Hack Attack

U2 to JFK: Myths and Mysteries of the Cold War, Part 1

2009-11-12T16:56:00.000-08:00

by Travis Kelly

“Who controls the past, controls the present. Who controls the present, controls the future.” – George Orwell

In an editorial penned on November 20 in Truthout, “What Obama Is Up Against,” veteran reporter Russ Baker recounts a brief history of Pentagon/CIA skullduggery and deception against presidents from Eisenhower onward, as prologue to the dilemma that Obama now finds himself in, with Gen. Stanley McCrystal publicly demanding several thousand more troops for the war in Afghanistan -- “like Vietnam without the napalm,” in the words of an Army trooper. Referring to the famous military-industrial complex speech, Baker concludes:

“Half a century after Ike's famous admonition, conflict and intrigue remain the engine of our economy... So Barack Obama is boxed in. But so are the American people, and so, really, is democracy itself. Bringing this inconvenient truth [the covert manipulations of the Pentagon and CIA] out in the open is the essential first step toward taking back control of our government -- and our future.”

It’s not inconceivable that a world at peace could be marshaled in our near future: instead of fueling a global arms race (the US currently accounts for 48% of world military spending, and 70% of global arms sales), a crash investment in alternative energy resources -- solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear -- could meet most of our domestic needs, perhaps requiring a modest scaling back of our gluttony (25% of energy consumption, 5% of population). More hybrids and Smart Cars, less Hummers. But there is one problem: the ravenous energy appetite of our modern military cannot be met with any of these sources, except the nuclear option in large platforms like aircraft carriers. An Abrams tank will never be powered by solar panels. Thus we have the classic autocatalytic loop: our “national security” demands a massive military establishment to secure a disproportionate share of foreign oil.... because oil is essential to fuel our massive military establishment.

According to reports released this year, the U.S. Marines alone use 800,000 gallons per day in Afghanistan. At a cost of $400 per gallon, that equates to $320 million per day – just for the Marines. In Afghanistan. God only knows what bills for the Army and Air Force amount to in the whole Mid East theater.

The Plan for a New Century American (global military hegemony), or whatever moniker it masquerades under now, is dead without Mid East oil firmly under the control of the American military-industrial complex. And it will do anything necessary to insure that position, whatever the cost to the nation’s broader interests and overt political process. It’s own bloated existence is at stake, and no organization is more ruthless at insuring its survival than the weapons crowd.

Herewith, a first step in honest accounting as we approach the 50th anniversary of what may have been the military-industrial complex’s first coup…

MAYDAY, 1960: THE U2 DISASTER

Was the downing of Gary Powers’ U2 flight sabotage, or a terribly inconvenient accident? After four years of uneventful missions, why had this flight suddenly crashed on Mayday, two weeks before an unprecedented summit scheduled in Paris between Eisenhower and Khruschev -- and who exactly authorized the flight on that date? Years later, the liberal Senator from Arkansas, William Fulbright, who headed the senate hearings on the U2 affair, stated:

“I have often wondered why, in the midst of these efforts by President Eisenhower and Khruschev to come to some understanding, the U2 incident was allowed to take place. No one will ever know whether it was accidental or intentional.”

A brief recap before examining the evidence to date:

The Mayday crash ended four years of successful high-altitude photo reconnaissance overflights. With the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers posing the novel threat of global “collateral damage” in any hot war, a sense of elation had broken out in the world’s capitals after the announcement of the Paris summit -- perhaps the terrible titans would arrange a solemn pledge not to bring on Armageddon and nuclear winter for the whole planet. Khruschev had toured America in September of ‘59, charming mostly warm, curious crowds with his earthy wit (which didn’t include his earlier quip about American presidential elections: “Which is better, the left boot or right boot?”) He was bitterly disappointed over being kept out of Disneyland for alleged security reasons. (Equally plausible, it was a shrewd exploitation of Khruschev's unabashed desire to see the spectacle: "Be good, stay out of West Berlin, and you can dance with Mickey and Minnie next time." Or maybe it was due to embarrassment: the prospect of Khruschev construing propaganda from the infantilism of Americans and their life-size version of Candyland.) He also missed Ronald Reagan, who boycotted his reception in Los Angeles.

Khruschev returned to a hero’s welcome in Moscow; Pravda, Izvestia and the whole nation lavished praise on the Premier and President Eisenhower, who was slated for a reciprocal visit after the summit. Ike had initiated the process, extending the invitation for Khruschev to visit the U.S. first -- but he would never see the Soviet Union.

The Soviets had known of the overflights for years, tracking them on radar, but neither their anti-aircraft missiles nor jet interceptors could reach the U2’s maximum altitude of 70,000 feet. Worried about nuclear first strike capabilities, and the West’s intelligence blackout against a rigidly controlled society, Eisenhower had authorized the mission conceived by Richard Bissell, but he repeatedly suspended it during periods of heightened tension, or diplomatic advances, concerned that the flights could be mistaken as the prelude to more hostile actions. Above all, he demanded plausible deniability in the event of an accident, and CIA director Allen Dulles gave it to him, an “absolutely categorical” assurance that the fragile plane, sanitized of all American identification, would break up and the American pilot would never survive to be interrogated and paraded before the world.

Relying on this ironclad assumption, Ike had the State Dept. declare that a U2 on a weather observation mission was missing, and might have strayed into the S.U., but any accusation of espionage was false. Two days later, Khruschev revealed his well-guarded ace -- the pilot was alive, well and being interrogated. The Soviet press erupted in a chorus of outrage and betrayal as the Kremlin hardliners accused Khruschev of dangerous naiveté and Eisenhower of monstrous duplicity. The relapse into paranoia and acrimony was instantaneous -- like a fiancé discovering her betrothed’s sordid affair days before the altar. The Soviet fears of aggression were far more touchy and justified than ours: the last time foreign aircraft penetrated their airspace -- the Heinkels and Messerschmitts -- 20 million had died. Adding insult to injury, the illegal penetration was perpetrated on their most sacred holiday, Mayday. Imagine the furor of a Soviet plane crashing over a July 4th parade in Omaha.

Both Ike and Khruschev went to Paris two weeks later, after Khruschev had relentlessly bellowed his indignation and demanded an apology, an assurance that the flights would be permanently suspended, and a statement that Eisenhower himself had not authorized the flight, all serving to upend another Dulles’ prognostication -- that the Soviets would never publicize a crash, being too humiliated to admit that they had been impotent for four years to prevent them. Ike refused the impossible demands, although Dulles offered himself up as the scapegoat. Ike had always spurned the bad military habit of blaming subordinates for failures, and the admission that an American president was not fully in control of his defense establishment would have been disastrous for diplomacy. But this is exactly what the Soviets suspected and publicly charged -- a Pentagon plot to sabotage the summit.

During the senate hearings, Dulles made a revealing statement in response to Fulbright’s assertion that Eisenhower had privately opposed the decision -- why then had he taken responsibility for it? “The fact that I was going ahead on my own authority,” said Dulles, “to do something of this magnitude may not have been widely believed, even if I had asserted and stuck to it.” Note that he says “fact,” not “supposition” or “cover story.” When Fulbright asked him why the flight on Mayday, Dulles initiated the long tradition of CIA deception and stonewalling of congressional inquisitors: “I don’t discuss what the President says to me or I say to the President.” But that really, was the gist of the hearings -- who greenlighted the disaster?

In his memoir, Waging Peace, Eisenhower remains ambiguous, only addressing the issue of command authority in a footnote: “The State Department statement added that specific missions had not been subject to presidential authorization, which meant that I had not ordered the single flight in question. I had approved the reconnaissance of broad areas of the Soviet Union within a time period of certain weeks.”

What exactly had caused the crash? The remote possibility of a lucky near miss by a Soviet missile was conceded from the outset -- the missiles couldn’t maneuver in the thin atmosphere above 50,000 feet, but a lucky strike was possible. Also flameout of the U2’s jet engine was not uncommon at this altitude. That would require the pilot to glide down to as low as 30,000 feet to restart the engine, putting it within the range of Soviet jet fighters. Powers reported an autopilot failure early in the long mission (3900 miles from Peshawar, Pakistan to Bodo, Norway), requiring him to assume arduous manual control for most of the flight. Over Sverdlovsk, he later reported a “bright orange flash” from the rear, sudden loss of control, the plane spiraling down. The U2 had been equipped with a destruct mechanism -- a cyclonite charge in the camera bay directly below the cockpit, to be activated by the pilot in the event of mission failure. The pilots were told that the button had a 70-second delay, giving them time to eject, but some of them had voiced suspicions that the delay might have been closer to zero. Each had been provided a special suicide needle spiked with deadly shellfish toxin. The message from their CIA handlers: we prefer you not captured alive. Perhaps they had arranged insurance for pilots lacking the requisite seppuku spirit?

That grim prospect seems to have weighed on Powers as he struggled to remove the canopy -- he never hit the ejection/destruct button. Pilots had lost limbs and been horribly maimed in power ejections, and he said he wanted to make sure the canopy frame would open. It appears, in an instinct for life, he completely opted out of the ejection/destruct sequence, which stood good odds of becoming an amputation/obliteration sequence for himself, assuming that the delay on the button had been zeroed out -- perhaps the source of Dulles’ unequivocal promise that no pilot would survive, despite the fact that three U2s had crashed prior to Powers flight (none over the S.U.) and all three pilots had lived. How was Dulles so certain this time?

In 1996, former Soviet pilot Igor Mentyukov told a Russian newspaper that he had brought Powers down. Found at a bus station and rushed backed to his air base on May 1, he was ordered to take off and attempt to ram the U2. Mentyukov’s’s Sukhoi Su-9 had been stripped of all weapons to extend its ceiling. Mentyukov claims he approached Powers at around 65,000 feet, overshot him, and the turbulence wrenched a wing off, sending Powers into a spiral. The U2 was basically a gossamer glider hitched to a giant jet engine, and other crashes had involved loss of control and sudden wing loss. Shortly after, according to declassified Soviet documents, a barrage of ground-based missiles were fired at the disintegrating shape on their radar: only one hit target -- a Mig-19 fighter closing in. The pilot died in his parachute of injuries.

There is a problem with Mentyukov’s account. The ceiling of the Sukhoi Su-9 was 55,000 feet. Powers is adamant that whatever befell his flight occurred at 70,000 feet (he lied to his Russian interrogators that the U2’s maximum altitude was 65,000 ft. and concealed other information). So Mentyukov’s Sukhoi must have gained a phenomenal 15,000 feet in ceiling, high enough to fly over Powers, a feat unmatched by any other Soviet fighter during 23 previous U2 flights. Perhaps Mentyukov, and his plane, were exceptionally jazzed by the spirit of Mayday.

In 2000, Sergei Khruschev, the former premier’s son, offered a slightly different account: Mentyukov had missed Powers, failing even to gain visual contact, but a single SA-2 antiaircraft missile had exploded behind the U2 after Mentyukov’s unsuccessful interception attempt. Crippled, the U2 either tumbled or glided down to lower altitude before Powers bailed out.

But former USAF Col. Fletcher Prouty believes that’s not the whole story. Prouty served as Pentagon-CIA liaison officer at the time, overseeing U2 flights over Tibet and other aerial reconnaissance missions over Thailand and the eastern USSR. After the September Camp David conference punctuating Khrushchev’s ‘59 tour, Prouty’s operation, the Pakistan operation and all U2 flights had been grounded on Eisenhower’s orders. Finally, the President succumbed to Dulles’ and Bissell’s relentless pressure for a few more flights before the summit and the first in several months took off on April 9. So far, the U2 program had disproved the alleged “bomber gap” and “missile gap” ballyhooed by a coterie of hawks in Congress and the fringe media: John Birch Society founder Robert Welch had called Ike a “conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy,” a charge echoed by crank author Cleon Skousen (Glenn Beck’s ideological hero). But Ike could not publicly cite this evidence without compromising the program. It seems Dulles was bent on a last ditch effort to find such evidence before the summit and a possible arms reduction agreement.

