Enlightenment:
A note to the non-ravers out there: codshit is
NOT a derogatory or insulting term and bears no relation in offensiveness to its four-letter
cousin, it's a word used to describe the nonsense that people sometimes talk
when they're off their heads.
Wisdom:
So there, we have figured it out, go back to bed America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control again. Here, here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed America, here's American Gladiators. Here's 56 channels of it. Watch these pituitary retards bang their fuckin skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go America, you are free... to do as we tell you.
.: Bill Hicks :.
Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'...they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git'....
.: Alexi Sayle :.
If you confront the Universe with good intentions in your heart it will reflect that and reward your intent. It just doesn't always do it in the way you expect.
.: G'kar :.
Now it is fully understandable that the people of the United States, in this time of war and terror, would seek some sort of grip onto the reality that seems to have left us during the night of September 10th, 2001.
Amid the seas of American flags, banners praising the freedoms of our nation, and a bubbling new nationalism, one almost feels as if the tide of patriotism brought to the forefront of our nation after the immense tragedies on September 11th, 2001, is an endless positive front against those shady specters of terror that lurk just beyond the line of sight of the castle cannons.
However, there are scattered groups out there that feel as if this rush of patriotism is breeding something far darker than outside terrorism, if indeed that is a possibility. Those scattered groups feel that the rush to support President George W. Bush in his march to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq signals a shift in the policy of America’s citizenry – the will to question the motives and agendas of those who lead us. To believe that the government of these United States of America has not used the uneasy acquiescence of the people to its will for personal gain shows both a foolish naïveté and an ignorance of history.
It has become un-American to speak out against those leaders for which some have an unaffected scorn. Showing anything but full support for our president on any issue relating to the security of this country is met with cat-calls of “terrorist,” and “treason.” Online stores now stock bumper stickers that read “Does My Flag Offend You? Get Out!” while Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh, among the top brash leaders of a movement determined to stomp out dissent speech, rail on those Americans who do not believe that President Bush is always correct in his motives.
Free speech, indeed, free dissent, is being stepped on by the most conservative and secretive administration since Richard Nixon took office. Protesters, a common sight – or maybe not – at Bush Administration speaking venues, are herded into “Free Speech Zones,” often enclosed areas up to a mile away from where the official they are protesting is speaking.
Protesters who carry signs often have them confiscated as “The stick with which the sign is attached could be used as a projectile weapon,” as one Miami riot officer said upon dispersing a crowd of protesters outside a building where Florida Governor Jeb Bush, President Bush’s brother, was speaking.
"By way of deception, thou shalt do war." - Motto of the Mossad
Jared Israel says that Scott Ritter changed his description of why he left UNSCOM, and is therefore a liar, and that he abruptly changed from a hawk to a dove on Iraq, and is therefore an agent of military intelligence. The first claim has to be evaluated very carefully from Ritter's actual statements. The conclusion of the second claim makes no sense at all. Also, Jared seems to label Ritter as a "hawk" for favoring "confrontations" with Iraq, but what Ritter was talking about were confrontational (i.e., unannounced and vigorous) *inspections*. That's not being a "hawk", which is a person who advocates war.
I present evidence here that Jared Israel has many lies on his own website, which have the purpose of covering up the role of the state of Israel in perpetrating the war on Iraq by proxy via the Bush administration neocons (as well as covering up and justifying Israel's mass robbery, torture, and murder of the Palestinians). In fact, most of his home page, and much of his entire website, is now devoted to lying propaganda on behalf of the state of Israel, rather than information about 9-11 and Yugoslavia. To put it simply, Jared Israel is a total zionist.
And Scott Ritter has voiced many criticisms of the state of Israel, thus providing a backer of Israel, such as Jared, with many motives for attacking him:
1. Ritter tried to stop the U.S. from attacking Iraq (while the state of Israel wanted the attack to happen), by exposing the "evidence" of Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) as false.
2. He criticized Israel for its role in *providing* false evidence of WMD in Iraq.
3. He criticized the neocons for their close ties to Israel, putting the good of that nation ahead of the interests of the U.S.
4. He criticized the neocons for sending U.S. soldiers to die to protect Israel, saying this is "a travesty".
5. He criticized the idea of a "Greater Israel" — the zionist goal of annexing large sections of the nations around it.
6. He criticized the Israeli government for instructing its citizens to open the seals on their gas masks when the attack on Iraq began, even though it knew that Iraq had no WMD. This act of propaganda cost Israel billions, because the masks or the absorbent substances in them will now have to be replaced.
It therefore appears very likely that Jared Israel's extreme hostility toward Scott Ritter, and his attempt to pressure the New York 9-11 truth movement into dropping Ritter from its upcoming public presentation, is an attempt to discredit Ritter and to fraudulently invalidate his criticisms of the state of Israel. And this is why Jared Israel is willing to *sabotage* the breakthrough of 9-11 information into the antiwar movement as brought in by Scott Ritter, which is the all-important step for spreading the information widely and thus stopping the bogus "War on Terror" — actually an eternal war of world conquest with its Nazi police state, mass murder attacks on many nations and possible nuclear war.
Furthermore, there have been recent reports that the U.S. has been secretly moving old "weapons of mass destruction" (chemical or biological) into Iraq, with the intention of "discovering" them, to serve as a pretext for extending the U.S. war of mass murder and wreckage of Iraq's infrastructure. This would continue to be largely on behalf of the state of Israel, which wants Iraq destroyed to the point where it is no longer a modern technological nation. And who would be the public figure with the greatest experience and authority to debunk this "discovery" and prove that the weapons had been planted, thus thwarting the intentions of the state of Israel? None other than Scott Ritter!
An important part of solving any crime is knowing who had the motive — who benefits — cui bono, because they are the natural suspects. Israel has used 9-11 as an excuse to greatly intensify its attacks on the Palestinians (whom it has long called "terrorists"), and as the means to attack Iraq (by proxy, using the zionist neocons).
Yet, contrary to a great deal of evidence, Jared Israel denies that the Israeli government wants to get rid of the Palestinians, denies that Israel wants Iraq destroyed, and denies that the neocons are backers of Israel (zionists). Thus, despite his reputation as one of the first 9-11 researchers, Jared Israel is now trying to deceive the 9-11 truth movement, and the world, about these very important aspects of the motivation for 9-11. And the fact that these *were* motivations for 9-11 is proven conclusively by one single piece of evidence — the "dancing Israelis", the Mossad agents that were seen filming the attack and collapse of the WTC towers and dancing with glee. This proves that the state of Israel had planned to benefit from 9-11 *before* it happened.
For Jared Israel, a 9-11 researcher, to lie about some of the motives for 9-11, and thus try to divert attention away from some of the likely perpetrators of the crime, is an extremely harmful action — a betrayal that is far worse than anything he has accused Scott Ritter of doing. It means that Jared Israel cannot be trusted to speak truthfully about any aspect of 9-11 or current events that even remotely involves the state of Israel.
I told you, it's all a fucking lie! There are no terrorists, there are only corrupt quasi-fascist wannabe-totalitarian GOVERNMENTS who INVENT "terrorists" and "terrorism" to use the fear they generate as a mechanism for social control. It's pure Hegel, right out of the box! But most people don't even realise it, they're too busy looking in the wrong place for people who don't really exist. It's not the "turr" we should be worried about, it's the people continually harping on about how much danger we're all in all the time. It's all about fear and control and finding the excuse for a war, this has nothing to do with "terrorism".
Palestinian security forces have arrested a group of Palestinians for collaborating with Israel and posing as operatives of Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terrorist network, a senior official said yesterday.
The Palestinian Authority said Israel's Mossad spy agency has set up a fake Al-Qaeda cell in Gaza so that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could justify Israeli attacks in Palestinian areas.
The arrests come two days after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon charged Al-Qaeda militants were operating in Gaza and in Lebanon.
'The Palestinian Authority arrested a group of collaborators who confessed they were working for Israel, posing as Al-Qaeda operatives in the Palestinian territories,' said the official, on condition of anonymity. He said the alleged collaborators sought to 'discredit the Palestinian people, justify every Israeli crime and provide reasons to carry out a new (military) aggression in the Gaza Strip.'
'It is a big, big, big lie to cover (Sharon's) attacks and his crimes against our people everywhere,' Palestinian President Yasser Arafat told reporters at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Arafat termed Israeli claim of Al-Qaeda in Gaza presence ridiculous.
Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo pointed to an Israeli plot. 'There are certain elements who were instructed by the Mossad to form a cell under the name of Al-Qaeda in the Gaza Strip in order to justify the assault and the military campaigns of the Israeli occupation army against Gaza,' Abed Rabbo said.
Earlier, International Cooperation Minister Nabil Shaath announced he would hold a press conference here at 2 p.m. (1200 GMT) on the alleged presence of Al-Qaeda operatives in the Gaza Strip.
Sharon's claim about the presence of Al-Qaeda in Gaza was considered a surprise because Gaza Strip is virtually sealed off by Israeli troops.
The Israeli leader also charged other members of the terror group were cooperating with Lebanon's Hezbollah.
The problem is that there are too few people still alive who remember the full horror of war. To us it's just this Hollwoodised, sanitised, big-screen spectacular where we have no contact with the death or destruction that is wrought in our name. Have we fallen so far?
The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the United States, and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago - February 27, 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for peace that mobilized citizens all across the world.
It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most recent research implies they did not.)
But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.
Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Legislators would later say they hadn't had time to read the bill before voting on it.
Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader with such high popularity ratings. Citizens who protested the leader in public - and there were many - quickly found themselves confronting the newly empowered police's batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader's public speeches. (In the meantime, he was taking almost daily lessons in public speaking, learning to control his tonality, gestures, and facial expressions. He became a very competent orator.)
Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. He wanted to stir a "racial pride" among his countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie "Triumph Of The Will." As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it's of little concern to us.
Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn't act first and foremost in the best interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of The United Kingdom to create a worldwide military ruling elite.
His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a "New Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" - God Is With Us - and most of them fervently believed it was true.
Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's leader determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably terrorist and communist sympathizers, and various troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals." He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader.
He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office for the homeland, and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.
Maybe if the greedy capitalist scum-fucks paid their employee a bit more and themselves a bit less then they wouldn't feel the urge to steal.
The PA who liberated millions from her super-rich bosses was simply doing her bit for the economy
Joyti De-Laurey will shortly be sentenced for stealing several million pounds from some City squillionaires. But if there was any justice in this world, Joyti would not only be a free woman, she'd be given a medal for services to the community.
True, she did filch over £4m from the bank accounts of three financial whiz-persons. Stealing things is wrong, as a rule, although if De-Laurey had confined herself to a few Post-it Notes, then she wouldn't have been splashed all over the newspapers. But here's the thing: De-Laurey has single-handedly put forward the best case for higher income taxes since Pitt the Younger and, at the same time, done a big favour to the shareholders and investors in Goldman Sachs and other mega-banks.
The most mind-blowing aspect of the whole affair is that the personal assistant managed to remove £4m from the accounts of three City bankers - and they didn't even notice. Is that crazy? Yes, but it's a sign of the twisted world they live in.
Michael Lewis's book on the lifestyles of rich and famous bankers, Liar's Poker, opens with an arresting scene: John Gutfreund, the head of trading at Salomon Brothers - at that time the ne plus ultra bank of Wall Street - challenging his chief bond trader John Meriwether to a childish game. Gutfreund wanted to play one round of liar's poker against Meriwether, just one hand, for $1m. And that was in 1986, when $1m was worth something.
Sadly, the game was never played - Gutfreund backed down when Meriwether raised the stakes to $10m - but it certainly wasn't lack of money that stopped them. Scott Mead of Goldman Sachs, one of the three people from whom De-Laurey liberated the £4m, had reaped around £50m when Goldman Sachs floated in 1999. He reaped that windfall because he was a partner of the investment bank when it went public - in other words, he was in the right place at the right time. And so too, in a way, was De-Laurey.
