectations

Bonds are loans that have the expectation of payback with interest. Government bonds are viewed as the safest financial instrument since the primary fiscal obligation of the state is to honor the terms of their own notes. However, in the fevered climate of currency wars among central banksters, the security factor of capital repayment is rapidly coming into question. As interest rates rise, the economic value of the bond diminishes. This inverted normal relationship is the essential dynamic of lending money with the purchase of Treasury Bonds. So what is all the talk about a bond bubble and likelihood that it will destroy your underwriting capital?

Bloomberg Businessweek warns in the article, The Rising Bubble in Bond-Bubble Chatter.

“An asset price bubble is when the expectation that the price can only go higher forms the only rationale for purchase,” remarked BlackRock’s (BLK) bond honcho Jeffrey Rosenberg Thursday at the CFA Society of Los Angeles’s Economic & Investments Forecast Dinner, at which the “wherefore bond bubble” discussion dominated. “But the main motivation of investors for buying fixed income is the opposite of typical bubbles—the fear of losing money rather than the greed of potential profit has fueled the historic shift of assets into fixed income.”

Just how safe is your money when you are holding T-Bonds? The U.S. Treasury wants you to believe that no other form of currency has the protection of first guarantee of the full faith and credit of your own government. Well, the mere questioning of this mythical assurance breeds deep distrust and instability of confidence into the entire fiscal system.

Morningstar offers an assessment in The Bond Bubble Threat, which on the surface is very sensible.

“To understand the implications of where we are, consider the history of the benchmark 10-year Treasury note. From 1900 to 2012, the average interest rate (yield) was 4.99% (often quoted as 5%). On Jan. 30, 2013, the yield was 1.99%, well below the long-term average. The prime interest rate, which the Fed has a role in setting, is 3.25%. It is the break-even rate for banks pricing loans.

When the performance of an asset class runs substantially above or below a long-term average, the odds increase that at some point performance will move back toward the long-term average. It may take a while for the interest rate on 10-year Treasury paper to re-approach 5%, but at some point, it will. As interest rates creep up, we see a shift away from fixed debt instruments to variable rate paper, stocks and various inflation hedges.”

Regretfully, when was the last time that economic fundamentals applied to the money debasement manipulations of the Federal Reserve? No doubt, a day of reckoning will come if market principles are allowed to work out their natural balance. However, the moneychangers design a fantasyland of monetary assessment that distort and prop up the price of the “Reserved Currency”.

John Plender writes in the Financial Times, Central bank hot air pumps up bond bubble, presents an analytical evaluation of worth in the current bond values.

“In the fixed interest sector something irrational is undoubtedly going on, but it is less a matter of exuberance than desperation in the pursuit of yield. In higher yielding parts of the market prices are out of touch with default risk.

Despite the oft-heard central bankers’ refrain that bubbles are impossible to identify until after they have been pricked, historical comparisons leave little doubt that this is a bubble – one, moreover, to which central banks have contributed their fair share of hot air. It is rare indeed for investors to pay a multiple of more than 50 times for the income stream on a 10-year Treasury bond.”

Nevertheless, this inflated bubble just keeps expanding from the unlimited flow of repurchases by the Federal Reserve of Treasury debt. What else is left to do, when the global financial markets are reluctant to buy into the next round of T-Bill offerings? Indefinite aggressive QE is here to stay as long as the need to roll over the debt exists. This view is shared in the latest report, Treasury Bond Bubble Will Not Pop, Fed Will Simply Increase QE. Guru Jim Sinclair offers the conventional-politicized viewpoint that the printing press will just keep running.

“Essentially Sinclair is stating that interest rates will continue to manipulated at an artificially low level by uneconomic buying of T-bonds by the Federal reserve governor typing on a keyboard, and that the pace of QE will keep pace with the pace of the US budget deficit/ funding gap, until which point the US dollar faces a collapse in the confidence of the currency itself.”

Of course, the operative circumstance is when will the collapse of the Dollar currency come? The interest rates charged to purchase T-Bonds will rise, when the Fed decides that the underreported rate of inflation can no longer be concealed from institutional transactions. When the Street panics over, the artificially low levels on Treasury Bonds rates, and refuse further purchases, the international exchange rate of the Dollar will plummet.

The global rush to devalue currencies is in full force and over time will affect the options that the Fed has in their toolbox. This chicken and egg dilemma will test the legal tender equation to its core. While the government can coerce the acceptance of a failing currency to be used as money, the same cannot be inferred about the purchasing power of T-Bonds.

The linkage between the underlying capital used to purchase the government note and the final return received for holding the bond until maturity has a profound disconnect. Selling your T-Bonds is a wise practice even if an imminent bubble is not ready to blow.

The harm to the financial markets from another precipitated house of cards should scare everyone. Expectations have a funny way of influencing financial results more often than sound evaluations. The prospect of a default by the Treasury is embedded, even under synthetically low interest rates. Just how long will this anticipation hold true?

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