Prouty notes that Power’s U2 was a “dog,” having experienced numerous mechanical problems, including a forced belly landing at the U2 base in Atsugi, Japan. It was shipped back to Lockheed in California for repair, and then flown to Peshawar in time for Power’s flight. Prouty alleges that the plane had been stripped of its “top secret” Lundahl reconnaissance camera, and somehow a whole incriminating package of Power’s identification papers and personal effects, forbidden to spy pilots, were found by the Soviets -- not in the wreckage, according to Prouty, but between his seat and folded parachute after Powers belly landed the plane near Sverdslosk! He cites no evidence for this conclusion, but it is interesting that the photo of the supposed U2 wreckage released by the Soviets was analyzed by the CIA and determined not to be that of a U2.

The U2 required a special hydrogen additive in its fuel to operate at maximum altitude. If the plane ran out of this additive, the engine would flame out, requiring the pilot to descend to lower altitude to restart the engine. Prouty suggests this is how the flight could have been compromised. And this is exactly what the NSA claimed happened, in a report to Dulles’s successor, John McCone, in 1962, after Powers was repatriated in an exchange for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, based on communications intelligence it had intercepted during the flight -- that the plane had slowly glided down to 30,000 or 40,000 feet before dropping to earth.

The weight of evidence suggests that something happened to Power’s plane at 70,000 feet, causing him to descend to lower altitude, where Igor Mentyukov’s unarmed fighter plane perhaps intercepted him and blew his wing off. The official story released by the senate investigation, long before Mentyukov’s testimony, concluded that a near miss from an exploding missile disabled the plane at maximum altitude.

In 1975, during the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation into CIA assassination plots, University of Delaware professor James Nathan published a retrospective article in Military Affairs reviewing the evidence:

“The anomalies in the Powers case suggest that the U2 incident may have been staged. There was the timing of the trip, the unusually long route chosen to over fly the Soviet Union, his undisguised American origins... the reluctance of Congressional committees charged with the oversight of such matters to ask any searching questions, and other indications that Powers had done essentially what he had been told... All these ‘administrative failures’ indicate that even if the weird flight and strange behavior of Powers was fortuitous, the U2 presented an opportunity which may not have been unwelcomed.”

Not unwelcomed by the hawks in both defense establishments, American and Soviet, it should be noted, who vigorously opposed any move toward détente. That same year, 1975, a Norwegian fisherman and convicted Soviet spy who had covered the Bodo, Norway base, Selmar Nilsen, claimed in a TV documentary that a KGB officer in Moscow had told him that a bomb had been planted in the tail of Power’s U2. At that time, Powers responded dubiously to the story, observing that security was so tight around the Peshawar base that it “would have had to be an inside job.”

Two years later, that prospect seemed to have become more plausible in Power’s mind: according to author Jim Marrs in Crossfire, Powers confessed on a radio talk show interview his suspicion that his plane had been sabotaged on the ground, and that it must have been an inside job. If Powers harbored secrets, and was inching toward breaking his silence after 17 years, he never got the chance. On August 1, 1977, while piloting a helicopter for the KNBC news station in Los Angeles, he crashed and died. There was no fire at the crash scene; the investigators found the fuel tank and lines completely empty. How had an experienced pilot made such an error? The previous week, Powers had abandoned covering a train fire early with a nearly empty gauge, only to discover upon landing at the Van Nuys airport that 30 minutes of fuel remained. According to the investigation, the fuel gauge was repaired -- but Powers was never told. Thus he may have continued hovering, convinced that he had up to a 30-minute reserve beyond his nearly empty gauge. None of the ground crew was sanctioned for this appalling oversight, and perhaps they were not at fault -- researchers have noted that both Lockheed-Martin and the CIA operated out of the same airport, and security for a news chopper was not quite as tight as that around Powers’ U2 in Peshawar.

According to New York Times reporter C.L. Sulzberger, Allen Dulles was disappointed that Powers had not committed suicide, either by shellfish needle or by pushing the destruct button. It appears that the CIA may have finally arranged the long delayed coda to Power’s mission, as it was originally intended. Some may argue that there are more reliable methods for getting rid of a troublesome whistleblower than tinkering with a chopper’s gas gauge; true, but there is none cleaner. If it can be arranged, aircraft sabotage is almost routinely dismissed as accident by most official investigations and news organizations. One witness to the Power’s chopper crash told a fireman that he saw the tail rotor of the chopper fall off before the crash. The National Transportation Safety Board never bothered to verify this, nor examine the largely intact instruments to determine if they were giving false reads.

Whatever the fugitive truth behind the downing of Power’s U2, historians may justly lay the lion’s share of responsibility for the aborted summit on Allen Dulles’ grave: he assured Eisenhower that a pilot would never survive an accident or shootdown (thus preserving a thin veneer of plausible deniability) and that the Soviets would never publicize a crash, both proven disastrously wrong. Along with Richard Bissell, Dulles pushed hard for the resumption of U2 flights after the Camp David suspension, selecting the Mayday date, provocative enough without a crash. And why was the plane chosen for this extraordinarily long and sensitive mission the “dog” of the fleet, experiencing autopilot failure soon after takeoff?

Eisenhower’s junior aide William Ewald later stated about Ike that “such trust as he usually reposed in his leading lieutenants he did not repose in Allen Dulles.” For good reason, presuming Ike was not ignorant of Dulles' near treasonous dealings with the Nazis before and during WWII: as a lawyer for the powerful Wall Street firm Sullivan and Cromwell, he had represented Fritz Thyssen's and I.G. Farben's interests in the '30s, and from 1937 on he helped Prescott Bush and Averill Harriman conceal their Union Banking Corporation's role as a Nazi money-laundering machine. As the top OSS spy in Switzerland during the war, Dulles continued to meet with Nazis, as busy serving his private clients' interests as aiding the national war effort. Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg once stated that "the Dulles brothers were traitors." Author James Trento has reported that James Jesus Angleton told him how he was named CIA counterintelligence chief: by agreeing not to submit "sixty of Allen Dulles' closest friends" to a polygraph test concerning their covert business dealings with the Nazis.

Distrustful of Dulles and the agency's lack of oversight, Ike formed a board of consultants for outside review of intelligence operations in 1956; the PBCFIA soon reported that the CIA's covert action branch was "operating for the most part on an autonomous and free-wheeling basis in highly critical areas... sometimes in direct conflict with normal operations being carried out by the Department of State." Dulles had long resisted such an oversight role by congress, once asserting that "in intelligence, you have to take certain things on faith."

The peculiar restraints of the Cold War, frustrating direct action and privileging clandestine and often unsupervised operations, were soon infecting the uniformed forces as well. Before the U2 incident, there had been several other cases of clear insubordination as the President strove to restrain aerial provocations that the Soviets might “misinterpret... as being designed to start a nuclear war.” In July 1958, an RB-47 reconnaissance plane had strayed over Soviet airspace in the Caspian and narrowly escaped being shot down. The same month, Air Force reconnaissance balloons that Ike had ordered suspended were again sent over Soviet airspace. When his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles professed that these were “permissible” mistakes, Ike exploded: “I am of the opinion that it was not permissible. I am getting weary of orders not being obeyed -- and someone should be fired.” Later, he protested to his Defense Secretary about the “disturbing evidence of a deterioration in the processes of discipline and responsibility within the Armed Forces. The harm done by this type of thing to the conduct of our international affairs and to our national security is obvious.”

After shutting down the Korean War, Ike struggled for the rest of his terms against hawks determined to exaggerate Soviet capabilities and boost the defense budget. During the Berlin crisis in 1959, he iterated his belief that one purpose of Khruschev’s bluff was to “frighten free populations and governments into unnecessary and debilitating spending sprees,” and calmly proceeded with a planned reduction of 30,000 Army personnel. On April 16, 1953, he had signaled his independence from the military establishment that had groomed him in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

“Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children...”

This concern culminated in the famous military-industrial complex speech. Although any suspicions he may have harbored about the U2 disaster were kept private, it surely formed a powerful subtext for that speech, having blown up the overriding goal of his administration for a peace summit and arms reduction agreement. That warning, about the “disastrous influence” of an insubordinate military establishment, presaged the virtual war that his successor would wage against the generals and spy chiefs over Cuba and Vietnam. There is one other character in the U2 affair, usually ignored or marginalized by most historians, who would play a critical role in that battle...

In September, 1959, two weeks after Eisenhower had suspended all U2 flights, an ex-Marine who had served as a radar operator at the Atsugi U2 base defected to the Soviet Union, promising to divulge everything he knew about the surreptitious flights, including radio codes (changed after his defection), and the planes’ exact altitude while flying over the S.U., perhaps the most closely guarded secret of the whole operation, as Soviet radar was deemed highly inaccurate. In a letter sent to his brother Robert back in Texas in 1962, he even claimed to have met, or at least seen, Gary Powers during his show trial in Moscow. In his book Operation Overflight, Powers suggested that the defector might have provided the Soviets with crucial new information that enabled the downing of his U2.

The defector’s name was Lee Harvey Oswald.

NEXT: OSWALD AND THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

Health care howlers: Sept. 12 vs. Sept. 10

2009-08-16T11:01:00.000-07:00

Nothing in this summer of our discontent has been as miserably amusing as the accounts of teabaggers and “Sept. 12ers” howling down discussion at town hall meetings, packing heat and issuing death threats to congressmen — possibly by tossing the venomous snakes they handle while speaking in tongues at riverside baptisms. When you believe the entire universe was created in 4004 B.C., that Adam and Eve fled the Garden of Eden on a brontosaurus, and that WMDs have, yes, finally been been found in Iraq... then you’re well primed to swallow the bilge that health care reform is really a Nazi eugenics program in disguise.

I wouldn’t slander all of these worthies as fringe religious wackos, but the tendency to believe in the most bald-faced absurdities and lies spewed by corporate propagandists or clerical charlatans is a common mindset.

The health insurance industry is spending $1.4 million per day lobbying to defeat any effective reform of the “best health care system in the world” (according to flack Glenn Beck), which actually ranks 37th in the world according to the WHO, despite being the most expensive. That gap is explained by 30% overhead (versus Medicare’s 5%), which equates to enormous profits for their Wall Street shareholders, gargantuan CEO salaries, and perks like gold-trimmed china in their private jets (see CIGNA whistleblower Wendell Potter's story here) — a bloodsucking system no other First World nation tolerates. Health care has long been rationed in this country, and bureaucrats are already making life and death decisions, but it is CIGNA , Blue Cross and their fellow vampires making them. And It is not only the small businesses that increasingly can’t afford health care for their employees, or the army of laid-off workers losing their coverage who suffer— even those with private policies are routinely denied help they need as the private bureaucrats fish for excuses to deny critical treatment (like the tragic case of Nataline Sarkisyan) — anything to protect the bottom line and increase their stock values. There are certainly problems with Obama's bill, but the goal of the private insurers and their frenzied dupes is to defeat any plan that extends coverage and reduces costs in line with our closest allies, Canada, the U.K., Japan, Germany, France, Taiwan, all of whom spend around 8% of GDP on health care, versus our 16%, while getting more for it.

Where will the money to fund a public option come from? the critics demand. You don’t have to look far: the gluttonous military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about, now accounting for 50% of global military spending, as we maintain 737 bases around the world, including those in Japan and Germany, 60 years after WWII. It's no wonder they can afford high-ranking health care as we subsidize their defense for no discernible reason. The “War on Terror,” largely a monstrous hoax, has cost $892 billion to date, and Defense Secretary Gates informs us that it will continue ad infinitum, although neither he nor anyone else can plausibly explain why such a protracted effort is worth this enormous sacrifice,

The Glenn Beck flock wants to return to September 12th, when we were all united under God, flag and war fever. Let me return to September 10, 2001 — that’s the day that Donald Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon had “lost” $2.3 TRILLION (this is not a misprint) — a sum that could fund a public option for decades. Neither he nor DOD comptroller Dov Zakheim suffered so much as a wrist slap, and there were no mobs demanding an answer to this titanic ripoff. Conveniently, the confession was erased from public consciousness by the bloody events of the following day. As long as their tax dollars are devoured by fraud-ridden private contractors performing services that the Pentagon used to do for a fraction of the cost, or simply squandered, the teabaggers are docile and mum. I won’t mention the other massive frauds and bailouts, all ensuing from the disastrous sabotage of longstanding (since the Great Depression) regulations and oversight led by the far Right and their allies in both parties.