Fools and their money are soon parted, and so it was that Mead, Jennifer Moses and Ron Beller allowed a proportion of their wealth to be redistributed to their PA, who earned - in her best year - £38,000, a fraction of the salaries and bonuses they were paid.
This is where De-Laurey was doing them a favour. The trio were far too busy with their 6am meetings and long-distance business trips to enjoy or even know how much money they had. It was just lying dormant in their accounts, doing nothing. Instead, De-Laurey took out their money for a brisk trot down to the shops - like exercising a dog, really.
Frankly, it was much better for the economy that the £4m was in circulation, providing employment and creating profits, being recycled into other hands. True, De-Laurey did spend the money on Cartier jewellery, but don't kid yourself the aggrieved trio were going to use it to help the homeless. For all the talk of De-Laurey wanting to "fund a lavish lifestyle", what do you think the trio were using it for?
De-Laurey was only doing to the bankers what they have been doing to investors and governments for years - fleecing them. Goldman Sachs once made more annual profit ($2.6bn) than the national income of Tanzania ($2.2bn). It was Goldman Sachs that allowed Robert Maxwell to illicitly shuffle pension funds around. The difference is that one gets sent to Holloway prison, and the other gets the fast car, the plush house and the big power-boat.
As crimes go, this was a victimless one. Goldman Sachs's official reaction to the verdict on Tuesday was that this was "an extremely unpleasant incident". Unpleasant? So is halitosis, but people don't get sent to jail for it. Although maybe they should.
One day you're gonna wake up in the morning and realise that codshit.com was telling you the truth but by then, of course, it will all be too late..
Will the US be under martial law by June, 2004? That is the impression some are expressing after witnessing a recent episode of Nightline (4/7/2004), with Ted Koppel. On this particular program Koppel is host to Richard Clarke, former Reagan officials Edwin Meese III and Kenneth M. Duberstein; former Clinton official Sally Katzen, author James Mann, and former Bush official Richard Clarke. The subject matter is named The Armageddon Plan.
Because many US citizens hold favorable views of Richard Clarke he was playing a key role. His affability enables him to convey the dark plans of the Bush Regime to critical observers without alarming the unconcious masses. On this program Clarke was on to inform elite audiences that they better get used to the idea the Bush Regime will sponsor a cataclysmic event in order to plunge the US under martial law.
Richard Clarke is already a legend in the world of propaganda. So far the Bush Regime has parlayed his "defection" from them with great success. As Karl Rove probably surmised, The Left Gatekeepers (e.g., Democracy Now! and Counterpunch, etc.) have been only very eager to treat Clarke's mild disagreements with the Bush Regime as their outer limit of permissible dialogue. With the liberal US media regarding Clarke's thesis that the Bush Regime was merely negligent about 9-11 as if it were the only idea possible the White House sailed through the 9-11 Commission/Coverup proceedings.
Now that the 9-11 Commission/Coverup has been safely wrapped for the Bush Regime the mainstream media is now giving some focus to James Mann's curiously-timed book (Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, Viking Press, 2004)). Vulcans concerns the efforts of present and past White House officials to establish a set of procedures for the highest-levels of government to follow should a catastrophic attack occur on US soil.
(Note that Nightline has dropped the moniker Rise of the Vulcans for the more Regime-friendly The Armageddon Plan. The latter conveys a greater sense of a Regime reacting to a stimulus, not being the source of it.)
The segment began with congenial chatter between the past and present government officials. As if he is hosting a dinner party Koppel smoothly has his guests reminisce fondly about past drills performed by high-level government officials to test their emergency preparedness. Koppel then imagines an attack that decimates the US Congress. They break for a timely commercial. After the break Koppel immediately launches into the key part of their script: "... aren't [we] left for at least the foreseeable future with some sort of martial law anyway?"
Duberstein agrees with Koppel, adding "You have to suspend rights."
The first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks found the world in much different shape than the leaders in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv had planned, and anticipated. Rather than a slow build-up for regime change in Afghanistan at the expense of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda, and his hosts, the Taliban, America and Britain had been forced by Israel - thanks to its apparent assassination of the Northern Alliance's Ahmed Shah Masood, its failure to inform the Americans what the hijackers had planned, and the anthrax letters it sent to important Democrats in the Senate to panic the population - to accelerate rapidly the process, and radically expand its scope.
The attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon - which the Bush administration totally miscalculated by thinking that they were simple hijackings which could be escorted to Los Angeles, and then put down at Afghanistan's expense - stampeded Washington into an all-out-war against its Muslim enemies, though its character and timetable had to be hidden for domestic, international, and legal reasons. To get the country behind the mission, Washington acted as if they attacks represented another Pearl Harbor, arresting Muslims like FDR did Japanese back in 1941. To get Prime Minister Blair behind the war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the United States conducted a swfit air assault against the Taliban, opening up the country for reoccupation by the Northern Alliance and other warlords, and making Al-Qaeda take to the mountains and parts unknown - Western intelligence increasingly claiming Iraq.
Then London put together its Iraqi Weapons Dossier, contending that Saddam's regime had put in place rapidly developing nuclear, biological, chemical and missile weapons programs since the UN weapons inspectors had been forced out of Iraq in 1998, and Iraq was now deeply involved in hiding what it was doing. Within 45 minutes, it claimed, Saddam could attack Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, and, of course, Israel, though it was unnamed for obvious reasons, with biological and chemical weapons. Iraq was allegedly seeking nuclear technology which could result in it having atomic weapons within two years. Several mobile biological and chemical laboratories were giving it almost the same capability with these WMD.
At this point, the war on terror spun again dangerously out of control, thanks to these developments:
(1) Washington still had an opportunity to stop making matters worse, but it, especially the Congress, chose not to do so. When the 9/11 attacks occurred, President Bush acted as if the United States was confronted with WWIII, recalling the attacks which started WWII in most self-serving terms. The Whie House acted as if there was no precedent for seriously investigating what had happened at this juncture, though President Roosevelt did appoint an inquiry to investigate why the attacks at Pearl Harbor were allowed to occurr - resulting in the scapegoating admittedly of Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short. But when the war in the Pacific was still progressing, the US Navy conducted an inquiry of its own which resulted in a far differnt result - Admiral Bull Halsey volunteering at the hearings that Admiral Kimmel had been badly treated by FDR's men in explaining the attacks
In this context, Bush should have immedialey appointed a proper commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks since the crisis was far less serious than what had happened back in 1941, and when he did not, the Congress should have immediately done so. It only got up the gumption for one of its own after a year, and a year is a very long time under such circumstances - a time for all kinds of more immediate and self-serving considerations to be paramount. The joint inquiry conducted by the Intelligence Committees of both Houses of Congress, while identifying most of the dots which America's intelligence community either misread or overlooked in the leadup to the attacks, explained them almost completely at the expense of Saudi Arabia - what the White House helped validate by excising those parts from its report when it allowed it to become public.
The source, of course, of the problem was the 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, and its officialdom, like America's, had dealt with them in all kinds of ways. This did not mean that Riyadh, or Washington, for that matter, was involved in the plots, but the hard-pressed congressmen chose to do so. Things like any official assistance to the hijackers themselves, or private help to persons who came in contact with them, or slightly knew them were seen as complicity in the plots. (Just think of the consequence of following this course with ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of JFK.) In this case, the Saudis became the fallguys for everyone else's foul ups.
(2) Having politicised the attacks in a way which drew bipartisan support, President Bush allowed the appointment of a commission to examine the facts surrounding them. Its content was determined by the leaderships of the Repubican and Democratic parties, and they picked persons who collectively would reinforce a similar conclusion - partisans who would attack the other's parties efforts to prevent terrorism, former officials whose records would oblige them to be most protective of their former bosses, and compromisers who had already been effective in cover ups.
The commissioners who come to mind in the first regard are former Illinois Governor James Thompson and Senator Max Clelland of Georgia. John Lehman when he was Secretary of the Navy helped bring on the Iran-Contra Scandal, resulting in his being forced to resign, and Jamie Gorelick spent much of her time at the Department of Justice, protecting her boss, President Clinton, from being removed from office. Former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean and Congressman Lee Hamilton made their careers by working with the leadership of the other party. For good measure, historian Philip Zelikow, who had co-authored books with NSA Condoleezza Rice, and was serving on panels appointed by Bush, was made the Commission's Staff Director, guaranteeing that it would essentially cover up its causes.
Zelikow is on record that the attacks could not be prevented because of structural problems with American intelligence gathering - the United States does not have an agency like Britain's Security Service which can act both at home, and abroad. Once former Bush insiders spread convenient distractions that the White House had been too preoccupied with Iraq, Zelikow even testified before the Commission that the attacks could not have been prevented. With all the groundwork having been laid, Rice has now testified to the same effect. The Bush administration, like all effective autocratic regimes, knows how to get its way no matter what it does to the nation.
(3) When crunch time came at the United Nations - when the Coalition was still thinking about the need of a second resolution to justify an attack upon Iraq - Secretary of State Colin Powell could have greatly simplified matters by simply ruling it out. While Blair was still telling everyone that Britain would not go to war without a second resolution - what he still didn't stick to when the resolution seemed doomed to failure - the French indicated that they would not make a fuss if Washington and London simply went ahead with their war.
Instead of going ahead, Powell made the most outrageous statement to the Security Council on February 5, 2003 - a wish list about Iraq's WMD which the most sceptical inspectors, crazy members of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and supporters of the Mossad's new Director General, Meir Dagan, could hardly add to. His thick intelligence file was bostered by NSA tapes of alleged conversations between Iraqi officials in the field and Baghdad, showing that they were moving prohibited vehicles and weapons to fool the inspectors. Powell was most pointed about Saddam's massive, mobile anthrax capability, reminding the Council of what Al-Qaeda might have done with just a teaspoon of the dried spores after the 9/11 attacks. For good measure, the Secretary of State alluded to what Iraq's biolgoical weapons chief Rihad Taha, known by the sobriquet Dr. Germ, had done with massive experiments upon unwilling prisoners, and what Osama's expert in the field, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, might well have done in America while seeking medical treatment in Baghdad.
While the claims promised finding Saddam's WMD the top priority if there was a war, Washington and London hard liners in the intelligence community made it inevitable by spying on reluctant members of the Council trying to work out a compromise, making sure that it didn't succeed.
(4) The war in Iraq was, perhaps, the most barbaric in history, smashing its society, blasting its infrastructure, murdering masses instead of leaders, destroying necessary facilities for maintaining security and any possible peace after the end of conflict, putting such a high priority on avoiding casualities that it killed many of its own forces through "friendly fire" incidents, etc., ad nauseam. By my calculations, 25,000 Iraqis were killed during this brutal attack, many in their own homes, and several thousand troops in their bunkers and barracks. The amount of depleted uranium in the weapons used could lead to massive problems with cancer in the Iraqi population down the road.
As even America's proconsul for the occupied country, L. Paul Bremer III, recently admitted, its "economy was flat on its back" after the attack, there was no police anywhere to be seen, the smashed army had simply disappeared, electrical power generated for April 2003 amounted to a meaningless 300 megawatts, the public health system was an empty shell, the canal system was totally useless, the telephone system was inoperative, the banking system was in ruins, there were no institutions of government, etc. The Coalition of the willing had subjected Iraq, except for its bridges to minimize its casualities, to total war, hardly what one would expect from an invader claiming its only motives in coming was to free the population from its cruel dictator and his minions.
Then the Coalition was more interested in settling scores with dangerous members of the former regime - seeking solutions to its problems - rather than serving the interests of the Iraqi people. Saddam's sons were killed to make sure that these most deserving enemies of it were never in a position to tell tales about Washington's, London's, and Tel Aviv's former dealings with them, making them martyrs in the process. Saddam, on the other hand, was captured, given prisoner of war status, and left to the Iraqis to try so that he did represent the same threat as his dead sons. Other members of the notorious pack of cards were treated with kid gloves in the hopes that they would help find Íraq's WMD.