Some imagine that we’re getting enhanced security with our huge War Department (what it should be called) expenditures. But they ignore that every year there are more American casualties from our cruel and shamefully "unique" health care racket than all the victims of terrorism in our entire history. A reasonable person would say: let’s cut back to 40% or 30% of global military spending, still enough to maintain our vaunted dominance, and spend the savings on domestic priorities like our deteriorating infrastructure and a health care system comparable to most other civilized nations.

Of course, an affordable MRI is not as spine-tinglingly glorious as an F-16 bombing another hapless wedding party in Afghanistan, but most of us would benefit far more from the former. We are spending a fortune on a culture of killing and destruction, and starving a culture of life and health — a monstrous sickness supported, ironically, largely by those claiming to worship the Prince of Peace. They should put down their Bibles long enough to study Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Eisenhower, or Marine General Smedley Butler (two Congressional Medals of Honor — see his “War is a Racket” essay), none of whom are given much attention by the corporate shills masquerading as leaders of the conservative movement.

It appears that the Kenneth Lays and Madoffs of our private health industry may succeed in sabotaging the genuine reform that would benefit the vast majority of Americans, and get rid of a system that is universally acknowledged as an albatross weighing down our economy, while offering no plausible alternative of their own, thanks to their shrieking ignoramuses, incited by a vile propaganda campaign worthy of Joseph Goebbels. One thing is certain: we will all — except a handful of CEOs and Wall Street bankers — be the poorer for it.

Another "anti-Semitic" cartoon

2009-07-10T14:17:00.000-07:00

Recently, renowned cartoonists Gary Trudeau and Pat Oliphant have come under fire from Abe Foxman of the ADL: Trudeau for a cartoon referring to Jesus' irritation at the "moneylenders," and Oliphant for a cartoon critical of Israel's brutal Gaza operation. Foxman hasn't honored me with his knee-jerk invective, but a cartoon I published in the Four Corners Free Press did arouse the usual spurious claims of anti-Semitism. Here's the cartoon, and my editorial published in response:

My recent cartoon, "Lox News: The trumpet of triumphant Zionism" drew some heated phone calls to the editor from a few readers offended by perceived Jewish stereotypes. So I should address the issue of boundaries in satire, comedy, and caricature, which often play off stereotypes.

As the editor pointed out, analogously, would not a cartoon entitled "Watermelon/Fried Chicken News" be offensive to Afro-Americans? I concede that it would be, although comedians like Richard Pryor and Don Rickles have often made comedic hay out of such stereotypes. I guess if it's kept within the family, it's more acceptable. So I'll bring this home: being mainly of Irish descent, would I be offended by a cartoon headlined "Guinness Stout News"? It depends; if it were a play off the name of a reactionary, warmongering news organization, and it satirized the thugs of the Real IRA attempting to sabotage the Good Friday accords that have brought peace to Northern Ireland, I don't think I'd get my dander up, or fret about "anti-Hibernianism."

Is the term "Spaghetti Western" offensive to Italian-Americans? I'm sure there are a few still fuming about this. I hope they eventually find more worthy objects of worry.

Another element of the complaint: the "code words for Jews" line. This was a parody of ADL official Gail Gans' assertion that "New World Order," "international bankers," "Bilderberg," and even "lizards" are invidious code words for "the Jews." I think this is absurd, scattershot fearmongering.

Finally, my caricature of ADL chief Abe Foxman as a Zionist stormtrooper proposing a "Final Solution" to the anti-Semite question may have been a little over the top, but the man is truly an abomination, habitually defaming honorable men like Jimmy Carter, Bill Moyers, Gary Trudeau and Pat Oliphant as "anti-Semites" for justly criticizing Israel's brutal, illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, and the indispensable role of the United States and our Israel lobby in perpetuating these injustices. A scandal in 1993 revealed that the ADL had conducted a 40-year spying operation on over 1000 "subversive" political groups, especially labor, peace, social justice, and human rights organizations, infiltrated police departments, cooperated with the FBI's illegal COINTELPRO program, and was cozy with South Africa's apartheid intelligence service... in another words, behaving very much like a Gestapo outfit. While ostensibly devoted to fighting bigotry on all fronts, the ADL has opposed recognition of the Armenian genocide, and it's recently released software purporting to block "hate sites" in fact only filters out sites defaming Jews, while allowing unblocked access to equally vile sites targeted at Muslims and Arabs.

I do understand the extra sensitivity of Jewish folk—but I also know that that sensitivity has been manipulated and exploited by radical right Zionists in organizations like GIYUS that attempt to stir up resentment and stifle all reasonable debate about our policies in the Middle East. I resisted producing this cartoon for a long time because of these sensitivities, but my disgust with this campaign of censorship, calumny and intimidation finally overrode my reluctance.

Noam Chomsky, Glen Greenwald, Norman Finkelstein, Naomi Klein, Rahm Emanuel, Uri Avnery, J Street, and the 70% of American Jews who support Obama’s push for a peace settlement in concord with dozens of nearly unanimous U.N. resolutions are to be applauded—but they are often drowned out by AIPAC, ADL and torture-loving chauvinists like Alan Dershowitz, probably the Aryan Nation’s top poster boy for recruitment campaigns. We must remember that this unresolved issue is the number one catalyst of the Islamic jihadists that our troops are bogged down fighting on two fronts.

Israel’s military-industrial complex is, if anything, even more deeply entrenched and corrupting than our own—the twin lobbies for perpetual war and occupation.

More voices of moderation were drowned out in Jerusalem recently, as filmed by journalist Max Blumenthal—a crowd of young Jewish Americans, many drunk, cursing Obama as a Nazi and another N-word—and this was not a minority sentiment in Jerusalem, he said. It’s commonly observed that Zionists in America, including Christian evangelicals in the CUFI organization (Christians United For Israel), are the most radical and intolerant of debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and have dominated U.S. policy with a hawkish, intransigent stance for 40 years, culminating in our ongoing Neocon debacles.

The Abe Foxmans are determined to stoke fear, close ranks, and keep the central issue of the Middle East wars well fueled: Allow criticism of Netanyahu and his defiance on the settlements issue to get a head of steam, and soon the skinheads will be breaking your windows! Abe has cried wolf so many times, he may soon resort to this final absurdity: “To criticize me is anti-Semitic!”

—Travis Kelly

Choke on your rotten hot dogs

2009-07-03T10:39:00.000-07:00

In every decade there is a crowd bemoaning the sorry, tragic state of the republic, usually those whose chosen party is out of power. We are sick, declining, and need strong medicine, they wail.

Increasingly, that wail has become bipartisan—and they all are right. Most of the country, including a plurality of independents and Republicans, recognized the follies of the Bush regime and turned against them, demanding, and thinking to get, a change of course with Obama and the Democratic congress. It’s been breathtaking, alright: we’re sinking another $106 billion into the 8-year Middle East crusade, shifting resources slightly eastward while antagonizing Pakistan and Iran. Terrorists don’t need mountain ranges to plot in—they can plot in an apartment in Hamburg or Florida, as the 9/11 hijackers did (with a lot of inside help). The war is a self-perpetuating feedback loop: we have to fight terrorism, the number-one cause of which is our fight against terrorism—the occupation of nations made dangerous by… our occupation. That’s a sweet racket, if you can keep it going, especially when private contractors fulfill half of military and intelligence functions at enormously inflated costs over former federal control.

The Party of Hope has also shifted boatloads of taxpayer money to service another racket: the bankster gang on Wall Street and its mob enforcer, the Federal Reserve, with a few thin fig leaves of regulatory reform. Nobel-prize economists and most disinterested financial analysts agree that virtually nothing of substance has changed. Wall Street has been given an aspirin and a vacation in the Bahamas, not the kennel and obedience training it deserves. While the rest of the country founders with accelerating unemployment, foreclosures and declining prosperity, Goldman-Sachs just tallied record-breaking profits in its 140-year history. They’re probably investing it in Chinese yen or other currencies, knowing that our own is close to collapse. Like Bruce Ismay, owner of the Titanic, these guys are real admirable survivors.

To cap the hoopla off, we are all about to get the shaft on health care reform. Let me explain to the die-hard market fundamentalists screaming about “socialism!”: whether you choose to participate in a possible public plan, or stay with your private plan, the astronomical costs of health care in this country will go down, if and only if there is a public option, like Medicare, to compete against the private insurance cartel. Multiple studies have shown that we pay more and get less than nearly all of the E.U., Canada, Japan, and many Third World countries, like Cuba, Costa Rica and Argentina. Some have a single-payer system, others have a mix, but the common thread is some form of public plan or strict government regulation of the system.

And now we are told by the Senate, aka the “Millionaire’s Club,” that there are “not enough votes” for any kind of public plan whatsoever. In a recent NY Times/ABC poll, 72% favored a public option, with only 20% opposed. Even half of Republicans (citizens, not politicians) are for it. The Democrats, elected to cure health care among other promises, control the White House and both houses of Congress… and this is not enough of a mandate?

There is an answer to these quandaries: our two-party system has become a charade of shallow differences in the most crucial, basic things (not abortion, gay marriage, gun rights or flag safety), and our government no longer gets its mandate from the will of the majority . This is no longer a democracy, but a plutocracy ruled by a triumvirate of lobbies: the military-industrial complex, Wall Street and the health insurance vampires. They own Washington. They have surrounded it like a besieging army, stifling all attempts at rescue and reform while plundering the national treasury. Why are they successful? Because most of us choose our politicians like a toothpaste—whichever can afford the most and the best lobby-funded TV commercials gets our business. “Bush—a brand name I trust!”

In France, when politicians have grown too complacent, with ears only for the corporate lobbyists who stuff their pockets, workers, professors, lawyers, teachers, doctors, drivers and soldiers swarm in the streets and organize general strikes. I know, many Americans are too obese for such stress, following our fat, fawning lapdogs in the corporate press. It appears that most of us are quite content gorging on mental junk food, or fleeing churchward to dwell on improvements in the afterlife.

The only solution I see, if we are serious about the future of the here and now, for the welfare of both ourselves and our children, is to revive some small measure of our Founders’ spirit—or emulate the French and Iranians. A third party, or several of them, would help.

Enjoy your hot dogs and fireworks.

More Egregious Depredations of the Military-Industrial Complex

2009-06-22T17:22:00.000-07:00

Topics: Military satellites closed off to scientists—for the DHS's Big Brother surveillance program, or to suppress evidence of Planet X? Air Force scuttles solar-power plant near Area 51. Secrets of Anti-gravity propulsion revealed.

Why has Obama authorized the military to shut its satellite feeds to scientists monitoring potentially catastrophic atmospheric impacts?

UPDATE: 6-22-09 — White House shuts down NAO spy-satellite program This means that #4 below is not the correct answer.

by jclifford: Over at Space.com, Leonard David is reporting that the Obama Administration is cutting off scientists’ access to military satellites. The satellites are said to be designed primarily to watch for evidence of nuclear tests. They had also been used by scientists who were studying the impact of meteorites in the Earth’s atmosphere. The military had provided the scientists with data from the satellites, which the scientists had then used to understand what kind of objects from space are striking the Earth...

A scientist involved in the research calls the Obama Administration’s decision “baffling”. Let’s think through the baffle. Four possibilities I can think of:
1. There is something about nuclear weapons tests that the government doesn’t want scientists to find out about.
 2. There is something hitting the Earth’s atmosphere from outer space, and the government doesn’t want scientists to find out about that. 
3. There’s something else visible to the satellites that the government doesn’t want scientists to find out about.
 4. The satellites are being retrained to a new mission, to watch something in a way that makes them useless for asteroid impact research. This is a particularly interesting possibility, given the way that Janet Napolitano at the Department of Homeland Security has resisted efforts by Congress to exercise oversight on the National Applications Office, a division of the Dept. of Homeland Security:

From Wikipedia: The NAO provides local, state, and federal officials with extensive access to military spy-satellite imagery. The spy surveillance satellites are considered by military experts to be far more powerful than those currently available to civilian officials. For example, they can take color photos, see through cloud cover and forest canopies, and use different parts of the light spectrum to locate traces left by chemical weapons... Some in Congress want to shut down the agency because of concerns that the satellites could be used to create a “Big Brother” in the sky directed willy-nilly at anyone’s house, place of worship or school.