(5) The Coalition compounded these problems by replacing administrator Jay Garner, the joivial general who had some real rapport with the peoples of Iraq, by the neocon mission maker Bremer. He is an America firster in the Teddy Roosevelt style, but he also has a special agenda for those killed in the 9/11 attacks.
Bremer served with Oliver North as co-chairman of the NSC's Operations Sub-Group when the illegal activities of Reagan's White House entered their most dangerous phase. As the President's Ambassador at-Large for Counterterrorism, he was deeply invovled in carrying a big stick against the Soviets while speaking softly, if at all. Bremer believed that everyone, including the press, should get behind Washington's covert war against the "evil empire", and consequently, he was deeply involved when North, Secretary Navy Lehman, and CNO Admiral James Watkins arranged to take out the Soviet underwater nuclear deterrent by surprise - what the asssassination of Swedish statsminister Olof Palme was to trigger on February 28, 1986. He then helped solve all the problems at Libya's expense when Soviet spies Rick Ames and Robert Hanssen helped spoil plans against Moscow.
With these credentials, Bremer became Managing Director of Kissinger Associates in 1989. After the 9/11 attacks which killed 295 employees of the financial services firm Marsh & McLennan, Bremer was appointed Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Marsh Crisis Consulting Company, a new company to help repair the damage.
(6) In Iraq, Bremer has been completely concerned with managing the situation, not helping solve the problem - getting the Iraqis so they can manage their own affairs. While concentrating upon restoring services, killing troublemakers, and building up businesses - what Marsh Crisis Consulting is ecstatic about - he has increasingly adopted a hard nose approach to growing political turnoil and social unrest, and expects the press to do the same. In the process, he has adopted just the wrong approach he has long protested against in dealing with terrorism.
Bremer expects, demands that the press adopt a "do no harm" approach to terrorism. "They have to understand that they are not just observers," Bremer explained in 1990, "they are part of the incident. They are a major reason for the incident...so they don't have the luxury of folding their arms and saying, "Well, we're just reporters here.' " When this has not happened increasingly in Iraq, Bremer has taken to the soapbox, explaining that the unrest is the result of outside troublemakers, there is little room for compromise with people like Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the terrorists must be crushed, the perpetrators of the ghastly attacks in Falluja must be punished, and the like.
Terrorists worldwide could not have hoped for a better script for bringing down America, and its Coalition of the willing.
This world is fast turning into an Orwellian nightmare...
Bush and Blair's pronouncements are becoming ever more Orwellian in their resolute defiance of reality
by Jonathan Freedland
All credit to the BBC for its latest period drama. He Knew He Was Right makes an inspired choice, if only because the title sounds so completely contemporary. The sentence describes perfectly the man of our time: our prime minister Tony Blair.
It seems long ago that critics branded the PM as "phoney Tony". Now we know that he is a conviction politician - with no greater conviction than his faith in his own rightness. What he is right about is a secondary matter; indeed, the opinion itself can change by 180 degrees within a few days. The important thing is that he holds it. Once he does, it becomes true. He knows he is right.
This is why yesterday's volte-face on the European referendum would have discomfited lesser politicians, but not Blair. He finds the change effortless. When he said, in October last year, that "There will not be a referendum" on the European constitution, because the changes in the document did not merit it, he knew he was right. And when he announced yesterday that there would, after all, be a national vote, he knew he was right again. There was consistency between the two positions: in both cases, Blair was certain of his own rectitude.
This was why the prime minister was only half-accurate when he told last autumn's Labour conference: "I've not got a reverse gear". Actually, he does have one and it works very well; it's just that, when he uses it, it does not feel like reverse. Blair believes he is pushing ever forward.
It amounts to an unusual knack - to deny reality and keep smiling - and it can be unnerving to watch. But Blair is not the only man to be so blessed. As in so much else, he shares this trick of the mind with his soulmate, President George Bush.
Friday's performance at the White House rose garden was a display of the technique so virtuosic, requiring such intellectual gymnastics, the pair should take their show on tour in a political Cirque du Soleil. They could call themselves the Duo of Doublethink.
Naturally, Bush went first with a rapid-fire series of statements that stand at almost surreal odds with the truth. "Iraq will be free, Iraq will be independent," he promised, just as soon as the "transfer of sovereignty" is complete on June 30. But look at the reality. On July 1 Iraq will still have up to to 130,000 foreign troops on its soil as well as 14 "enduring" US military bases. Every move of the new authority - consisting of individuals handpicked by the American pro-consul Paul Bremer and with no democratic mandate whatsoever - will be subject to the approval of a "US embassy" which will administer some $18.4 bn in reconstruction funds and be the largest such mission in the world. Iraqi infrastructure, from the electricity grid to the courts, will be reshaped and run out of the embassy. Iraqi industry will be on sale to foreign ownership and the Iraqi military will still take its orders from the US commander. So June 30 will not be a handover of "sovereignty" at all, and Iraq will be neither "free" nor "independent", at least not according to any common-sense definition of those terms. Yet Bush and Blair continue to speak of the end of June as if it was Iraqi independence day.
And that's nothing compared with the rest of the Bush-Blair show. Behold the comedy of the president's declaration that "our coalition has no interest in occupation". Or the prime minister's insistence that no "outside" forces will be allowed to determine Iraq's future - as if the US and British armies are not outside forces doing precisely that. These are examples of doublethink to rival Bremer's exquisite remark to an American interviewer earlier this month that the Iraqi resistance is made up of people who "think that power in Iraq should come out of the barrel of a gun. That's intolerable and we will deal with it". (Where does the coalition's power flow from, if not the barrel of a gun?)
Perhaps the problem is one of self-awareness. Maybe Bush, Blair and Bremer do not see that they are heading a US and British occupation of Iraq, and genuinely forget that they are outsiders ruling the country. Or maybe there is a wider error here. For the doublethink spreads far. Witness Blair's assertion that "we have been involving the UN throughout" - when the one thing everyone knows about this war is that it was waged without the involvement or backing of the UN. Or Blair's breezy reassurance that from now on "the UN will have a central role", as if he had not noticed that, one year ago, he stood beside Bush in Belfast and watch him repeatedly promise the UN a "vital role" which never came. Does the prime minister not see reality? Or does he think the rest of us won't notice?
Forget Bin Laden - the president's real enemies are dissenters at home
by Peter Preston
The event itself has a certain exoticism: two dozen academics from (among other places) Oklahoma and Zimbabwe, Arizona and Peru, gathered in a small Slovenian town to discuss censorship and democracy. But there is nothing exotic about the central question stalking us all. That's as relevant as the morning headlines, as fresh as blood in the sand, or Tony Blair biting his lip. Simply: why is America such a "weak democracy"?
The problem, of course, is best posed by an American. Enter Bob Ivie, professor of communication and culture at Indiana University. It's he who teases out and delineates the "weakness".
That began (in my free-wheeling and fallible extrapolation of his thesis) with the founding fathers. Read Madison and see. They were nervous about "distempered" democracy, about too many roughnecks rocking their elitist boat. So the constitution - far from being one man, one direct part in the action - was a cautious edifice of checks and balances: a lower house, an upper house, a president, all forced to wheel and deal and, at the end, deliver what the system ordained rather than what the voter crudely demanded.
And the years have not been kind to that constitution. It has frozen in mythic immobility. No ferment about reform, no movement. The alterations to the superstructure of this superpower are external, shifts in context. Consider the explosion in media spending; consider the zillions you need to run for anything; consider the dependence on corporate power. Greenback elitism.
The people have a vote (if registered). They can be, and often are, involved in community politics. But real politics is the preserve of the few. And the few, like Marie Antoinette reaching for the ginger biscuits, are perennially edgy about their authority. Television and radio have given the president the added aura of supreme power. They have helped to free him from the web the founding fathers wove. He has a digital bully pulpit now. But he runs what Ivie calls a "rhetorical presidency" - full of "images, phantasms, tropes and insecurity". That means "governance by crisis".
Modern history makes the case. First the mutual phantasm of the cold war, then the dominoes of Vietnam falling. If no more suitable dragon than General Noriega presented itself, there was always a "war on drugs" to wage or forget, as necessary. And today there is that "war on terror". If war is crisis, then war is also the stifling of debate in weak democracies.
Those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty" while criticising the Bush administration's methods of fighting terror at home and abroad provide "aid to terrorists". That's attorney general John Ashcroft testifying to the Senate after 9/11. "See how dissent terrorises democracy while political quiescence promotes peace and security," says Ivie dryly. "Democratic dissent has turned oxymoronic."
So today's headlines take over. There stand Messrs Bush and Blair on the White House lawn, vowing eternal devotion to the "historic struggle" for democratic victory in Iraq. They've been there before. Last time Bush declared that "every nation in every region has a decision to make - either you are with us or you are with the terrorists". But now we're beyond nations and shadowy forces lurking in Tom Clancy's dreams. Who are these unwelcome, individual Iraqis on our TV screens, protesting, rampaging, shooting and often dying? Why, says George, they're terrorists. Yes indeed, echoes Tony. He who is not for us is a terrorist. He can and will be killed unless he falls silent. He can and may be locked up indefinitely (like the 762 aliens in US jails) so that silence enfolds him.
Let's be clear where the blank rhetoric of good and evil, white and Arab, democracy and utter destructiveness, is leading us. It is designed to make democratic dissent seem treacherous. It renders argument damnable or deluded. It makes zapping Falluja or Najaf a no-brainer. It means the force-feeding of democracy, or else. And its feebleness - nay, feeble-mindedness - is manifest.
Actions speak louder than words, and the action of this US government have been nothing short of BARBARIC! Lies, death, invasion and to top it all off, censorship. All of this from the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, I'm not sure how much more of the hypocrisy I can stomach. If you ask me al-Jazeera should do an Englash language version of their channel, then the Pentagon would be really pissed. Hey, I'd gladly give up one of the stupid shopping channels and pay £20 a month to watch English al-J. So if anyone from that good station is reading this (fat chance!) listen up guys, us English speakers need real news too not the censored, sanitized, pussy-whipped pile of shit we're subjected to now!
Al-Jazeera has a track record of accurate reporting - which is why its journalists have been criminalised and its offices bombed
When US forces recently demanded that a team from the Arabic TV station al-Jazeera leave Falluja as a condition for reaching a ceasefire with the local resistance, it came as no surprise at the network's headquarters in Doha. Reliable sources there say that coalition officials threatened to close down the al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad earlier this year and last week sent a letter accusing the network of violating the Geneva convention and the principles of a free press.
Since the "war on terror" began, al-Jazeera has been a thorn in the side of the Pentagon. "My solution is to change the channel," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said this month in Baghdad, "to a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station. The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources."
The trouble for Kimmitt is that millions of people in the Middle East disagree. Al-Jazeera has become the most popular TV network in the region - with a daily audience of 35 million - precisely because it has shown the human carnage that US military onslaughts leave in their wake. If it became a "legitimate, authoritative, honest news station" of the kind that routinely censors the realities of US military operations, it would lose its audience.
The al-Jazeera reports of US snipers firing at women and children in the streets of Falluja have now been corroborated by international observers in the city. Perhaps it is natural that a military force should seek to suppress evidence that could be used against it in future war crimes trials. But it is equally natural that a free media should resist.
Democratising the Middle East may have been the neo-cons' case for the conquest of Iraq. But on the ground, the US is acting against the flowering of Middle East media freedom, which al-Jazeera initiated.
The station was launched in 1996, by disenchanted BBC journalists, after Saudi investors pulled the plug on the Arabic TV division of the BBC News service. Since then, it has spawned a plethora of competitors such as EDTV, Abu Dhabi TV, the Lebanese Broadcasting Company and, most significantly, al-Arabiya. Like al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya has been banned by the US-appointed Iraqi governing council for weeks at a time for "incitement to murder", after airing tapes of Saddam Hussein. Two of its journalists were shot dead by US forces at a US checkpoint in March.
Last November, George Bush declared that successful societies "limit the power of the state and the military ... and allow room for independent newspapers and broadcast media". But three days earlier, an al-Jazeera camera man, Salah Hassan, had been arrested in Iraq, held incommunicado in a chicken-coup-sized cell and forced to stand hooded, bound and naked for up to 11 hours at a time. He was beaten by US soldiers who would address him only as "al-Jazeera" or "bitch". Finally, after a month, he was dumped on a street just outside Baghdad, in the same vomit-stained red jumpsuit that he had been detained in.
Twenty other al-Jazeera journalists have been arrested and jailed by US forces in Iraq and one, Tariq Ayoub, was killed last April when a US tank fired a shell at the al-Jazeera offices in Baghdad's Palestine hotel. It was an accident, the Pentagon said, even though al-Jazeera had given the Pentagon the coordinates of its Baghdad offices before the war began.
The full madness of George W. Bush has been revealed, as new articles describing journalist Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack are released, and as Bush himself proudly reiterates America’s God-given right to proliferate 'freedom' at gunpoint everwhere on earth.
The book backs up previous accounts of Bush’s determination to make war plans against Iraq immediately after 9/11. According to Woodward, who interviewed more than 75 key officials including Bush, the initial probing towards war with Iraq began in November 2001, when the president met urgently with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and said, “…let's get started on this.” The next month, the president had General Tommy Franks draw up a hypothetical battle plan. And so the die was cast.
Bush’s war plans intensified during 2002, when the administration’s neocon “cabal” set up the Office of Special Plans to produce “intelligence” on Iraq’s alleged WMD program. The cabal was apparently guided by Vice President Dick Cheney and run by his chief aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith.
According to Woodward’s book, Colin Powell- barely on speaking terms with Cheney these days- protested that the vice president had through the OSP set up a parallel government to push the warmongering of the administration’s neoconservatives.
The president’s personal dedication to war had dramatically increased by early 2003:
“‘…we're not winning. Time is not on our side here. Probably going to have to, we're going to have to go to war,’ the book quotes Bush as telling national security adviser Condoleezza Rice in early January 2003.”
Rice’s significance as one of the key antagonists for war emerges in Plan of Attack. Although the position of national security advisor is one of the most important in any administration, Rice’s role was heightened by the president’s awareness that Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell had irreconcilably opposing views on Iraq. Perceiving Rice to be more independent, Bush placed great faith in her opinion which was, unfortunately for peace, pro-neocon.
Let me begin with some blunt questions, the harshness of which matches the situation in Israel/ Palestine. How have the Jews, immemorially associated with suffering and high moral purpose, become identified with a nation-state loathed around the world for its oppressiveness toward a subjugated indigenous people?
Why have a substantial majority of Jews chosen to flaunt world opinion in order to rally about a state that essentially has turned its occupied lands into a huge concentration camp and driven its occupied peoples to such gruesome expedients as suicide bombing? Why does the Zionist community, in raging against terrorism, forget that three of its prime ministers within the last twenty years—Begin, Shamir and Sharon—are openly recognized to have been world-class terrorists and mass murderers?
And why will these words just written—and the words of other Jews critical of Israel—be greeted with hatred and bitter denunciation by Zionists and called "self-hating" and "anti-Semitic"? Why do Zionists not see, or to be more exact, why do they see yet deny, the brutal reality that this state has wrought?
The use of the notion of denial here suggests a psychological treatment of the Zionist community. But in matters of this sort, psychology is only one aspect of a greater whole that includes obdurate facts like forceful occupation of land claimed by and once inhabited by others. The phenomena of conscience are of course processed subjectively. But they neither originate within the mind nor remain limited to thoughts and feelings. Conscience is objective, too, and linked to notions like justice and law that exist outside of any individual will. It is also collective, and pertains to what is done by the group in whose membership identity is formed. These group phenomena are, we might say, organized into "moral universes," in which history, mythology, and individual moral behaviors are brought together and made into a larger whole. Such universes may themselves be universalizing, wherein that whole is inclusive of others, who are seen as parts of a common humanity (or for non-human creatures, nature). Or, as all too often happens, they may be unified only by splitting apart of the moral faculties.
Now, the situation prevailing in Israel/Palestine is that common humanity is denied, the Other is not recognized, and the double standard prevails. In such conceptions, which have stained history since the beginning and comprise one of the chief impediments to the making of a better world, talion law reigns, violence toward the Other is condoned, and violence from the Other is demonized. Like the realms of matter and anti-matter, each such moral universe is paired with that of its adversary. But such mirroring does not imply moral equivalence; that is settled according to the rules of justice. In this instance there should be no doubt that those who have dispossessed others and illegally occupy their national lands have to bear prime culpability.
This is not meant to excuse such Palestinian or Arab wrongdoings as have arisen in the course of the struggle—which would be a denial of moral agency—but it provides context for understanding the conflict at a deeper level and obliges us to look with special care at the curious situation of the Jews. Despite the innumerable variations between different fractions of Judaism, here certain unique historical forces have shaped a common dilemma and played a crucial role in the unfolding of Zionism.
No, I'm not shutting up about this! This article was written a while ago but I missed it when it came out at the beginning of the year so here you go. I think someone should nominate Mike Rivero for a Nobel prize or something, his website is second to none.
I know that’s not what you want to hear as you hoist your New Year’s champagne, but it is the unpleasant truth that we all face going into 2004.
Movies and public school like to portray slaves as bound by chains and beaten with whips, creating a polarized image of slavery that can be pointed to with the comment, “You are not like that, therefore you are not a slave.” But history shows that slaves have been treated in all manner of ways, some more cruel than others, yet even with the most kind treatment, a slave remains a slave.
Setting aside the stereotyped image of a slave as a bleeding chain-bound wretch, slaves throughout history are often hard to recognize. In some cases, such as the Medieval Serfs, they were held slaves to the rulers by religious belief, and did not see themselves as slaves even though they were treated as such.The favored slaves of Asian potentates wore jewels to make a movie star gasp, yet were still slaves for all their finery and comfort.
So, what is a slave? How do we define a slave? What test do we use to tell if someone is a slave. What makes them different from free people?
Free people can say “no”. Free people can refuse demands for their money, time, and children. Slaves cannot. There is no freedom without the freedom to say “no”. If someone demands that you do something and you can say “no” and refuse to do it, then you are a free human being. If you can be forced to do something or surrender something that you do not wish to, then you are a slave. No other test need be applied.
When you are forced to surrender half your life’s work to the government in ever-increasing taxes, then you are a slave.Throughout history, slaves were expected to perform the work needed for their own upkeep, then perform additional work for the rulers. For Roman slaves, the ratio of work-for-self versus work-for-rulers was about 50-50. The same ratio applied to Medieval Serfs, and even to the slaves of the American south. And, when you add up all the overt taxes, covert fees, tariffs, excises, plus the increased price you pay for products to pay the taxes of the companies that make those products, you will find that Americans are at that same “half-for-self” versus “half-for-rulers” ratio! Can you say “no” to the confiscation of half of your life? Can you even get the masters to maybe reduce the burden by a significant amount? No? Congratulations. You are a slave.
The masters have decided they want wars on anyone living over oil. The idea is that it is better for American corporations to steal the oil they need than to pay for it. Millions of Americans (and millions more around the globe) did not want the war, but the masters started them anyway, by lying to the people. Could you refuse the war? Can you refuse being lied to? No? Congratulations. You are a slave.
The rulers want your children for their future wars. Legislation for a draft is already in Congress. Can you refuse the confiscation of your children? No? Congratulations. You are a slave.
The government has been caught lying over and over again to the people, from who really did 9-11, to the legality of the tax system, to Cheney’s Energy Task Force papers, to Saddam’s WMDs. Americans are the most lied-to people on Earth. Can you refuse to be lied to? Can you punish the liars? No? Congratulations. You are a slave.
My fellow Brits I ask you, how does it feel to know that we are the evil empire??? Guess what; everything you learned in history at school is all one big fucking lie, all of it! What they don't know, they invent and what they do know, they distort until it bears little resemblence to what actually happened. Our teachers feed us crap, our parents feed us crap, our priests feed us crap, the media feeds us crap and our governments feed us crap, and most of those poor, well-meaning souls don't even realise they're doing it because the lies are so well crafted and all pervasive that unless you looking for the "truth" you never even get close! They don't want us to be intelligent, well-balanced, well-educated, free, healthy and happy (all the things they say they are promoting); they want us tired, anxious, down-trodden, fearful, stressed out, worked to the bone and desperate to consume because the TV tells us it will make us feel better. Orwell and Huxley were both right and unless a whole lot of people do a whole lot of waking up, we're all absolutely and completely fucked!
...with a little help from her friends
The recent brouhaha over Patrick Buchanan's interpretation of World War II differs markedly from what had been the central historical dispute between the adherents of revisionism and orthodoxy on the American entrance into the war. That dispute revolved around the motives of the Roosevelt administration. The American historical establishment never accepted the World War II revisionists' contention that the American people had been tricked into war by a duplicitous Franklin Roosevelt, who falsely claimed that his policies would keep the United States at peace while doing his utmost to involve the country in war. [1] According to the long-held establishment version of American entry into World War II, a reluctant U.S. government had been dragged into war by the force of circumstances — the belligerent actions of Germany and Japan. [2]
What Thomas Mahl's taboo-shattering book makes clear, however, is that the revisionist interpretation was not only much closer to the truth, but that it, in fact, did not go nearly far enough — failing as it did to recognize the extent to which British intelligence had orchestrated the interventionist effort. [3] Moreover, the British played a critical role not only in bringing America into the war but also in inducing this country to emerge as a global superpower. Mahl bases his work on a number of recent government archival releases, which he, in detective-like fashion, melds with other materials — especially private papers — to arrive at his striking thesis.
Mahl, in short, presents "the story of the covert operations mounted by British intelligence to involve the United States in World War II and destroy isolationism. These operations profoundly changed America forever, helping it become the global power we see today — a power whose foreign policy leaders were freed to make, after the war, a multitude of global commitments unhampered by any significant isolationist opposition." (p. 1)
Long before the onset of World War II, Mahl observes, the British discerned the utter necessity of American military support in any future war with Germany. But, as made evident by the neutrality acts of the 1930s, the great bulk of the American people were adamantly opposed to becoming involved in another European war. Consequently, the British government recognized the need to become actively involved in domestic American politics in order to bring the reluctant American people into the war against Germany. Britain's great assets in this endeavor to transform American policy were her secret intelligence and propaganda agencies.
British success depended on the intimate cooperation of two crucial allies in the United States: the eastern Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite and the Roosevelt administration. "This Anglo-Saxon East Coast establishment, which included such financial luminaries as the Rockefellers, not only shared England's political ideals but literally loved England and English culture." (p.6) The Roosevelt administration had been "at war with Hitler long before Chamberlain was forced to declare it." (p.6) Those two American groups were "willing tools" of British intelligence in its war-involvement scheme, with each having its own particular role. The Eastern elite provided the influential individuals who shaped the national media and comprised the interventionist pressure groups. The White House engaged in deceptive diplomacy and allowed British intelligence to operate freely on American soil. "What British intelligence brought to the equation," Mahl writes, "was sharp focus, good organization, technical expertise, and a courageous determination to do whatever was necessary — however illegal or unseemly." (p. 179)
The head of British intelligence in the United States was William S. Stephenson, a Canadian businessman, better known today by his New York cable address, Intrepid. [4] Arriving in the United States on April 2, 1940, Stephenson was, by January 1941, operating under the name of British Security Coordination (BSC), which administered all the varied secret British intelligence and propaganda organizations in the United States. Those organizations included British Secret Intelligence (SIS or MI-6), which was responsible for intelligence outside of Britain and the Commonwealths; Britain's Internal Security Service, MI-5, which, much like the FBI in this country, dealt with internal British security; and also a number of lesser-known security agencies.