Government agencies tasked with intelligence and surveillance are proliferating faster than rabbits Down Under. In addition to the CIA, NSA, DIA, NRO, FBI and all the Pentagon branch agencies, I've come across the NGA (National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency), NIMA (National Imagery and Mapping Agency), NIC (National Intelligence Council), NCTC (National Counterterrorism Center) and Homeland Security's OIA (Office of Intelligence and Analysis). Feel safer now from those hordes of terrorists targeting your local Starbucks?

Another possibility for #2 above; the rumored approach of Nemesis, Niburu, Planet X, or Wormwood, take your pick— a brown-dwarf companion to our Sun (astronomers have discovered that most stars are binary systems) that supposedly enters our solar system on a long elliptical orbit after a cycle of 3600, or millions of years, depending on your source. The gravitational energy of this monster causes many disturbances: heating up the Sun and solar system (now happening), catalyzing volcanism, disrupting the Oort cloud, and bombarding the inner planets with a barrage of asteroids—perhaps responsible for the periodic mass extinctions on Earth. According to a recent statistical study of a comprehensive fossil database by Berkeley physicists, mass extinctions to a greater or lesser degree have occurred regularly every 62 million years.

Though largely speculative, the existence of Nemesis has been postulated by astronomers from unexplained perturbations in the outer planets not accounted for by lowly, downgraded Pluto. In 1983, NASA's newly launched IRAS (Infrared Astronomical Satellite) telescope detected just such a body. The Washington Post reported that year: "A heavenly body as large as Uranus and part of this solar system has been found in the direction of the constellation of Orion by an orbiting telescope." According to many believers in a Mayan-prophesied 2012 apocalypse, NASA and other government agencies, domestic and foreign, have conspired to cover up the alarming truth, and all the "debunking" of Nemesis is merely disinformation to keep us in the dark...until the real murk descends and we're all trundling on Cormac McCarthy's The Road. On the other hand: has there ever been a generation in human history not harboring some apprehension of imminent apocalypse?

Two further related cases of the military trumping civilian science and technology:

Air Force axes giant solar reflector/tower plant in Nevada

In 2007, a Los Angeles firm called SolarReserve proposed the construction of a $700 million solar thermal power plant, covering two square miles near the Nellis Air Force base in Nevada, and capable of generating 100 megawatts of energy The plant's mirror-heated tower would have created molten-salt, essentially a form of battery enabling the steam turbines to generate power for 50,000 homes around the clock.

After negotiating with the AF for 18 months, and offering to move the plant 25 miles further away as suggested by the boys in blue, SolarReserve finds its plans stymied by AF lobbying of Congress and the BLM, which owns the land in question. Col. Howard D. Belote, installation commander at Nellis, said "Unfortunately for them and us, there's stuff on the Nevada testing range we don't tell anyone about."

Nellis AFB, of course, is home to the infamous Area 51. What exactly would be jeopardized by SolarReserve's lone tower standing below a 2,000-foot-tall mountain separating it from the base? A new book by physicist Paul LaViolette claims to reveal all:

Secrets of Anti-gravity Propulsion: Tesla, UFOs and Classified Aerospace Technology

I heard the author on the Coast-to-Coast radio show last night, and he was very convincing, speaking knowledgeably about the history of these developments, particularly Townsend Brown's overt and successful experiments, which are recounted in an older book on the subject that I've read: Man-Made UFOs: 1944-1994. It's astounding how open this research was, publicized in numerous newspapers and aviation journals, at the height of nationwide UFO sightings in the '50s, until a virtual blackout descended in 1959—interestingly, the same year that Eisenhower delivered his "military-industrial complex" speech.

From Coast-to-Coast: "We're sort of being held in a 'technology cage,' on purpose, for fear of change," LaViolette said about what he believes to be a decades-long clandestine development of anti-gravity technology by the United States.

"A lot of this work has been going on since the end of WWII, if not before," LaViolette said about the quest to break the bonds of gravity. He detailed some of the early experiments conducted by Nikola Tesla and T. Townsend Brown, who both used electricity to affect gravity. LaViolette noted that, in the mid-1950's, numerous aviation companies were not only attempting to develop anti-gravity technology but were quite open and enthusiastic about it—until 1959. "Suddenly it was like a blackout in the media," he observed. This sudden silence, LaViolette surmised, was at the behest of the US government.

One might think that this technology was a failure, but the thousands, or by now millions, of UFO reports by credible witnesses (police, commercial pilots, scientists and politicians) indicate some kind of unconventional aircraft have been hovering and zipping around in our skies for several decades. The whole "Aliens are among us!" meme may be disinformation designed to discredit these unavoidable observations.

There is a common thread here, tying the research of Tesla, Brown, Searl, Wilhelm Reich and a few other energy researchers — their labs destroyed and their research quarantined, after they discerned a recondite energy field, or ether, or zero-point vacuum that could revolutionize the way we live on this planet. Why has it been suppressed? Is it too dangerous to disseminate on this Planet of the Apes?—or too threatening to powerful interests vested in routines of dominance and exploitation? Whatever the case, the accelerating crises on Planet Earth may ineluctably flush these discoveries out into the open eventually, perhaps sparking a penultimate quantum leap in the evolution of human civilization.

Standing squarely against such a liberation may be a strange, perverted cult in the higher echelons of our military, revealed by the former wife of a Marine colonel, Kay Griggs:

"They took with them the most perverted aspects of Nazi Germany and brought them over to the United States... They get rid of the good guys. The Marine Corps are the assassins for the Mob. The military is run by the Mob. The military IS the Mob... He told me what they did. They nurture--they cultivate--the sons of prominent families. They're called "rising stars." They rope them in. Then they "turn" them."
— Kay Griggs

Mockingbird Agenda at Daily Kos?

2009-06-09T09:31:00.000-07:00

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Net's leading liberal website in terms of traffic and political influence, Daily Kos, has a rather curious and odd background for a leader of the Left—one that might explain his official policy of banning any Diarist who posts information or opinion dissenting from the 9/11 Commission's unraveling myth about the attacks, despite several Commissioners themselves having now stated that the inquiry was obstructed by the CIA, NORAD, FAA and the Pentagon, amounting to a whitewash (see below). The Commissioners even considered, but did not pursue, perjury charges against some of these officials.

Markos served in the U.S. Army from 1989 to 1992, where he was a staunch Reagan Republican, campaigning for George H.W. Bush. It was the "near miss" of being sent to Gulf War I that sparked his political conversion, he says. He hails from a wealthy El Salvadorian family, one of whose members was Minister of Education with the notorious junta during the civil war.

In a speech to the Commonwealth Club in 2006, Kos admitted to interviewing with the CIA for a 6-month period after a time of "underemployment." His statements there betray either a stunning ignorance, or sneaking sympathy with the CIA's long history of democratic subversion and support of rightist dictatorships abroad, including the one that sponsored death squads in his former homeland:

"This is a very liberal institution. And in a lot of ways, it really does attract people who want to make a better, you know, want to make the world a better place . . . Of course, they've got their Dirty Ops and this and that, right but as an institution itself the CIA is really interested in stable world. That's what they're interested in. And stable worlds aren't created by destabilizing regimes and creating wars. Their done so by other means. Assassination labor leaders . . . I'm kidding!... And even if you're protecting American interests, I mean that can get ugly at times, but generally speaking I think their hearts in the right place. As an organization their heart is in the right place. I've never had any problem with the CIA. I'd have no problem working for them . ."

Links to the Commonwealth Club audio, and other biographical documents on Moulitsasa can be found here.

Moulitsas began working for the Howard Dean campaign, and simultaneously launching Daily Kos, in 2002, shortly after his romance with the CIA. One may speculate that perhaps the romance never fully ended—and wonder if the CIA's IT venture capital subsidiary, In-Q-Tel, may have provided development and/or funding assistance to spark the meteoric rise of Daily Kos, now a virtual kingmaker in the Democratic party. The site endorses and directly raises funds for certain Democratic candidates and PACs, amassing over $2 million in the last two election cycles. Markos and his business partner, Jerome Armstrong, have also hired themselves out as political consultants to certain candidates—a stark conflict of interest for journalists. Markos answers that he is not so much a journalist, but an "activist."

The CIA has also been accused of providing seed money for both Facebook, and Google, according to former CIA clandestine officer Robert David Steele. As one critic has noted: "The CIA does not merely look into social media—they appear to own it."

If Moulitsas is a digital-age Mockingbird (the CIA's Cold War program of infiltrating and co-opting the American media; ), perhaps he is exercising a role similar to that of Rahm Emmanuel, who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 2006 elections, steered party funds to pro-war Democrats while starving anti-war candidates. If that is the agenda of Daily Kos—to maintain the Democratic party's inertia as co-dependent enablers of the military-industrial complex and it's boondoggle War on Terror—it seems to be succeeding wildly. Suppressing any alternative narrative of 9/11, the foundational keystone of this war, would be a crucial element of such a strategy.

9/11 Commissioners' statements:

"Those who knew about those videotapes [of al-Qaeda operative interrogations] — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation."
— Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice-chairmain Lee Hamilton

"We to this day don't know why NORAD told us what they told us. It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."
— Chairman Thomas Kean

"At some level of the government, at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened…I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described .... The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.... This is not spin. This is not true."
—Senior Counsel John Farmer

"There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version."
—Commissioner Bob Kerrey

"It is a national scandal...This investigation is now compromised...One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9/11 issue is so important to Amercia."
— former Sen. Max Cleland, who resigned from the Commission

9/11 Metastasizing: the Left’s Co-Dependency

2009-06-06T12:45:00.000-07:00

by Travis Kelly

In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein relates how nations brutalized by the Chicago School’s savage capitalism and the Dirty War juntas enforcing it have recovered and developed a healthy immunity against more eviscerating shock therapy:

Any strategy based on exploiting the window of opportunity opened by a traumatic shock relies heavily on the element of surprise... in North America, the September 11 attacks were, at first pure event, raw reality, unprocessed by story, narrative or anything that could bridge the gap between reality and understanding. Without a story, we are, as many of us were after September 11, intensely vulnerable to those people who take advantage of chaos for their own ends. As soon as we have a new narrative that offers perspective on the shocking events, we become reoriented and the world begins to make sense again

.

That psychology pertains on both the individual and societal levels: a trauma that is never dealt with openly, but suppressed in the subconscious, festers, reinforcing crippling habits and sabotaging recovery. Maybe it is our reigning paradigm of dogmatic materialism that keeps us from acknowledging afflictions of the mind and spirit; imbibe a new pill to correct the faulty chemistry, or ingest an economic stimulus package to cure our destructive addiction to greed and gluttony. Consciousness, our scientists tell us, is a mere epiphenomenon of electrical brain circuits, so there can be no such thing as a collective “national psyche” capable of being wounded (socialist psychology!).

But how do we explain the shocking backsliding of Obama and his majority party: indefinite detention, torture lite continuing in Gitmo and Bagram, virtual immunity for war criminals, acceptable collateral drone carnage of civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan, escalation of the disingenuous War on Terror, not to mention the subsidization of our piratical financial class. We are still locked in the shock of 9/11, the sole justification for this endless train of abuses, usurpations, and crimes. To forswear waterboarding would be regression to a perilous “September 10th mentality,” Elizabeth Cheney assures us.

9/11 is the wellspring that keeps on gushing, fueling our fear, barbaric behavior, and coffers of the merchants of death. But if the officially sanctioned narrative of 9/11 is any way deficient—if it is a cover-up of some kind, as many credible Commission staffers, prominent academics, military and intelligence officers, architects and engineers have alleged—then we cannot continue tacitly endorsing it without very grave and perhaps fatal consequences to our republic. To censor all inquiry that reflects critically on that first, very panicked draft of history, and declare any revisionist narrative heresy, surrenders our minds to the perpetual War lobby still feeding on it.