BSC made use of any means, legal or illegal, to fight those it deemed enemies of Britain, a classification that consisted mainly of non-interventionist Americans who wanted to keep the United States out of the war, rather than actual German agents. [5] In essence, BSC sought to override the democratic will of the American people in the interests of the British government; and, most significantly, in this effort it was aided and abetted by the Roosevelt administration.
Of such great magnitude was BSC's influence in the Roosevelt administration that in 1941 it was able to design an American intelligence counterpart, the United States Coordinator of Information, which became the Office of Strategic Services the next year. The COI/OSS was created in the "image and likeness of British Security Coordination." (p. 21) Although officially headed by William Donovan, Stephenson's assistant, Dick Ellis, did much of the day-to-day running of the security agency, which was staffed by many other British agents. Moreover, "BSC passed on an attitude as much as it passed on specific technical skills. It passed on a way of looking at problems and an openness to possible solutions — no matter their legality or morality." (p. 21)
Another crucial BSC activity was the setting up of pro-interventionist front groups, the most important being the Council for Democracy and the Fight for Freedom, Inc. (FFF). By the last quarter of 1941, FFF, which cooperated closely with the White House, had become a central propaganda agency promoting a nationwide campaign for a U.S. declaration of war. Its propaganda built a demand for more extreme pro-war policies that a politically cautious President Roosevelt could then follow. Mahl illustrates the paramount role of British intelligence behind interventionist groups by discussing the fate of the first major interventionist group, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (CDAAA), nominally headed by the noted journalist William Allen White. The CDAAA publicly proclaimed that aid to Britain served to keep the United States out of the war. After British support shifted to the more militant Fight For Freedom in the summer of 1941, the CDAAA faded and died.
The principal tactic of British propaganda, Mahl points out, was to excite American fears of a direct German threat to the United States. That involved two basic themes: that Germany was poised to take over Latin America and that American non-interventionists were pro-Nazi fifth columnists. (It should be noted here that there was virtually no mention of German persecution of Jews, which today has become the ultimate justification for the "good war.") The theme that non-interventionists were really Nazi agents had perhaps the greatest long-term impact. That lethal smear destroyed the careers of many non-interventionists, eliminating opposition not only to involvement in World War II but also to postwar American globalism in general. [6]
British intelligence worked closely with media moguls and big-name writers to spread stories reflecting those propaganda themes. Mahl clearly shows that this was not a case of influential Americans unwittingly repeating British propaganda, but rather was a deliberate and direct collaboration with British agents. Among the many luminaries who consciously cooperated with British intelligence were publisher Henry Luce, noted columnist Walter Lippmann, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, and many of the foremost Hollywood movie producers. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt's speechwriter, went so far as to clear the president's speeches with Stephenson before they were delivered.
Everyone agrees that President George Bush's lobotomy has been a tremendous success.
Dick Cheney, the vice-president, declared that he was fully satisfied with it from his point of view.
"Without the lobotomy," Mr Cheney told the American Academy of Neurology, "it might have proved difficult to persuade the president to start wars all around the world without any good pretext. But the removal of those parts of the brain associated with understanding the outcome of one's actions has enabled the president to function fully and without hesitation. Even when it is clear that disaster is around the corner, as it is currently in Iraq, the chief executive is able to go on TV and announce that everything is on course and that he has no intention of changing tactics that have already proved disastrous.
"I would like to commend the surgeons, nurses and all involved with the operation," said Mr Cheney.
Similarly, Donald Rumsfeld regards the surgery as an unqualified success. He writes in this month's American Medical Association Journal: "The president's prefrontal leucotomy has successfully removed all neural reflexes resistant to war-profiteering. It is a tribute to the medical team who undertook this delicate operation that, no matter how close the connection between those instigating military action and the companies who benefit from it, the president is able to carry on as if he were morally in the right."
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, is also delighted at the beneficial effect that medical intervention has had on the president. "Just imagine how the president might have responded to Ariel Sharon's crazy schemes if we hadn't had the foresight to take out the neural pathways normally connected with perception and understanding," Mr Wolfowitz told a meeting of the Association of Muslim Neurosurgeons For An All-Jewish Israel. "The president is now capable of treating the man responsible for the massacres at Shatila and Sabra as a decent human being, whose advice on how to deal with the problems of Israel is worth not only listening to, but also taking."
With all this acclaim for the US president's lobotomy, it is scarcely surprising that Tony Blair, should have decided to follow suit and undergo similar psychosurgery.
Thanks to the inhibition of specific presynaptic terminals, Mr Blair now appears to feel totally comfortable giving his support to the US massacre in Falluja and to the activities of US snipers who have been so busy in that city shooting women, children and ambulance drivers in revenge for the murder of four mercenaries.
It is also believed that intervention in the motor speech area of his cortex now enables Mr Blair to describe Iraqis who respond negatively to having their houses blown up as "fanatics, extremists and terrorists".
You ever noticed how people who believe in Creationism look really unevolved? You ever noticed that? Eyes real close together, eyebrow ridges, big furry hands and feet. 'I believe God created me in one day' Yeah, looks liked He rushed it. -= Bill Hicks
US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy
by George Monbiot
To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state's Republican party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the decisions made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston.
The delegates began by nodding through a few uncontroversial matters: homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; "any mechanism to process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns" should be repealed; income tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and corporation tax should be abolished; and immigrants should be deterred by electric fences. Thus fortified, they turned to the real issue: the affairs of a small state 7,000 miles away. It was then, according to a participant, that the "screaming and near fist fights" began.
I don't know what the original motion said, but apparently it was "watered down significantly" as a result of the shouting match. The motion they adopted stated that Israel has an undivided claim to Jerusalem and the West Bank, that Arab states should be "pressured" to absorb refugees from Palestine, and that Israel should do whatever it wishes in seeking to eliminate terrorism. Good to see that the extremists didn't prevail then.
But why should all this be of such pressing interest to the people of a state which is seldom celebrated for its fascination with foreign affairs? The explanation is slowly becoming familiar to us, but we still have some difficulty in taking it seriously.
In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth.
What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (ie those who believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow.
The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there), sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European Union/France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.
While doing political research as an academic, I always sought evidence which was most immediate and apparently fair about whatever I was interested in. This usually meant looking for reliable newspapers which had direct reports about the matter in question rather than government records of major states or private papers of important individuals.
As Western powers have become developed states, their bureaucracies have become increasingly politicized, making their reports often censored versions of what really happened. Personal accounts of events, unless they are those by a player directly involved, are generally little more than hearsay evidence by those who have some point to make, or axe to grind, often long after they actually occurred. Memory too can play tricks on individuals when they try to recall what really happened.
Of course, newspapers, especially current ones, are not immune to such distorting tendencies, but they are still the best sources we have.
A good example of the kinds of things I am talking about surfaced when I started writing a two-volume biography of British barrister Henry Brougham (1778-1868). Brougham, because of his independent ways as an advocate and politician, was highly ridiculed in newspapers of the day, and letters by associates. William Hazlitt, the famous English essasyist, dismissed Brougham's efforts as those of a most self-serving hack who would do anything to get his way.The strength of Hazlitt's dismissal was well illustrated when I was once asked by Sir Geoffrey Elton, the famous Tudor historian, what I was doing, and when I explained to him the scope of the project, he responded curtly: "I would have thought one volume would have been more than enough, and a thin one at that."
The conversation took place while I was pouring over the columns of The Times in one of the reading rooms of the Institute of Historical Research in London, looking for accounts of Brougham's efforts in the courts, and Parliament during the early years of the 19th century. This was when Thomas Barnes was taking over editorial control of the newspaper from its proprietor, making it the envy of the earth. The Times was also another bete noir of Hazlitt who claimed that it was just another London rag.
For a more accurate picture of the paper and the politician, a better mix of fact and fiction, I would recommend viewers read the novels by Anthony Trollope, especially The Warden.
My research convinced me that there was far more to the politician and the paper than their critics, especially the witty Hazlitt, were contending. In the process, I also learned that Hazlitt was closely related to Dr. John Stoddart aka 'Dr. Slop', the former editor of The Times who was fired because of his reactionary interests. Stoddart then formed the New Times to combat Barnes's rising interest in reform, and became a leading light in the Constitutional Association, a most repressive organization to stop it. In sum, Hazlitt had real axes to grind, and his pithy claims should not be taken as fact, just interesting essays to be read for enjoyment.
While I was learning this, I failed to appreciate how all these considerations could be drastically changed if some bystander or researcher because of their claims became the focus of something quite different, eventually even sinister. Here I am referring to efforts by America's secret government, first to see to the repudiation of my theories about the assassination of JFK, especially the roles of CIA, Nixon, and his last Chief of Staff, General Alexander M. Haig, Jr., and when this effort unexpectedly failed, to see to my actual elimination. In the process, I learned the importance of having good files to correct one's questionable memory.
In my last confessions, I tried to describe the trouble caused by a fraudulent FBI memo, claiming that Jack Ruby should be given special consideration by the Bureau because of the work he was performing in the late 1940s for California Representative Richard M. Nixon on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) - what college professor J. David Truby had been given by a member of the Nixon Justice Department in 1974, and was circulating in order to justify the publishing of an article about it in The National Tattler.
The article was intended to corroborate many claims that I had been making about the President, but when I learned about the role of the memo in its proposed publication, I threatened Truby with a libel action if he went ahead. In the end, the tabloid printed a story in its June 1975 issue which satisfied neither Truby nor me, though I declined to sue it because I thought, given clarifications that The Writer's Digest had provided about the dispute in January 1976, any action would only help the culprits who assassinated JFK by mudding the waters further about the whole process.
When I left America permanently in November 1989, I thought that the whole dispute had long been settled, and clarified. Little did I know that Jim Marrs, the well-known researcher of the Dallas assassination. would claim then in Crossfire that I, after examining thousands of similar Bureau documents, had changed my mind about the Ruby memo, deciding that it was, in fact, genuine. Of course, I, living in the wilds of central Portugal with few contacts with the outside world, had no idea that he had written such outrageous claims, and I would have threatened him with a libel action if I had.
I only learned of Marrs's claim another 13 years later, and only through correspondence with Jim DiEugenio, editor of the former web site magazine Probe. This was after I had finally decided to move to Sweden because of my growing difficulties, especially with my health. I ultimately came to the conclusion that someone - apparently elements in America's secret government - was trying to kill me by poison, and I better seek a new venue if I hoped to survive much longer. It was outside Stockholm, when I finally went on the internet with my new computer, that I learned that DiEugenio had further trashed my work by claiming in a special issue of the magazine in Jan.-Feb. 1996 that I, a former intelligence officer, had deliberately used the fraudulent memo to help remove Nixon from office.
The point DiEugenio was making against me was not just an incidental one, but the basis of the whole special issue, as he explained in an introductory note, "From the Chairman's Desk," after the appearance of Oliver Stone's movie "Nixon" - what was intended to portray the former President in a better light: "And if that means defending people one don't like, so be it. If it helps return democaracy to America, we can call a temporary truce with Dick Nixon."
In explaining the origin of the temporary truce, DiEugenio said this about my efforts: "How bad did things get in those days. When the impeachment process was in gear in 1974, a college professor named Trowbridge Ford, with help from jouranlist David Truby surfaced a memo saying that Nixon had helped Jack Ruby get out of a jam with the HUAC. Paul Hoch ably revealed this document to be a forgery. But as Ed Tatro said, the real significance was that it showed someone was out to get Nixon and both Ford and Truby had intelligence connections."
I was never out to get anyone - though I would have pursued even my own mother if she had been part of the Dallas conspiracy - and had no role in either surfacing or circulating the memo. And I let DiEugenio know in no uncertain terms, and as soon as I could. When I finally got through his associate Lisa Pease to DiEugenio on October 16, 2003, he replied tersely:
My name is Jim DiEugenio. I wrote the three sentences you are complaining about. I got this information from Edgar Tatro, a researcher from Boston.
Are you denying you ever circulated the Ruby-Nixon memo? If you are so doing, have you forwarded letters to the others involved denying this and showing that people like Paul Hoch and Mr. Tatro have falsely accused you of this decades ago? If you have, please show me such documentation because when I called them when I wrote those words they never told me you had.
I assume you are not denying that the memo was a forgery or that you knew Mr. Truby.
JIM DIEUGENIO
After I replied the next day, trying to clarify matters on the basis of the two articles which had appeared in The Writer's Digest, DiEugenio continued in the same vein:
Mr. Ford:
I just picked up Jim Marrs trade paper edition of Crossfire. On pages 269-270, you are quoted directly. I quote in part:
"By the early 1980's, Ford told this author he had studied literally thousands of genuine FBI documents and had slowly come to the conclusion that the Nixon-Ruby memo was probably legitimate."
Mr. Ford, not only did you circulate this thing originally, but even after you knew it was phoney, you told an author of a bestselling book that it was probably not.
Please show me your letter to Marrs retracting this statement at the time the book was issued. If not, please drop the subject. There is nothing in the original citation that damages you in any way or is false. The Marrs citation show that it was correct.
JIM DIEUGENIO
Of course, I responded immediately, stating that there was nothing true in his e-mail, even the claim of a direct quotation in Marrs from me, and explaining that no one can deny false claims one doesn't know about, especially if they issued in a way least likely to promote discovery. (For example, I never wrote to other researchers into the JFK assassination that I was not part of the plot for fear that they might still, somehow suspect so.) DiEugenio then relented on October 21st, stating that he would raise the matter with Marrs, and asking me to fax copies of the articles about the memo in The Writer's Digest.
While I planned to do so, I don't have a fax, and before I could go out to one, I seriously injured my left foot, making any kind of trip like that out of the question. Then my computer immediately developed a deadly virus, making any e-mail or snail mail to him impossible because all his addresses were in my computer's memory. When I and my computer were finally up, and around, I sent him an e-mail on November 10th, explaining the delay, and telling him he could find The Writer's Digest in any good-size library. When I didn't hear anything more from DiEugenio, I even wrote an e-mail about my complaints to Marrs on December 6th, asking DiEugenio to forward it to him.
After three months had passed without any reply from either DiEugenio or Marrs, I e-mailed the former to tell him that my last confessions article had appeared on this site, and that I would be writing this one unless I received an adequate explanation, or compensation from him within four weeks. When the deadline passed without any response, I wrote again about the action I would take, and received this reply from DiEugenio:
Thanks for sending me this. I will keep it as proof of your nuttiness, fabricating, and libelous intent. SO when anybody writes me about your goofy article, well what do you expect.
BTW (Better Take Warning?), Marrs has notes about this interview with you for his book that you say never happened.
JIM D
The e-mails ended with a bitter exchange of claims and counterclaims about fabrications, facts, and failures.
Hardly had they stopped than Ed Tatro e-mailed me, professing that he had never had any relationship with the Agency, and while he could well understand what DiEugenio had put in his Chairman's Letter about me had been deeply upsetting, he declined all responsibility for it, claiming that Probe had completely distorted what he said. Tatro wanted me to retract what I had said about him. He was just a hard-pressed high school teacher who was trying to enlighten his students about some of America's darkest moments despite avoidance of the subject in standard textbooks.
Of course, I responded in the fashion already indicated, but his timing, and the rigmarole he went through to get in touch with me left much to be desired. I cannot help but think that he was tipped off by DiEugenio about what I was doing, hoping to gain some kind of helpful clarification in this article. Also, he used a different web site, lindqvist. com, to get in touch with me, claiming he did not know how to do otherwise. Of course, codshit.com published my e-mail address on many occasions, and he had the opportunity to deny my claims right on the web site. Unfortunately, for him, any reply would have been right under my e-mail, quoting his effort from Probe magazine - obviously an environment which would not have been promotive of his aims.
Tatro's claims about being a high school teacher suddenly refreshed my memory about my life in Portugal - what I had forgotten about when I wrote the earlier article. While I searched my files in researching it, finding only a few items on my old computer relevant to the project - what forced me to rely heavily upon my own memory - I had forgotten that I had written many letters on an electric typewritter before I purchased a computer, and copies of the letters had to be somewhere. I finally found them in an envelope another high school teacher had provided me in dealing with his students, and I had used it to store copies of the letters I wrote on the typewriter.
They were a revelation about why Marrs et al. had gone to such lengths to distort my research - they were building a case in my absence about my libelous intent against Nixon and his associates. In American law, it is almost impossible for a public figure like the former President, General Haig, and former DCI Richard Helms to win a libel case without showing that the alleged libeler did so, knowing that his claims were untrue - what Marrs apparently has in his notes of an alleged interview with me. According to him, I maintained that the Nixon-Ruby memo was legitimate after a most thorough search; yet, I still confided to Marrs that I knew it to be phony all along.
To make sure that they had an open-and-shut case against me, Randall Lynn, a history teacher at Douglas County High School in a suburb of Altanta, Georgia, wrote me a letter, apparently in January 1993 though it is undated, asking if I would help some of his best students investigate further questions about the JFK assassination, an event which had changed his life. If I agreed, he twice assured me that none of my help would be published or aired without my approval. He said nothing, though, about using it in any possible intelligence operation, or in a libel action by aggrieved individuals.
On March 11, 1993, I wrote to one student, outlining the conspiracy which murdered JFK - what I have elaborated upon in my earlier artciles on Helms, William King Harvey, Peter Wright, Alexander Haig, and Anatoliy Golitsyn. The letter concentrated upon the operations that Jack Ruby was integrating - the actual Mafia assassination plot (Operation Cleopatra), the set up of Lee Harvey Oswald and other decoys at Fidel Castro's expense (Operation Little Egypt); and the threats to the President by various criminal associates to break down JFK's security as he visited key cities, especially Miami and New York (Operation Twist Board).
I stressed how Nixon had brought everything together by standing up to recorded threats, apparently by Oswald, by attending the Bottlers' Convention at Market Hall on Nov. 21st, right across from the Trade Mart where JFK would be giving his speech the next day, as Pepsi-Cola's chief counsel, and then giving a press conference denying claims that there had been any official concern about his safety - what The Dallas Morning News empasized with its "Guard Not For Nixon" story on its front page on the fatal day. Instead of following false leads in Jim Garrison's investigation, I urged her to look into Watergate for more culprits, and evidence of the conspiracy.
Then the students asked me for more information about why I did not agree with Garrison's claims, especially about Clay Shaw's role, how Oswald had been set up as a "patsy", and who had killed Officer J. D. Tippitt and why. Before I had even had time to answer them, I received a most effusive letter from Lynn: "Your input has been been invaluable, and you join such figures as Dr. Cyril Wecht, Gaeton Fonzi, Mary Ferrell, Jack White, Jim Marrs, and Anthony Summers in giving so generously of your knowledge so that teenagers - so often ignored by the research community - may learn more about this pivotal event in our history." He asked for more information about names I had mentioned, and he had never heard of. He expressed the hope that the relationship could be ongoing, as there would be other students coming along with questions they wanted answered.
A week later, I wrote a four-page, single-spaced letter, trying to answer his queries and theirs. Without troubling viewers with all the detail, the most important information from the point of view of this article concerned Nixon, and none of it had anything to do with the false memo - e.g., Nixon and Dallas Representative Bruce Alger receving threatening post cards from someone thought to be a "possible, dangerous social deviant" from Dallas, Fort Worth, and Irving, Texas, locations known for their connections with Oswald; why would the former Vice President then go to Dallas to stand up to such threats, and publicise his apparent recklessness unless he was attempting to set the President up under controlled conditions - what he had learned from actress and Pepsi president Joan Crawford that JFK was tempted to do himself; why would President Clinton seek advice from Nixon when he had treated his Democratic predecessor so treacherously; etc.
Instead of hearing further from Lynn, I got an unexpected letter from Ms. Jennifer Caplan of Milledgeville, Ga., though it took nearly a year for it to arrive in Portugal. By this time, I had had it out with Lynn - what was prompted by writing him on December 10th to complain about his failure to answer my April letter, and to suggest that students write Nixon, Helms, and Haig for information about their role in the JFK assassination for the book I had now decided to write about the Dallas tragedy. Thanks to the handling of the Nixon-Ruby memo, and the controversy it had stirred up, I knew that these people would not answer any questions I put to them, but maybe they would feel obliged if Lynn's students queried them - what could even bring JFK's killers to justice at this late date. A few days later, I wrote to Bureau Director Louis Freeh in the same vein.
Ms. Caplan was apparently an investigator for some justice department, and hoped to gain information which would lead to my prosecution rather than that of Nixon, Helms, and Haig. She asked me about the memo, and obviously hoped that I would supply information along the lines Marrs claimed. I attacked not only the memo, but also how she had gotten interested in it. "By the way," I wrote on July 11, 1994, "do you know Mr. Lynn, and did he suggest that you consult me about your questions?" She, of course, denied everything, admitting only a now useless interest in seeing if the apparent relationship between Nixon and Ruby warranted some kind of criminal prosecution.
I do believe that this scathing letter ended all interest in a libel action against me, but put me on a deadly course with America's secret government. To make matters worse, I had written to President Clinton on April 30, 1994, complaining bitterly of the support the United States provided, and the testaments he gave to Nixon upon his death. I said that it was a slap in the face to those who had worked so hard to see that the felon was removed from office. "In sum," I concluded, "rather than spend good taxpayer money to try to polish up this most terrible President, you should have the Attorney General look into his earlier crimes, or appoint a new commission to determine what really happened to JFK and the country in Dallas. If you want further massive evidence on these matters, I would be happy to oblige. Kennedy's unsolved murder calls for no less"
I even wrote again to Freeh, thrice to Attorney General Janet Reno, and to Ms. Mary Spearing, Chief of the DOJ's General Litigation and Legal Advice Section, after she replied for her boss, but without any action, only being referred to previous unsuccessful investigations of the JFK assasination as if the Justice Department is only some kind of library reference service. All they accomplished apparently was to focus law-enforcement efforts on forcing me back to America where I could be silenced much more easily - what Portuguese emigration officials attempted, but without success when I went to the States a month later.
It was then that America's secret government plotted to kill me, once its new Ambassador to Portugal Elizabeth Frawley Bagley had gotten established in Lisbon. In looking through these misplaced papers, I also found my correspondence with its Vice Consul - who I had contacted on March 24, 1995 over the trouble I was having using the telephone because of suspected taps. He was Michael D. Thomas, not John White, as I had claimed. I had been forced to rely upon my memory, and it had turned up the wrong man - apparently a leading member of the Ulster Defence Asssociation, and close friend of imprisoned Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair - as expected under such circumstances.
Thomas surprisingly answered my questions the same day thus: "After conducting a thorough investigation, I hereby reassure you that, to my knowledge, there is no agency of the United States Government engaged in illegal activities against you." Of course, I took exception to any idea that he could know of any legal actions that America was conducting against me, and this left unanswered the possibility of either Washington or Lisbon conducting illegal operations against me. I was also convinced that his getting my name wrong, calling me "Trumbridge", was just a ruse so that he could get his hands on my passport, and keep it, claiming that I was again living illegally in Portugal.