The disillusioning betrayals by our Democratic majority should be sufficient evidence of that by now. The torture, renditions, bloodbaths and bankrupting imperialism could be extended for 10 more years, as a Pentagon general recently envisioned. The Constitution, and critical domestic initiatives, are indefinitely detained.

In South America, after decades of plutocratic plunder and police-state oppression, genuinely pluralistic and vital democracies are resurgent, in no small measure because their citizens have courageously and tenaciously faced the horrors of their past, excised the cancer, and insured their progress with legal deterrence—exposure and prosecution of the Dirty War thieves and killers. Wall Street’s IMF shock troops have been evicted from the whole continent, and the rule of law has triumphed. In Argentina, Peru, or Spain, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld would be in the dock by now.

But here in United States, cradle of modern democracy and the unfettered Fourth Estate, our ostensible leaders and most of our media still cannot honestly face the seminal neo-fascist crime of over 40 years ago, the assassinations of JFK.. When one of the principal suspects, Cold War fanatic E. Howard Hunt, arranged a posthumous confession two years ago (“Surely someone would have talked by now!”), implicating the CIA’s Cuba faction, it was left to Rolling Stone alone to get the word out (whatever the veracity of that confession was later determined to be, there is no excuse for blacking out news of it). Twenty years earlier, when Mark Lane convinced a Miami jury that the same E. Howard Hunt and the CIA were complicit in the assassination, news of the landmark trial (Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby) never made it beyond a local Miami TV station. If there’s a conspiracy-of-silence theory here, fault our panjandrums of the press for feeding it, including radical luminaries Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky and Justin Raimondo, all still preposterously swearing fealty to the rancid Warren Commission corpse as a holy relic.

Because: power is structural, institutional and ruthless, but it would never stoop to this level (except overseas). Because American exceptionalism embodies more than the privilege to flaunt whatever laws get in the way of its blundering manifest destiny—we are blessed also with a congenital/Constitutional immunity to those Machiavellian maladies common in most other polities in history. A Caesar Borgia is impossible in our land (except Chicago)! We suffer the downside of our singular individualism—Lone Nuts and postal pariahs—but they rarely collaborate in socialistic cabals. God’s, or Madison’s, dispensation has forever freed us from the alien scourge of conspiracy (except the Mafia, famously apolitical). To assert otherwise is a faux pas as impudent as “class warfare.” It’s self-evident: there is no ruling class in the shining city on the hill, but if there were, it would never, ever conspire darkly against the general welfare. Case closed!

Let us give praise: with a few picayune exceptions, every skeleton in our internal National Security empire is dragged out into the disinfecting glare of a summer day in Death Valley. Our congressional investigations are, by and large, enviable forays of forensic rigor and infallibility. We may falter and stumble, but in the Invisible Hand we trust to right the ship in all storms.... as long as our faith is sure and we stifle all doubt. All our current problems ensue, really, from a surfeit of the white man’s burden: Democracy and uplifting Capitalism are threatened by global epidemics of insurgency and virulent socialism that could, if not checked by our stalwart sacrifice, plunge the nation, or even the planet, into a great depression! The only language they understand: napalm on the wedding party. Since WWII, we have successfully crusaded and seeded capital democracy like conquistadors of the Enlightenment: Guatemala, Iran, Greece, Indonesia, Chile, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Iraq. We can’t abandon the mission of 1776 now. We must summon the fortitude to stand up to our swelling coalition of enemies.

It’s not the Cold War—it’s the Slush War, thawed by global warming. Becoming more fully automated, privatized and casualty minimizing. Replacing body bags, we’ll suffer wounded and killed drones and cyborg Marines—boom time for the robot contractors. Moreover, the market is stable, growing and self-fertilizing; new crops of terrorists spring up like bush seedlings after one of our F-22 forest fires. Our boys in uniform will be joystick jocks; when Star Wars is finally deployed (with offensive capability), even the previously disabled can be war heroes. Given the order, a future Steven Hawking, for example, if he got bored with physics, could obliterate one of the Stan countries. Is that not another advance for equality and social justice? Even as we kill prolifically, we do good. Virtue rises and permeates our character undefeated, however rough and tumble we’re forced to be. Most importantly, the Brits don’t have it over us on decorum; our prudence, civility and good taste in public are not inferior—we know when and where to censor ourselves. God save the Queen and the rest of the leisure class.

After 45 years of unpunished serial abuse, the collective unconscious of the nation must be roiling with a lot of repressed baggage, and we imagine this is inconsequential as we “look forward,” that all the talk of “festering wounds” in the national soul is just so much metaphorical prattle. America is a future-forging dynamo, untroubled by the dead weight of remorse for Abu Ghraib, the Gulf of Tonkin, or the Manchurian hit on RFK. No, such detours into the past would hinder the breathtaking progress we’re making on all fronts: reigning in the corporate-financial kleptocracy, ushering in a universal health care system approximately efficient as Cuba’s, withdrawing from the bankrupting quagmires overseas. Deploy the windshield, I’m gasping!

Certainly, let us not distract from celebrating the shower of fig leaves over this swinish epidemic of corruption in the capital. Yes, our gallant Democrats have shifted the political landscape—so the bulk of lobby loot now gravitates to their pockets, and we are appeased with a few grudging lipstick concessions from the bloodsuckers of Wall Street, the Pentagon and the insurance aristocracy—vested agents of bankruptcy, sickness and death feasting now with marginally less ravenous gluttony. Hoorah.

Perhaps our illegal immigrants from the South can assist by cultural diffusion: maybe they can teach us how to conduct a proper truth and reconciliation commission and reclaim our democracy. Maybe their example can shame most of our own journalists, professors and pols into growing some balls. Are we serious about dismantling this murderous, parasitical apparatus, or not? Outraged citizens in Bolivia, Argentina, Lebanon and even Britain take to the streets—our vanguard cannot even open its mouth, except to abjectly slander those who have taken action and risk the kick of outraged consensus reflex.

To cite one example of this noxious co-dependency: on Daily Kos recently, a longtime blogger, Tocque DeVille was banished for declaring the proscribed L***P theory about 9/11, even after masochistic denials that he was giving any credence to subversive “conspiracy theory”—that ever potent meme adapted to divert investigation of the worst shock therapy crimes. Too grim and serious for us happy, optimistic Americans. Please do not disturb our precious innocence—we will persist peeing the bed and sucking the pacifier of big lies as Uncle confidently prepares to rape us again.

Well, I am serious. The body parts of 92 children in Bola Boluk were just shoveled into graves, courtesy of the Audaciously Hopeful One. And that was merely a downpayment. It is necessary, because somewhere among the gore there may have been a splattered towelhead hatching another 9/11.

If I have not already committed punishable perfidy here, I now offer no theories, conspiratorial or otherwise, but simply the following citation of officiously endorsed empiricism. As Kos repeats the hackneyed gem in his online Rules: “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.” Well, here it is:

Firm evidence of nano-thermite residue in four distinct WTC dust samples. From a paper published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal by dissident physicist Stephen Jones (our own Andrei Sakharov) and eight colleagues (summary here: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13049). Jones states it was the most rigorous peer-review he had ever undergone, in a long and distinguished career. So far, none of the dependable debunkers have disputed this research—that would perhaps draw too much undesired attention to it. So what does it mean?

First, it provides an explanation for two anomalies in the Twin Towers’ destruction: the great plumes of pulverized mass at the beginning of the collapse; and the pools of molten metal found in the debris weeks later (kerosene jet fuel fires may weaken steel, but cannot melt it).

People are quick to jump to unwarranted conclusions, but I will keep this safely within the designated free speech zone: no theories straying off limits into how or by whom the nano-thermite was employed on 9/11. But prima facie, it is a national security issue. Nano-thermite, or super-thermite, is a controlled pyrotechnic compound under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR). It has to be engineered in a fairly sophisticated lab (like the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where it was originally synthesized. Or like the distinctive strain of anthrax used in the post 9/11 attacks). If the 19 hijackers and/or unknown confederates somehow acquired or created this devastatingly explosive terrorist weapon (it can be embedded or molded into almost anything, like ceiling tiles, shoes or carry-on luggage), should this not be discussed and investigated? Can our airport scanners detect this stuff? Is there an al-Qaeda nano-technology lab somewhere on the planet? Are we to rely on torture alone to save us from a ticking nano-thermite bomb?

Well, if this evidence be declared verboten by our commissars of permissible discourse, we may safely add to the flourishing Bush/Cheney legacy another element: the willful suppression of science, as we continue marching in blind faith-based amnesia over more cliffs.

We now know unequivocally that the FAA and NORAD lied about the national defense failures on that fateful day, much like the Warren Commission was bamboozled by Hoover’s corrupt FBI (see recent and upcoming books by Commission staffers Richard Ben-Veniste and John Farmer). And we know that Dick Cheney was in complete command (in an encore self-appointment, he assumed supreme authority over homeland defense four months earlier; an unprecedented role for an American VP), having arranged no less than 6 separate war games on 9/11 (Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern Vigilance, Northern Guardian, Tripod II, and a curiously coincidental NRO exercise), including simulated hijackings and airliners smashing into buildings (which Condi Rice and company could “never have imagined”) that diverted most U.S. defensive aircraft while effectively providing an obfuscating smokescreen for the genuinely hijacked aircraft. Maybe it wasn’t only the Boeings that were hijacked, but the whole war games scenario. If so, have we identified the al-Qaeda moles in NORAD, the Pentagon, or Dick’s bunker whose intelligence coordinated this Trojan Horse operation? Good God, could they could still be in place, packing nano-thermite laptops and iPods? From Level Blackout, we should move at least to Level Orange alert here.

Regarding responsibility for the financial meltdown, economist James K. Galbraith said, “…as always, you’ll have incompetence, negligence and conspiracy at various parts of the operation at various times”— a rare and exemplary apprehension of complexity that could also flesh out a new, unexpurgated, war-disabling narrative of 9/11. Whatever the relative proportions of negligence, incompetence and conspiracy, one thing is clear: the election-hijacking cabal (another feckless failure of our press, with the lone exception of Keith Olbermann) in power wanted, needed, pined and prayed for a “new Pearl Harbor” to kick off the “New American Century.” Individuals and bureaucracies alike filter out dissonant information, or intelligence, in conflict with grasping desires and beliefs; the best cognitive filter is a numbing ideology masking both inconvenient facts and base ulterior motives, enabling the most barbarous acts in the name of some imagined higher good. Such as: “Our white phosphorus is searing democracy into a stubborn, impervious people.” Better said by John T. Flynn:

The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilize savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.

Unlike the first Pearl Harbor, not a single American official has suffered so much as a wrist slap for the loss of 3000 lives on 9/11, even though very specific foreign intelligence about an impending attack was flooding Washington that summer, while Colleen Rowley’s, Robert Wright’s and other diligent FBI agents’ field investigations were stymied, stubbornly and absurdly, by D.C. headquarters (the Moussaoui lead, suspected terrorists in Arizona flight training schools, a money trail back to madrassa financiers, all quarantined in a bureaucratic Siberia). The FBI honcho responsible for most of these persistent obstructions, David Frasca, was never reprimanded— incredibly, he was promoted. Ignore this.

In the secret bunker, Cheney appears to have ordered a stand down as Flight 77 approached the Pentagon, according to the Commission testimony of Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. Finally dragged together before the hearings they struggled to abort, Cheney ventriloquized his dummy to insure no slip ups focused on this long train of suspicious behavior. The warmongering cowboys fought any deeper probing of the disaster, and largely succeeded; how curious that our champions of the Left now ape them, acting as a mop up crew, blissfully ignorant of recent FBI statements like this:

As with all cases, the FBI will continue to examine the 9/11 investigation from every angle as new evidence develops, utilizing all leads available. Mr. Gage (president of Architect and Engineers for 9/11 Truth) presents an interesting theory, backed by thorough research and analysis.

—Michael Heimbach
Assistant Director, Counterterrorism Division
National Security Branch, FBI

The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden's Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.