I have little to add about the campaign that America's secret government carried out then to cause my death, apparently an accident, but actually caused by increasing doses of ricin - what I was fed when I had dinner at Caldas da Rainha's Supatra Restaurant. While the effort to inflict a disastrous libel suit on me had been apparently inspired by Nixon and his former Chief of Staff Haig, the plot to kill me was led by President Clinton, former DCI Helms, and the chief of section in Portugal, Ms. Bagley.
I had actually missed completely the transformation until recently, especially the significance of DiEugenio's Chairman's Letter to the murder plot when it was moving into high gear in early 1996. DiEugenio's was making my murder seem perfectly understandable under the circumstances. Who could feel sorry for an intelligence operator who plotted most foully to bring down President Nixon, being killed by anyone after his dirty scheming had been so tellingly exposed?
The only thing to add about the poisoning is that its effects still appeared after I thought I had escaped to safety in Sweden. My body had enough ricin in it that only a tiny bit more would have finished me off. I never had any more Thai food just to be sure, so that could not have been the cause of the attacks. For the next three years outside of Stockholm, though, I regularly had attacks in the middle of the night - attacks of incredible dizziness, followed by severe vomiting and diarrhea. It usually lasted for about 12 hours, and they occurred about once a month.
Three of the attacks, after I had exercised heavily, caused me great concern. The first occurred in the summer of 1997 when my girl friend was visiting her son in California. One morning, after running a bit with my dog Fresco, I suddenly had another attack like the last one in Portugal at Saint Martinho. I could not even stand, I was so dizzy, and once I staggered back to our house, I spent the rest of the day vomiting, and sitting on the toilet.
The most scary attack occurred just a year later, after my girlfriend and the dog had taken a long walk. Once we got back to the car, I suddenly fell unconscious, falling on the road beside it, and splitting open my head in the process. Everyone thought I had either had a heart attack, or suffered a stroke. After I was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, sewn up, and given a cap scan, doctors were at a loss, though, to explain what had happened to me. Even another extensive examination by my own doctor revealed nothing.
My last attack occurred another year later after Fresco had been gored by a deer, and I got so upset in taking him to the hospital that I ultimately experienced a spell of dizziness which forced me to line down on the floor for awhile to avoid falling, and splitting open my head again. Fortunately, since then, I have had no more attacks.
While sceptics may still not believe my claims - believing that I just had some mysterious ailment which somehow cured itself - I am convinced that I was poisoned by the people mentioned above, and if they wish to dispute it, I urge them to take me to court. I have already had enough near escapes with death.
As if that psycho Sharon is actually going to give a toss what Blair says or does....
Tony Blair distanced himself from Washington yesterday by pointedly condemning the Israeli assassination of the Hamas leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi at the weekend.
George Bush's administration refused to criticise the killing and said Israel had a right of self-defence.
Mr Blair told parliament: "We condemn the targeted assassination of Hamas leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi just as we condemn all terrorism, including that perpetrated by Hamas."
While Mr Blair has been quick to condemn Palestinian suicide bombings against Israel in the past, he has been less ready to criticise action against Palestinians.
What makes this intervention even more stark is that it was made on behalf of the leader of an organisation that has launched hundreds of suicide attacks against Israel over the past four years.
Mr Blair could have opted, as he has done in the past, to leave the criticism to the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, who condemned the assassination at the weekend.
Mr Blair's condemnation came as the Bush administration denounced Hamas, saying it should be put out of business. The Palestinian government should shut down Hamas and provide Palestini ans with the social services that Hamas offers them, the White House spokesman Richard Boucher said.
Mr Blair said the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's unilateral decision to withdraw troops from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank could be the first step on a full settlement outlined in the Middle East road map.
Putting an optimistic gloss on events, he told MPs the international community had a responsibility to prevent a vacuum and should help the Palestinian authority in those areas from which the Israeli government withdrew.
He said: "The fact that there is a withdrawal by Israel from Gaza and the West Bank at least gives us a chance, not just the Palestinian authority, but the international community, to play a role in building the necessary economic, political and security capability within that part of the territory controlled by the Palestinian authority."
Labour and Conservative MPs demanded, and won, assurances that Mr Blair would not accept the Sharon plan as a final settlement, and that the demand for a withdrawal from West Bank settlements was not being shelved. "Of course it is not a final step, or a final settlement," he said.
The road map was effectively brought to an end last week when Mr Bush endorsed the Sharon plan to pull out of Gaza in return for US recognition of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
It did appear that the mountainous bulk of murder and corruption, Ariel Sharon, was about to leave politics. Much as with Al Capone, authorities only caught up with him through a trail of crooked money.
But we have heard less of his retirement lately and rather more about his plan to leave Gaza. Apparently, after killing hundreds of its occupants, including scores of innocent bystanders as Israeli helicopters fired missiles into city streets, Sharon thinks he'll get some good press about leaving Gaza.
Of course, what Sharon truly is leaving is an impossible situation. Gaza is a small, fenced-in enclave of nearly a million Palestinians where only the most mentally unbalanced Israeli settlers insist on living a life of guard towers, razor wire, patrols, and spies. Sharon's army is tired of protecting a few machinegun-toting fanatics, not to mention the small fortune it can save by ending the protection.
The army will be able to do a more efficient job by policing only the perimeter of the world's largest open-air detention center. Access by land, air, and sea are tightly controlled, although inmates are permitted on selected days to pass through fences and checkpoints for jobs in Israel that Israelis will not take.
America's court-appointed President, the remarkable man who spent a hundred billion dollars to set Iraq in flames, characterized Sharon's initiative as "historic" and "courageous," two words whose meanings there is no objective evidence he even understands.
During the carefully-staged ceremony in Washington, Bush suggested the U.S. will support Israel's annexation of parts of the West Bank. How is Bush entitled to grant land he neither owns nor occupies to a third party without so much as consulting those who lived there for centuries and still often hold deeds? Apparently, through no principle more dignified than might makes right.
The de facto border of Israel keeps shifting eastward as new settlements sprawl out like Florida land developments. The Palestinians are not to be permitted even their miserable 22% of what once was called Palestine. Sharon's gang has always wanted the West Bank, minus its inhabitants, carefully dressing up its language in biblical terms that strike a special chord in the backwaters of America. Of course, one just as reasonably could make a case for Greece claiming parts of Turkey on the authority of the Iliad. The biblical claim really is just that silly, but it carries weight in parts where children's books are scrutinized for dire signs of witchcraft.
Sharon's government has been a disaster both for the Palestinians and Israel. The world's reaction to his behavior has been waves of severe criticism, but there also has been ugly new expressions of anti-Semitism. A number of Israel's defenders work to blur the distinction between these two things, hoping to silence criticism. Reasonable people are driven to despair at being treated so mindlessly.
A warmonger. A crackpot fundamentalist. A fanatic and a fool who has only the barest grasp of the killing power of the forces under his command.
His name is George W Bush and his main battle plan is to set the world on fire.
September 11 was a crime against humanity but from Afghanistan to Iraq, and now in Israel, Bush has blazed a purposeless trail of destruction and multiplied the dangers of terrorism a thousand-fold.
The War Against Terror has turned into a war of terror in Iraq as American troops butcher their way through the civilian population in pursuit of an enemy that grows stronger daily with each dead Iraqi civilian.
And in Israel Bush has overnight primed the entire region for a new cycle of slaughter by backing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's illegal land-grab of Palestinian territory and offering the Arabs nothing in return only despair.
Bush seems determined to unite the entire Arab world against the West. Already the mass murderer Osama bin Laden has gleefully vowed to avenge the Israeli assassination of Palestinian Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin.
After September 11 Bush promised to fight terror. But the only promise Bush has kept is the promise of more terror, more terrorist atrocities, like the Madrid bombings, to come.
As the American President Bush is supposed to protect democracy and make the world a safer place.
Bush is supposed to be the leader of the free world, a man who directly follows in the footsteps of such great statesmen as John F Kennedy, who saved the world from nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban missile crisis.
But airhead Bush is no Kennedy.
Watching Bush stumble through a live press conference, even when he knows the questions, is like watching a stranded goldfish gasping for air.
Bush is not just out of his depth, he is out of his element.
If it was not so truly frightening you could almost feel sorry for him.
If I was an American I would be ashamed. Ashamed that the greatest nation on earth is so badly led. Ashamed that their commander-in-chief is without purpose squandering the lives of his men, and Iraqi civilians.
And ashamed too of a President who sends men to their death but does not have the courage to attend one single funeral of the 700 US soldiers killed in Iraq.
This is very very interesting, when a Rothschild sneezes the whole world tends to come down with a cold....
A Golden Era Ends For A Secretive Dynasty
"They have pulled out of retail fund management - into which they went with much fanfare only three years back - and now they are pulling out of oil and gold in favour of the higher-margin areas of private banking and wealth management."
The news that the bankers Rothschild are to withdraw from the gold market, in which they have been a major player for two centuries, has been hailed as the end of an era.
In one sense, of course, it is. This was the company that smuggled gold coins across the English Channel to finance the Duke of Wellington's advance through France to his final triumph at Waterloo over Napoleon (who, it turned out, had also borrowed money from the Rothschilds).
But in another way it marks out the continuation of an even older tradition - the ability of the family which has founded one of the world's largest private banking dynasties to sustain their secretive fortune, which industry insiders count not in billions but in trillions, and keep it within the family.
Secrecy has been a hallmark of the Rothschilds from the outset. Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the son of an itinerant money lender and goldsmith who settled in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1744, specialised not just in clever accounting practices but also kept secret books and subterranean vaults which he ensured were never the privy of auditor, lawyer or taxman.
As the paterfamilias became more successful he despatched four of his five sons to different European capitals to take advantage of the rise of capitalism and the growth of international trade. Nathan he sent to London, James to Paris, Saloman to Vienna, and Carl to Naples, keeping the eldest, Amschel, at home with him in Prussia. Of these the two most important proved to be London and Paris, where the two main branches of the family developed a friendly rivalry, with the English branch developing the edge in business and the French in philanthropy, the arts and winemaking. But then in 1996 Amschel Rothschild, a 41-year-old man who had lived in the flamboyant style of many of his ancestors, hanged himself in a Paris hotel room. He was the Rothschild who had been groomed to take over as head of the English arm of the dynasty.
So when the bank's chairman Sir Evelyn de Rothschild retired earlier this year the succession passed to the French side of the family. Baron David de Rothschild, who had been running the family's Paris-based bank, inherited.
None of the Rothschild enterprises have been banks in the sense as understood by the man or woman in the street. What Mayer Rothschild founded in the 1760s was a business which grew from the humble beginning of selling rare coins to becoming the prime moneylender to greedy and spendthrift governments across Europe. One German contemporary quipped that Mayer was "the pride of Israel ... before whose money box kings and emperors humbly bow". And the novelist Thackeray said of Nathan that he was "not king of the Jews, but the Jew of the kings". The brothers financed both sides in the Napoleonic wars and in the Austro-Prussian war too.
"So, during the coup of 2000, when I watched an almost rabid Katherine Harris salivating to "certify" Bush"s electoral theft in Florida, a state controlled by his brother Jeb, and when I learned that the United States Supreme Court, comprised of some of the most unethical "justices" in United States history, appointed Bush the dictator of the United States, I knew there were forces at work more sinister than simply a cabal of corrupt oligarchs usurping democracy.'
If one believes the "official" versions of modern-day history, it is disquieting to learn of the remarkable number of "coincidences" that have served to lead humanity down the pathways of warfare and destruction.
A few months ago an article in PRAVDA proclaimed that Satan was living in the United States of America, specifically in the State of New Jersey. I remember thinking, tongue only slightly-in-cheek, that while this article may have accurately pinpointed the correct country, it missed the exact locale. Almost everyone in the world (outside of the United States of course) knows that Satan has, for the past few years, lived in opulent luxury in Washington D.C., personified by the avaricious, hypocritical, corrupt, deceitful, bloodthirsty, thieving, warmongering dictatorship of George W. Bush and his minions.