—Rex Tomb
Chief of Investigative Publicity, FBI

Got that, ye righteous debunkers? We’re spending more billions hunting down a CIA-spawned Frankenstein for a crime we have no evidence that he committed. All the Taliban demanded before the carpet of bombs in 2002 was submission of that evidence, which Bush and Cheney couldn’t cough up. Sweet. I think Smedley Butler would call it an autocatalytic racket. He would also surely gag if asked to swallow one of the lesser known physical absurdities of 9/11, the Shanksville Gopher Hole, which swallowed Flight 93 and the “Let’s roll!” heroes whole, leaving no discernible debris larger than a baseball on the surface, before belching up engines and other parts and spewing them 8 miles downstream. The only comparable feat is that of Messrs. Cockburn, Chomsky, Raimondo, Moulitsas and company in swallowing this turd without so much as a gag reflex. But these gentlemen have their off-mainstream reputations to uphold. And how their screeds are winning the day! Keep shooting at the tail and tusks, gentlemen; the beast will succumb…eventually.

I don’t know how culpable Cheney is for 9/11—whether he would be indicted for criminal negligence, manslaughter or conspiracy to commit murder, illegal war and torture if not shielded by a vestige of high office. But I know that any nation that still tolerates this malignant Goering pontificating freely in public has a long way to go in recuperating its sabotaged traditions and hocked soul. Maybe we should convene a South American presidents’ summit in Washington or New York. They would probably advise us: “Publish the damn facts and indict the sonofabitches already!”

Of course, the chances of that happening any time soon are slim. The shocking candor might demoralize our media’s corporate overlords, sapping their dynamism that so richly trickles down upon us these days... it could even wreak unprecedented havoc on Wall Street! Above all, the supreme virtue, stability of the status quo, must be safeguarded. We can procrastinate still a little longer; after all, it has taken the Chileans, and many victims of serial abuse, decades to recover. The tsunami’s reflected waves are only now departing the South, to rattle back on the epicenter. Of course, since this tumor of fanatic-right covert ops sheathed with blind impunity was born on November 1963, it could be argued that we’re relatively overdue for making a start. In many cases, we are not talking “conspiracy theory” but simply history—revisionist, radical, uncompromising— and it is no mere academic exercise, as Orwell observed: who controls the past, controls the future.

The reason behind this inertia is obvious: treason has prospered mightily and benefited us all more or less, so none dare call it treason. That’s the demon lurking in our national id; it’s all about maintaining our sumptuous lifestyle, Rumsfeld proclaimed, and who really wants to live less high on the hog? But the credit on these accounts, like our other soaring deficits, is fast approaching the omega point. Recent bulletins from the Pentagon: we could be squatting in Iraq for at least 10 more years; the Vatican-sized embassy in Baghdad will be matched by a new diplomatic fortress in Pakistan; Afghanistan will require another decade as well; and we can still fight a conventional sequel in Korea, the generals cheerfully promise us. While the rest of the country founders, it’s boom time for Daddy Warbucks! Eisenhower understood this military-industrial coup a decade ago; we still don’t get it.

There has been much speculation on what prompted the former general to speak out so bluntly; the ambiguously authorized Gary Powers U2 flight and sabotage of a peace summit with Khruschev being the most likely candidate. Another possibility: he became privy to the now declassified Operation Northwoods plans presented by the Joint Chiefs early in JFK’s presidency. To galvanize the public for a pre-emptive invasion of Cuba, false-flag attacks on the homeland could be engineered, with bombed airliners and civilian casualties. JFK spiked this, before he was spiked. The naive assumption that no Rambos in our corrosive defense establishment could conspire so iniquitously is moot.

The liberation achieved by our former vassals in the South will be elusive to us until we also first liberate our minds. And it may take a shock to stir us from our lethargy, a shock equal to 9/11, which would be the whole shocking truth about 9/11. But maybe you are pleased with our Siamese twin-party farce of reform. A little tweaking and tuning of the Bush policies is all we really need and can hope for, as more thousands are destined to perish from inadequate health care, financial rape, and blind drone strikes. Thankfully, many among us are not so cravenly resigned—like chemistry professor Niels Harrit, co-author of Jone’s nano-thermite paper, who answered why he was so active in the 9/11 Truth movement:

First, I am opposed to crime, and second, when my 6 grandchildren ask me, 'Grandfather, which side were you on?' I will be able to answer them, 'I was on your side.'

For those who would acquiesce, whatever the level of suspicion, and act as if we must ignore, forget, deny and tolerate the crushing of 3000 lives... soon you may be cheering the glorious nuclear engagements with Tehran and Pyongyang in Eastasia. Osama bin Goldstein is still miraculously on the loose, no doubt hatching another Axis of Evil sneak attack in one of the aforementioned capitals. If we just torture sufficiently, perhaps we’ll finally discover his GPS coordinates.

Ignorance is strength... Stubborn ignorance is nuclear!

Imperial Bankruptcy

2008-03-20T14:46:00.000-07:00

The illegal Iraq war that began 5 years ago might continue for up to 100 more, according to John McCain, confirming his professed weakness in economics. At the current $12 billion per month rate, it’s doubtful that even the Federal Reserve can print money fast enough to keep up with the dollar’s vanishing act.

American casualties so far include: 4000 dead soldiers. Several thousand severely wounded. American prestige and influence abroad. The 4th Amendment to the Constitution, and the venerable system of checks and balances laid out in that document. A decimated volunteer Army. And what once was the world’s most productive economy. And what exactly have Americans received for all this sacrifice? Cheap oil? The only winners in this fraudulent “War on Terror” are the Daddy Warbucks contractors and oil pirates fattening like ticks on a sick hog. And the wingnut Zionists who had a large role in luring us into another Middle East occupation — the #1 cause of terrorism. Has it occurred to them that a broke America jeopardizes Israeli security?

Eisenhower warned us against the insidious predations of this complex. Surely he spins in his grave as the U.S. now borrows and spends as much as the rest of the world combined for “defense,” while our industrial infrastructure has deteriorated or been exported to China in the ultimate triumph of voodoo economics: Uncle Sam in hock up to his ears to the world’s most powerful Communist nation. And the ultimate historical irony: we are bankrupting ourselves exactly like the Soviet Union by overinvesting in non-productive weapon systems and maintaining 800 bases in 130 foreign countries. We’re still “defending” Japan, Korea and Germany while their economies boom and their citizens enjoy universal health care.

As the Chinese and Saudi credit cards have maxed out along with our national debt and plummeting currency, it is inevitable that the never-ending “War on Terror” will require taxes and the draft to be raised. But those who continue to support this ruinous insanity shouldn’t wait for government mandates: our troops don’t need more yellow ribbons – after three or four extended rotations, with 145 vet suicides, they need relief. Volunteer boots on the ground. For those too old to serve, we could offer WWII-style war bonds. Then all the neofascist chickenhawks and their goosestepping followers can finally put their own flesh or money where their lip service is —or just shut up.

November Super Bowl

2008-02-05T11:56:00.000-08:00

Several people on my email list replied to my celebration of the New York Giants SuperBowl victory with dismissive harrumphs, and I'm sure others quietly did the same. For those who are not football or sports fans in general, suspend your disinterest or prejudice for a moment and consider the following narrative — a parable if not a harbinger of the times we live in:

The New England Patriots, losers in last Sunday's SuperBowl, have been the dominant NFL team throughout the Bush era, winning their first championship in 2002. A victory on Sunday would have earned the players their 4th SuperBowl ring, and was deemed all but inevitable by Vegas bookmakers, the nation's whole cadre of sportswriters, and anyone at all familiar with the season, for the Patriots had racked up an unprecedented record — 18-0 — and were poised to become the Greatest Team of All Time. In the 87-year history of the NFL, only one team has achieved a perfect season — the 1972 Miami Dolphins, who went 14-0.

All year long, the Patriots didn't merely defeat their opponents — they crushed them, in some cases racking up huge, unnecessary and humiliating scores in the final quarter, an unsportsmanlike practice rarely indulged in the NFL or any professional sport. But skeletons have been discovered in the Patriots' locker room...

In the third game of the season, the team was fined $200K and the head coach Bill Belichek $500K for illegally videotaping an opponent coach's sideline signals. And last week, the Boston Herald (the Pat's hometown paper) revealed that their source, a Pats' staff employee in 2002, had admitted to secretly videotaping the St. Louis Rams' workout on the day before the 2002 Super Bowl — the final practice, wherein teams hone the patterns, plays and strategies to be used against a particular team. Gaining "intelligence" about such a workout in a covert operation is an egregious cheat that, unchecked, could lead to runaway escalation: bugs in the coach's office, double-agent waterboys, biological warfare against the opponent's Gatorade, encrypted signals beamed to the quarterback's earpiece, codebreakers furiously trying to hack it... we don't want to go there.

In response to the Herald exposé, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced that the league's czars had been aware of such "rumors" all along, had already conducted an investigation, accepted the Patriot's profession of innocence —that nothing untoward had been done with admittedly once extant tapes — which Goodell subsequently destroyed (this has prompted Sen. Arlen Specter to initiate his own investigation).

The "missing tapes."
Illegal electronic surveillance.
Violation of the league's "constitution."
Steamrolling all opposition.

Is this beginning to sound familiar? It appears that Coach Belichek borrowed the playbook of Karl Rove, and all the team's stunning victories may have been aided by dirty tricks. And like our supine Congress, the NFL Commission has decided to sweep the tainted victories under the rug, in the interest of maintaining faith in the system, however much it has been corrupted — with furtive camcorders, or the hacked results from Diebold voting machines.

Some juggernauts, ruthless in their exercise of raw power, are simply too formidable to tackle with any genuine hope of success. So it was said of the 2007 Patriots, with the trail of carnage in the wake of their historic 18-0 season. The "19-0, Undefeated SuperBowl Champs," "Greatest Team in History" T-shirts, caps and other memorabilia had already been printed. A Boston publisher had already printed commemorative books with the same title. That the Patriots would insure the perfect season by demolishing any foe in the biggest game of the year was a foregone conclusion, and only hopeless-cause romantics could entertain any delusion otherwise.

The New York Giants got off to a rocky start, losing 2 of their first 3 games, and struggled to a second-place finish in their own division. But they entered the playoffs as a "wildcard" team — second-chancers who would have to play an extra game while all the top seeds enjoyed a rest. The Giants won their wildcard game, then handily defeated their own division champs, the Cowboys, in the next round.

In the third round, they played on the Green Bay Packers frozen home turf. Air temperature at game time was —2 degrees, with a wind chill factor of —35 — the kind of brutal conditions that the heavily favored Packers excel in. Lombardi's progeny even pulled their own dirty trick, shutting off the heaters on the Giant's sideline. But the Giants battled to a tie at the end of regulation time, then won in overtime. Now all they had to do to cap an improbably successful season was make an appearance in the Super Bowl and lose to the Greatest Team of All Time.

Incredibly, they pulled off a shocking upset, scoring the winning touchdown with 35 seconds remaining — one to rank with Seabiscuit's victory over War Admiral, or the American hockey team's victory over the invincible Russians (all pros) in the Lake Placid Winter Olympics. So what is the parable here?

Sometimes, a seemingly inconsequential sporting event may signal a shift in the Zeitgeist. Those familiar with the peculiar workings of Synchronicity know that, in Jung's definition, some coincidences are meaningful — a timely eruption of the implicate order that may be shifting under our feet. The relevant coincidence herein:

The fraudulently invincible dynasty of the New England Patriots. And the fraudulently invincible dynasty of the magnificently corrupt Bush-Clinton machine.

The pundits have been assuring us that Hillary is certain to be the Democratic nominee, and that a wildcard like Ron Paul on the Republican side hasn't a ghost of a chance. These become self-fulfilling prophecies, when the GOP establishment and MSM ban Paul from debates and do everything in their power to marginalize him, while HIllary almost certainly benefited from Diebold fraud in the New Hampshire primary. For those who believe that her tearjerk performance was responsible for erasing Obama's 13-point lead... please send me your bank account information post haste — I have a wealthy acquaintance in Nigeria earnestly seeking to augment your net worth.

The dirty tricks have only just begun in this campaign season. Gutterball is the order of the day. Will we succumb to the vile manipulations? A friend who reviles spectator sports laments the lardass Americans who never get any exercise watching superbly conditioned athletes exert themselves — an apt analogy to our political process in recent years. If we stand any chance of taking our democracy back from the cheats, liars and military-industrial complex shills, we are going to have to turn off the TVs, climb down from the bleachers, and get involved.

We are going to have to play with the same indefatigable determination as the New York Giants.

The Case for Impeaching Dick Cheney

2008-01-26T11:00:00.000-08:00

1. Espionage and Treason: The Valerie Plame Affair
Cheney’s chief aide, Scooter Libby, was the fall guy for the Valerie Plame affair, but Cheney was almost certainly the mastermind. Plame’s CIA network, operating under the front company Brewster Jennings, was tracking nuclear proliferation rings in the Middle East, and her exposure resulted in the arrests and deaths of agents in this network. From Sibel Edmonds’ testimony, we now know that corrupt U.S. officials were engaged with Turkish, Pakistani and Israeli agents in selling American nuclear secrets. The exposure of Plame’s network now seems to involve more than retaliation against her husband, Joe Wilson.

And if Edmond’s allegations are correct, the nuclear smuggling ring funneled nuclear technology to the black market network run by Pakistani nuke scientist A.Q. Khan, with North Korea, Libya and Iran as principal beneficiaries. It would be hard to imagine a greater crime against national security. The relevant U.S. Code espionage statute, (18 USC Sec. 794, see below*), mandates the death penalty or imprisonment for these offenses.

2. Torture
Cheney has publicly argued for allowing CIA agents to use torture against prisoners in secret detention centers, and most likely issued directives permitting waterboarding and other abusive practices. “Cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States, and the Constitution makes such treaties the law of the land, and their violation a criminal offense.

3. Illegal surveillance
Cheney has been the leading advocate for extra-constitutional surveillance, including illegal CIA and Pentagon spying on American citizens, outlawed since Watergate. The procedures include warrantless wiretaps, “National Security Letters” issued by the FBI and DOD to fish through bank accounts and other private records without court approval. After Congress outlawed the Orwellian TIA (Total Information Awareness) program, it has gone underground, and a massive database on all American citizens, Main Core, is being populated in secret, effectively abolishing the 4th Amendment.

9/11
The ostensible justification for all these high crimes and misdemeanors is the “national emergency” ensuing from 9/11. But there is compelling evidence that, at the very least, the 9/11 attacks were abetted and allowed to happen, and Dick Cheney was the crucial kingpin in this atrocity. Most suspicious is the unprecedented failure of air defense to impede the attacks (in the year prior to 9/11, USAF jets had scrambled to intercept aircraft that had lost transponder signals or veered off course a total 67 times, and the average response time was between 15–20 mins.).

1. PNAC and "the new Pearl Harbor"
In 2000, Cheney is signatory to the PNAC’s (Plan for a New American Century) manifesto, calling for a global American military empire, and virtually praying for “a new Pearl Harbor” to catalyze the revolution.

2. Cheney delegated emergency defense powers
On May 8, 2001, four months prior to 9/11, Bush placed Dick Cheney in charge of “[A]ll federal programs dealing with weapons of mass destruction consequence management within the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, and Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies…” This included all “training and planning” which needed to be “seamlessly integrated, harmonious and comprehensive” in order to “maximize effectiveness.” This mandate created the Office of National Preparedness in FEMA, overseen by Dick Cheney.

3. 9/11 War Games:
The Air Force was running multiple war games on the morning of 9/11 simulating hijackings over the continental United States that included (at least) one “live-fly” exercise as well as simulations that placed “false blips” on FAA radar screens. These war games eerily mirrored the real events of 9/11 to the point of the Air Force running drills involving hijacked aircraft as the 9/11 plot actually unfolded. The war games & terror drills played a critical role in ensuring no Air Force fighter jocks - who had trained their entire lives for this moment - would be able to prevent the attacks from succeeding. These exercises were under Dick Cheney’s management:

4. Cheney and the Secret Service
While Bush sat reading “My Pet Goat” to elementary school children in Florida for 30 minutes after the attacks were acknowledged, Cheney was running a completely separate chain of Command & Control via the Secret Service, assuring the paralysis of Air Force response on 9/11. The Secret Service has the technology to see the same radar screens the FAA sees in real time. They also have the legal authority and technological capability to take supreme command in cases of national emergency. Dick Cheney was the acting Commander in Chief on 9/11.

5. Norman Mineta’s testimony: the Stand Down
Testifying before the 9/11 Commission, Former Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta related his experience in the PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operation Center) as the attack unfolded:

“During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President...the plane is 50 miles out...the plane is 30 miles out....and when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary!??”

Mineta explains that while he had not known it at the time, he had surmised that the standing order the young man asked about must have been a stand down order.

Over 3000 Americans and foreign nationals were murdered on 9/11. An untold number have been kidnapped and tortured under "extraordinary rendition," many of them innocent of any crime or connection with terrorism. In 2006, the Bush administration successfully ramrodded a law through Congress giving all members of his administration retroactive immunity for war crimes. Impeachment hearings, with no possibility of "executive privilege," would surely provide enough evidence to rescind the legislated immunity.

*18 USC Sec. 794
(a) Whoever, with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates, delivers, or transmits, or attempts to communicate, deliver, or transmit, to any foreign government, or to any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States, or to any representative, officer, agent, employee, subject, or citizen thereof, either directly or indirectly, any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, note, instrument, appliance, or information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life, except that the sentence of death shall not be imposed unless the jury or, if there is no jury, the court, further finds that the offense resulted in the identification by a foreign power (as defined in section 101(a) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978) of an individual acting as an agent of the United States and consequently in the death of that individual, or directly concerned nuclear weaponry, military spacecraft or satellites, early warning systems, or other means of defense or retaliation against large-scale attack; war plans; communications intelligence or cryptographic information; or any other major weapons system or major element of defense strategy.

Sibel Edmonds update

2008-01-20T14:39:00.000-08:00

A follow-up article in the London Times:

THE FBI has been accused of covering up a key case file detailing evidence against corrupt government officials and their dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets...

She (Edmonds) says the FBI was investigating a Turkish and Israeli-run network that paid high-ranking American officials to steal nuclear weapons secrets. These were then sold on the international black market to countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia...

One of the documents relating to the case was marked 203A-WF-210023. Last week, however, the FBI responded to a freedom of information request for a file of exactly the same number by claiming that it did not exist. But The Sunday Times has obtained a document signed by an FBI official showing the existence of the file...

The freedom of information request had not been initiated by Edmonds. It was made quite separately by an American human rights group called the Liberty Coalition, acting on a tip-off it received from an anonymous correspondent...

The anonymous letter names a high-level government official who was allegedly secretly recorded speaking to an official at the Turkish embassy between August and December 2001.

It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US...

Edmonds: “This gag was invoked not to protect sensitive diplomatic relations but criminal activities involving US officials who were endangering US national security.”

Sibel Edmonds vs. The MSM Iron Curtain

2008-01-19T17:34:00.000-08:00

Any remaining doubt that the American MSM (Mainstream media) has degenerated into the functional equivalent of Pravda and Izvestia in the late Soviet Union — submissive oracles of Orwellian obfuscation--has been banished by the recent case of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds in January of this year.

A U.S. citizen and former Turkish language translator hired by the FBI after 9-11, Ms. Edmonds turned whistleblower after reading intercepts indicating a network of foreign intelligence agents was dealing with corrupt U.S. State department and intelligence officials in narcotics trafficking and smuggling of American nuclear secrets to Middle Eastern figures with connections to 9-11. Like any bureaucracy, the FBI fired her and denied her allegations. Edmonds filed suit, and presented her case in unclassified hearings before Senators Charles Grassley (Rep.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy, (Dem.). Both have publicly attested to her credibility, along with several knowledgeable FBI officers. And a senior official of the Justice Dept., Glenn Fine has stated: "We found that many of Edmonds' core allegations relating to the [espionage allegation] were supported by either documentary evidence or witnesses other than Edmonds.”

In 2002, Attorney General Ashcroft slapped Ms. Edmonds with a “states secret privilege” gag order, and In 2004 took the unprecedented step of retroactively classifying all the documents and testimony that she had given the Senate Judiciary Committee.

There are legitimate national security motives for keeping FBI and CIA employees from becoming blabbermouths, but the Sibel Edmonds scandal trumps these concerns morally and legally — a treasonous and criminal rogue enterprise embedded in our government that may have transmitted nuclear know-how into the hands of Middle Eastern terrorists needs to be exposed and investigated. For the last seven years, her case has been widely disseminated in alternative newspapers, magazines, books, websites, and the blogosphere. Like Erin Brockovich, the heroine of the eponymous true-story film, Ms. Edmonds has refused to be intimidated, shut up, and go away.

And it may take Hollywood to tell her story, because the MSM has gagged itself and erected an iron curtain of silence around her revelations.

In January 2008, the major media blackout finally lifted when the London Sunday Times published an article thoroughly laying out her case, including some of the information she was prohibited from discussing by Ashcroft — that the smuggling-spy ring included citizens of Turkey, Pakistan and Israel, and that prior warnings from FBI agents about an imminent terror attack by Osama bin Laden had been suppressed. She also named an American official — former undersecretary of State Marc Grossman — as a central figure in these machinations (he denies all).

Another central figure is former Pakistani ISI General Mahmoud Ahmad, infamous (except in the U.S.) for wiring $100,000 to lead 9/11 hijacker Muhammed Atta shortly before the attacks, and who was in Washinton visiting top American intelligence and political figures the week before. As Libertarian writer Justin Raimondo asserts, “The darkest secrets of 9/11 are buried at the end of the trail laid out in Edmonds' testimony.”

The London Times story was picked up by newspapers in many countries, including Ha’aretz in Israel, The Daily Times in Pakistan, and The Daily News in Turkey — all nations whose agencies were implicated in the story, and some where freedom of the press is a far more restricted and dangerous affair than, ostensibly, in the cradle of free speech itself, the United States, where the sum total of major media coverage remains absolute zero. The NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, none of the second or third tier papers, CNN, MSNBC, Fox... a perfect vacuum, excepting the unbridled reporting on Antiwar.com, BradBlog.com, and the online editions of the foreign newspapers above.

There is something rotten to the core here, and it’s not in Ankara, Islamabad, or Tel Aviv.

Edmond’s allegations are directly related to the accounts of other FBI whistleblowers — Colleen Rowley, Robert Wright — who have implicated high-level FBI bureaucrats in spiking field investigations that were homing in on the 9/11 plotters. So far, none of them have suffered even a slap on the wrist — rather, a few have even been promoted. In the face of patent negligence, malfeasance, and perhaps worse — outright treason involving the security of our people against terrorism — it is up to the Fourth Estate to take up where habitual government secrecy and bureaucratic CYA stymie the necessary housecleaning. But it appears the press in Turkey, Israel and even Pakistan is more honest and vigorous than our pathetic lapdogs.

Those who believe we are getting anything resembling the truth about the crucial dangers threatening our society — from electoral fraud to nucelar proliferation — from our press lords are as deluded as the babushka who trusted Pravda to give an honest accounting of Uncle Joe and his KGB thugs. For inquiring minds hungry for the uncensored news about the United States, the online editions of British and foreign newspapers, and many websites publishing these feeds, are the only fully reliable sources. But I have found one good use for the Washington Post , New York Times and other major dailies — excellent tinder for my fireplace.

See these online articles for more complete information about Sibel Edmonds:

For sale: West’s Deadly Nuclear Secrets, London Times

Nukes, Spooks, and the Specter of 9/11, Antiwar.com

The never-ending Occupation: an imperial conspiracy?

2007-08-26T13:21:00.000-07:00

A few weeks after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, writer Joshua Micah Marshall published a telling essay in the Washington Monthly: Practice to Deceive. Subtitled "Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare scenario–it's their plan," It remains one of the most cogent exposes of Neocon origins, methods and madness. And it has proven eerily prophetic. Some excerpts:

"Every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits...