But, after some reflection, I realized that the influence of evil in shaping human destiny, and its capacity to inflict human suffering, is not so humorous after all. If one believes the "official" versions of modern-day history, it is disquieting to learn of the remarkable number of "coincidences" that have served to lead humanity down the pathways of warfare and destruction.
The First World War, for example, and the millions of lives it took, began as the result of a series of extraordinary "coincidences". A failed assassination attempt against Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand mysteriously turned into a successful one after Ferdinand's driver took a wrong turn, placing the Archduke within the sights of one of the assassins, who was brooding in a nearby cafe over the failure of the earlier attempt. This particular assassin also happened to be the best marksman in his group of conspirators, and easily shot both Ferdinand and his wife to death. This, in turn, ignited a series of "entangling alliances" that ultimately erupted into World War One.
A little over a decade later, and just as mysteriously, a struggling, embittered and homeless artist named Adolph Hitler arose to a position of ultimate power in Germany that was still embittered by its defeat in World War One.
In 1947, largely through the non-violent philosophy and efforts of Mohandas Gandhi, two centuries of British rule ended in India. Yet religious conflicts and tensions also saw the partitioning of that nation into India and Pakistan, and ultimately led to the assassination of Gandhi. The tensions between these two nuclear powers still persist today, frequently fueled by events in the disputed region of Kashmir.
Assassinations also played a disturbing role in America during the Vietnam-era of the mid-1960s and early-70s. Many historians believe that former President John F. Kennedy was planning on ending American involvement in Vietnam during his administration. But, before that occurred, a disgruntled, former marine found himself working in the Texas School Book Depository, a building that made an ideal sniper"s nest on November 22, 1963. The assassinated Kennedy was replaced by Lyndon Johnson, who subsequently escalated the war against Vietnam.
In 1968 two other anti-war voices, those of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were also silenced, King's allegedly by a fugitive from a Missouri prison who somehow acquired the resources to travel overseas, where he was eventually caught at Heathrow airport in London, and Kennedy's while he was walking through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
The result was the election of "law-and-order" president Richard Nixon, and the ultimate suppression of the anti-war movement, coupled with the harassment, censoring, imprisonment and murder of activists through the FBI's COINTELPRO operation. Yet Nixon's alleged "respect" for "law-and-order" certainly did not prevent him from engaging in criminal activities, nor compel him to refuse a pardon from his hand-picked successor Gerald Ford after these activities became known.
So, during the coup of 2000, when I watched an almost rabid Katherine Harris salivating to "certify" Bush"s electoral theft in Florida, a state controlled by his brother Jeb, and when I learned that the United States Supreme Court, comprised of some of the most unethical "justices" in United States history, appointed Bush the dictator of the United States, I knew there were forces at work more sinister than simply a cabal of corrupt oligarchs usurping democracy.
"What Bush has actually done is give way to the crazed world of Christian Zionism. . . . His language, his narrative, his discourse on history, has been such a lie these past three weeks that I wonder why we bother to listen. . . . What better recruitng sergeant could Bin Laden have than George Bush."
So, President George Bush tears up the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan and that's okay. Israeli settlements for Jews and Jews only on the West Bank. That's okay. Taking land from Palestinians who have owned that land for generations, that's okay. UN Security Council Resolution 242 says that land cannot be acquired by war. Forget it. That's okay.
Does President George Bush actually work for al-Qa'ida? What does this mean? That George Bush cares more about his re-election than he does about the Middle East? Or that George Bush is more frightened of the Israeli lobby than he is of his own electorate. Fear not, it is the latter.
His language, his narrative, his discourse on history, has been such a lie these past three weeks that I wonder why we bother to listen to his boring press conferences. Ariel Sharon, the perpetrator of the Sabra and Shatila massacre (1,700 Palestinian civilians dead) is a "man of peace" - even though the official 1993 Israeli report on the massacre said he was "personally responsible" for it. Now, Mr Bush is praising Mr Sharon's plan to steal yet more Palestinian land as a "historic and courageous act".
Heaven spare us all. Give up the puny illegal Jewish settlements in Gaza and everything's okay: the theft of land by colonial settlers, the denial of any right of return to Israel by those Palestinians who lived there, that's okay. Mr Bush, who claimed he changed the Middle East by invading Iraq, says he is now changing the world by invading Iraq! Okay! Is there no one to cry "Stop! Enough!"?
Two nights ago, this most dangerous man, George Bush, talked about "freedom in Iraq". Not "democracy" in Iraq. No, "democracy" was no longer mentioned. "Democracy" was simply left out of the equation. Now it was just "freedom"--freedom from Saddam rather than freedom to have elections. And what is this "freedom" supposed to involve? One group of American-appointed Iraqis will cede power to another group of American-appointed Iraqis. That will be the "historic handover" of Iraqi "sovereignty". Yes, I can well see why George Bush wants to witness a "handover" of sovereignty. "Our boys" must be out of the firing line--let the Iraqis be the sandbags.
Iraqi history is already being written. In revenge for the brutal killing of four American mercenaries - for that is what they were - US Marines carried out a massacre of hundreds of women and children and guerillas in the Sunni Muslim city of Fallujah. The US military says that the vast majority of the dead were militants. Untrue, say the doctors. But the hundreds of dead, many of whom were indeed civilians, were a shameful reflection on the rabble of American soldiery who conducted these undisciplined attacks on Fallujah. Many Baghdadi Sunnis say that in the "New Iraq"--the Iraqi version, not the Paul Bremer version - Fallujah should be given the status of a new Iraqi capital.
Why can no one name the hijackers or prove they flew the planes?
Know how to tell the difference between the truth and lies of 9/11? If they're talking about hijackers having done the dastardly deed, you know they're part of the sinister coverup extravaganza, wittingly or not.
In order for the people of the world to be convinced that Islamic hijackers were responsible for terrible tragedy of 9/11, we need to see some evidence. Not hearsay, innuendo, aspersion or promises of evidence, but real evidence.
Otherwise, the whole subject is rightly regarded as a ruse, a setup to conceal the identities of the real culprits, the ones who sit smugly in front of the TV cameras and plot their cynical war on terror - otherwise known as the war on the peoples of the world.
As President Bush continues to insist that his word be accepted as truth on numerous questions, time after time his statements have been revealed as blatant falsehoods. Yet he continues to repeat them, and the whorish corporate media continues to accept them.
Why hasn't either the Bush administration or some element of law enforcement in the United States issued a single solid piece of evidence connecting the hijackers to the hijacked airplanes? Why don't the alleged hijackers appear on the airport security videos? Why aren't there credit card records of their ticket purchases?
Why did FBI director Robert Mueller say very publicly to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco that nothing on paper connected Arab terrorists to 9/11? I mean, two and half years have passed. And the feds produced 19 names within 72 hours of the disaster. Notice a mathematical inconsistency here? All that has happened since is mere vigilante hysteria, hypothetical scenarios trumpeted ad nauseum by America's notoriously brainwashed Zionist press.
Seven or eight of the names on that original list have been found living comfortably in other countries. Why hasn't the FBI made any attempt to correct the errors made on that original list? See for yourself. http://members.fortunecity.com/911/september-eleven/hijackers-alive.htm and http://www.welfarestate.com/911/
And why, after much hullabaloo about Colin Powell using phony information in his remarks to the United Nations about the reasons for war, hasn't the U.S. government produced a single conclusive piece of evidence to back up its claim that 9/11 was the work Osama bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists? Not a single piece!
Every time I hear that demented intellectually stunted cowboy drone on about "turr" and "the war or turr" and "turrists" I want to be physically ill.
After watching the smug, sanctimonious, downright insulting, tired old, same old same old speech that came out of President Bush's mouth Tuesday night, how could any American not feel any number of emotions - all naggingly negative - about electing a guy who turned out to be not only the biggest but most dangerous mistake ever made in American democratic political history?
But president he is, God save us all, and led we will continue to be, at least as long as this one-note megalomaniac and his handlers have anything to say about it.
Once again, Americans on Tuesday were assaulted by more "pledges" from Bush: pledges for lots more violence in Iraq; lots more resolve to kill faceless, nameless and probably innocent people; lots more vows to seek "justice" from people who we've never known and by all accounts had nothing to do with the attack on America on Sept. 11.
But then you think; who is going to do all this killing of these virtual strangers, these people we are also pledged (wink, wink) to "protect" and to "free" from tyranny?
How about those private industry mercenaries, the ex-military so-called "contractors" who were killed recently, spawning the US military-led bloodbath in Fallujah?
Now it is fully understandable that the people of the United States, in this time of war and terror, would seek some sort of grip onto the reality that seems to have left us during the night of September 10th, 2001.
Jared Israel says that Scott Ritter changed his description of why he left UNSCOM, and is therefore a liar, and that he abruptly changed from a hawk to a dove on Iraq, and is therefore an agent of military intelligence. The first claim has to be evaluated very carefully from Ritter's actual statements. The conclusion of the second claim makes no sense at all. Also, Jared seems to label Ritter as a "hawk" for favoring "confrontations" with Iraq, but what Ritter was talking about were confrontational (i.e., unannounced and vigorous) *inspections*. That's not being a "hawk", which is a person who advocates war. 
Palestinian security forces have arrested a group of Palestinians for collaborating with Israel and posing as operatives of Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terrorist network, a senior official said yesterday.
The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the United States, and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago - February 27, 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for peace that mobilized citizens all across the world. 
Joyti De-Laurey will shortly be sentenced for stealing several million pounds from some City squillionaires. But if there was any justice in this world, Joyti would not only be a free woman, she'd be given a medal for services to the community. 
Will the US be under martial law by June, 2004? That is the impression some are expressing after witnessing a recent episode of Nightline (4/7/2004), with Ted Koppel. On this particular program Koppel is host to Richard Clarke, former Reagan officials Edwin Meese III and Kenneth M. Duberstein; former Clinton official Sally Katzen, author James Mann, and former Bush official Richard Clarke. The subject matter is named The Armageddon Plan.
The first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks found the world in much different shape than the leaders in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv had planned, and anticipated. Rather than a slow build-up for regime change in Afghanistan at the expense of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda, and his hosts, the Taliban, America and Britain had been forced by Israel - thanks to its apparent assassination of the Northern Alliance's Ahmed Shah Masood, its failure to inform the Americans what the hijackers had planned, and the anthrax letters it sent to important Democrats in the Senate to panic the population - to accelerate rapidly the process, and radically expand its scope. 
All credit to the BBC for its latest period drama. He Knew He Was Right makes an inspired choice, if only because the title sounds so completely contemporary. The sentence describes perfectly the man of our time: our prime minister Tony Blair.
Let me begin with some blunt questions, the harshness of which matches the situation in Israel/ Palestine. How have the Jews, immemorially associated with suffering and high moral purpose, become identified with a nation-state loathed around the world for its oppressiveness toward a subjugated indigenous people?
The recent brouhaha over Patrick Buchanan's interpretation of World War II differs markedly from what had been the central historical dispute between the adherents of revisionism and orthodoxy on the American entrance into the war. That dispute revolved around the motives of the Roosevelt administration. The American historical establishment never accepted the World War II revisionists' contention that the American people had been tricked into war by a duplicitous Franklin Roosevelt, who falsely claimed that his policies would keep the United States at peace while doing his utmost to involve the country in war. [1] According to the long-held establishment version of American entry into World War II, a reluctant U.S. government had been dragged into war by the force of circumstances — the belligerent actions of Germany and Japan. [2]
To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state's Republican party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the decisions made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston.
He is the most dangerous man in the world.
"They have pulled out of retail fund management - into which they went with much fanfare only three years back - and now they are pulling out of oil and gold in favour of the higher-margin areas of private banking and wealth management."
Know how to tell the difference between the truth and lies of 9/11? If they're talking about hijackers having done the dastardly deed, you know they're part of the sinister coverup extravaganza, wittingly or not.