Its (the Bush administration's) preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration's broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue...Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it's just a straight-up con...

But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn't even tried. Instead, it's focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind."

That agenda is permanent American military presence in the Middle East, engineered with this formula:

Invasion and "incompetent" occupation creates chaos.
Extended occupation is necessary to tame the chaos.
The occupation creates more chaos and never ends.

Which must be the goal if you’re investing in the world’s largest “embassy”—a Xanadu of air conditioned luxury larger than the Vatican, defended by 14 “enduring” military bases from Nasiriyah to Mosul. A unified and functioning sovereign government, representing the 70+% of Iraqis who want the U.S. gone, would never countenance the permanent squatting of foreign troops on native soil—the bete noir of genuine sovereignty.

The construction of these colonial fortresses has been effectively blacked out by our Pravda brothel of trick-turning pundits, who lament the supposed bungling responsible for the quagmire—ideological rigidity about laissez faire capitalism and democracy mistransplanted on hostile shores. "The Quiet American" sojourns in the Middle East with noble intentions, dashed by the fractious realities of tribal culture. The learning curve is steep, but with a few more tweaks, benchmarks and surges, our indefatigable “can-do” spirit will finally get it right and we’ll leave a friendly, grateful democracy in our wake. The litany of supposed blunders runs like this:

1. An occupation force of 450,000, recommended by Gen. Shinsheki as necessary to pacify the devastated country, is rejected for Rumsfeld's bargain basement force. CIA warnings about post-invasion anarchy are ignored. Only the oil ministry is defended by American troops—the rest of the government infrastructure is allowed to be completely destroyed by looting and vandalism.
2. The American army fails to secure Iraq's widespread munitions depots, the looting of which has supplied the insurgency's arsenal of IEDs, RPGs and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.
3. Against the advice of the occupation's first viceroy, Gen. Jay Garner, the Iraq army is disbanded and all Baath party officials cashiered, creating a legion of disgruntled desperadoes. How will they fight? See #2 above, and:
4. In August 07, the GAO reports that 190,000 weapons supplied to the Iraqi security forces have gone missing—more arms to fuel the militias’ internecine bloodletting.

Sorry, but I’m no longer buying the Keystone Cops’ rubric. Bush may be crazy, but like his mother told us, “Crazy like a fox.” The whole crusade was kicked off with what many believe to a false-flag operation on 9-11, and it’s likely that manufactured terror attacks have stoked the civil war. Referring to the bombing of the Shiite al-Askari mosque in Samarra in Feb. ‘06 that ignited it, former CIA official Ray McGovern speculated:

"The main question is Qui Bono? Who benefits from this kind of thing? You don't have to be very conspiratorial or even paranoid to suggest that there are a whole bunch of likely suspects out there and not only the Sunnis. You know, the British officers were arrested, dressed up in Arab garb, riding around in a car, so this stuff goes on."

MCGovern is referring to three British SAS soldiers arrested by Iraqi policeman in Basra in Sept. ‘05—dressed in Arab garb and wigs, with a car load of weapons and bombs. To prevent any further interrogation and publicity of this compromising disaster, regular British forces broke them out by bulldozing the jail with a tank.

It may very well have been such a covert op team that blew up the Samarra mosque, and continues to foment strife. Because if the civil war ever ends, a strong Iraqi government will almost certainly send American troops packing. Many Americans, conditioned like Pavlovian dogs to growl and spit at anything labeled a “conspiracy theory,” will dismiss this possibility out of hand. America has a Constitution, after all, and it’s supposed to work just like we learned in grade school—everything by the book, on the up and up—none of that decadent skullduggery in God’s country!

But change the terminology, and it becomes more understandable—Machiavelli is alive and well in Iraq, simply practicing that most venerable and effective of imperial strategies: divide and conquer. And all the ineffectual, half-hearted opposition by Democrats and rogue Republicans (no defunding the war, no impeachment proceedings or even censure) is so much noise and thunder to pacify the public. There is no exit strategy, because there is no commitment to exit on either side of the aisle.

How To Get Your War On

2007-08-15T18:28:00.000-07:00

Remember the Maine!

In 1898, the U.S.S. Maine exploded in Havana harbor, igniting the Spanish-American war. Hearst newspapers—the godfather of Fox News—declared it an act of war by Cuban saboteurs, but it may have been a drifting mine, a coal bunker explosion (common in those days), or even self-sabotage—yes, a conspiracy theory. Or false-flag theory. After 4 investigations, the evidence is inconclusive.

WWII

Hitler kicked it off with a pre-emptive strike against Poland, reacting to a border incursion of Polish soldiers—actually the bodies of executed German prisoners in Polish uniforms, planted for Goebbels’ megaphone. A false-flag op.

Pearl Harbor

Roosevelt, or members of his inner War Department circle, failed to dispatch decoded Japanese signal intelligence of an impending attack to the army and navy commanders on Pearl Harbor. The prize American carriers were all safely at sea. By negligence or design, the anti-war majority evaporated overnight.

Operation Northwoods

Desperate for a pretext to invade Cuba after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Pentagon hawks hatched a plan to fake Cuban terrorist attacks on American soil, including the shooting down of an American airliner. A false-flag op that never got off the ground—JFK shot it down. He would be the last president to stymie the war hawks.

Gulf of Tonkin

Progress has been made: you don’t have to actually sink a ship—just a few salvos at dolphins, repelling a Vietnamese attack that never happened, will work now to get the war fever going. Yes, it was a “conspiracy”—not a false-flag op, just a big lie requiring the complicity of Johnson, some naval officers, and a chorus of willing drumbeaters in the press and Congress.

Gulf War I

After a stern rebuke from Maggie Thatcher—envoy of Her Imperial Majesty, the Queen—George Bush, Sr. triggered the war with a classic British imperial strategem: Secretary of State James Baker instructed April Glaspie, the ambassador to Iraq, to relay the message to Sadam that the U.S. has "no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait." It was a green light—Sadam took the bait, and the very grave threat that the Iraqi military posed to control of its own fields was annihilated.

The "New Pearl Harbor"

Few people know that the latest WOT (War on Terror) upgrade is the 2005 release of GSAVE, (Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism), which completely replaces WOT. The merger was necessary to accommodate the vast new vision of the President—beyond merely extirpating the ancient tactic of terrorism, now we’re taking on the scourge of rebels, bread rioters, and soccer hooligans in every last frontier on Earth that might have some oil. The crusade was kicked off on 9/11, the “new Pearl Harbor” that Neocon manifestos had virtually prayed for. The prayers finally produced a miracle—the single most anomalous day in human history since the Resurrection, requiring even greater leaps of faith. The old standards of physics, precedent, probability, and gullibility were all broken that day—any absurdity could be retailed while the vast ignorati was in shock, fed a whole opus of Magic Bullet theories, stunning in their impossibility or sheer implausibility:

A gopher hole that swallows an entire 757, then belches out a debris field covering 15 sq. miles; the Pentagon plane completely vaporized and the Pentagon videos that recorded it still classified. All but 2 black boxes from 4 aircraft vaporized;, the Air Force that intercepted 67 off-course or incommunicative planes that year never even saw one of the 4 attack planes, even with an hour warning before the strike on the Pentagon; the precedent of no steel-framed skyscrapers ever collapsing due to fire is shattered—3 in one day! All pancake perfect, at free-fall speed.

In Florida, GWB sits reading nonchalantly in a vulnerable schoolhouse for 30 minutes with a major airport 5 miles away and his schedule publicized days beforehand. “Didn’t want to frighten the children,” was his excuse. Bless you, George—you did everything you could not to frighten the adults with a 9/11 investigation, too.

WWIII

Most likely scapegoat—Iran. Either a Persian Gulf “incident” or a false-flag op against “coalition forces” or the Homeland. Other false flags likely to fly on this day: Patriotism and Christianity. Could go nuclear. Likely actors: the fundamentalist zealots of all faiths eager to make it happen. It’s Foretold—might as get the upper hand with another, bigger,and better pre-emptive strike against the Axis of Evil. Raytheon, Lockheed and Halliburton stock will soar like the winged bulls of Assyria! As long there's no business like war business, we can look forward, at long last, to the war to end all wars—Armageddon.

George the Blackhearted

2007-08-01T18:38:00.000-07:00

Retrieved from the deep memory hole engineered by our Media Masters, a startling fact that focuses a stark beam of illumination on George Bush's character:

While presiding over a record number of executions as Guv of Texas (140), GWB granted clemency to only one death row inmate, commuting his sentence to life imprisonment. It wasn't Gary Graham, the candidate most likely to have been innocent. Nor any of the estimated 20% of death row inmates who may have been or are innocent, according to some statistical estimates based on post-conviction DNA exonerations (between 1976 and 2000, 87 wrongfully condemned prisoners had been freed from the nation's death rows, prompting the governor of Illinois to impose a moratorium on executions in his state, while GWB accelerated the pace).

George Bush's single act of mercy was reserved for one of the most prolific and horrific of serial killers—Henry Lee Lucas, whose confession to over 600 murders is controversial and surely exaggerated, but who was definitely guilty of multiple homicides, rape, torture, necrophilia and cannibalism.

This curious, little-known fact has been circulating on the web lately—news to a lot of people, including myself, who resided in Texas under both terms of Dubya's governorship (don't bother me with your suffering!). And no, Bubba, this is not a "conspiracy theory," or an urban legend—Texas newspapers reported it, briefly. Lucas was scheduled for execution on June 30th, 1998. Bush appealed for clemency on June 18, and the State Board of Pardons and Paroles uncharacteristically granted it. Lucas enjoyed his new lease on life until a heart attack claimed him in 2001.

Stranger still, the parallel fate of Lucas' accomplice in many grisly crimes, Otis Toole, who also resided on death row in a capital-punishment loving state, Florida. His sentence was also commuted to life imprisonment—by George's brother, Governor Jeb Bush.

What accounts for these singular anomalies? The answer may lie in an incredibly sordid tale of satanic death cults, supposedly involving more than your wayward Goth teenager or psychotic drifter. Journalist Dave McGown has explored it in depth: There's Something About Henry. Warning: do not go here if you're afraid of the dark.

For now, I'll focus on more verifiable evidence of the dark, sinister core of GWB's soul, prefaced with a Biblical adage modifed for the political sphere: "Not by their words, but by their vetoes, ye shall know them." Whether exercised or merely brandished, Bush vetoes are notable for their relative scarcity:

1. In 2002,he threatened to veto a defense bill, opposed to new pension benefits for disabled military veterans.

2. He threatened to veto Congress' bipartisan torture ban. When both the House and Senate approved the bill with veto-proof margins, Bush issued a signing statement stating that, as "unitary executive," he would be free to ignore it. Torture, it seems, is dear to GWB's heart.

3. He vetoed the bill for increased embryonic stem-cell research that could help cure many intractable diseases, such as the Alzheimer's that afflicted conservative idol Ronald Reagan.

4. He vetoed a defense spending bill that included a troop withdrawal mandate, after his de facto veto of the Iraq Study Commission's recommendations for solving the Iraq imbroglio. His "surge" strategy has resulted in the highest monthly casualties for the U.S. military since the war started.

5. He now threatens to veto a bill that would ban mercury in flu vaccines for children, despite it's proven links to autism and other neurological disorders.

6. He plans to veto a bill to increase funding for S-CHIP (State’s Children Health Insurance Program), which subsidizes health care for children whose families are too poor to buy private insurance, yet do not qualify for Medicaid.

There is a pattern here: in every case, the veto would increase the sum of human suffering.

As the bloodshed in Iraq continues unabated and his approval ratings continue to plummet, reports from the inner circle describe Bush as "serene." When warned of the dire problems of post-war reconstruction in Iraq, he casually signed off on the catastrophic decisions of Paul Bremer in near total "detachment," according to aides.

He knows that many innocent men have been unjustly imprisoned in Guantanamo and the rendition gulags, yet he fought the Supreme Court's ruling and pushed through the Military Commissions Act to deny them any redress. Undoubtedly, as the new science of DNA analysis was coming to the fore in the '90s, he knew that many innocent men were probably being executed in the Texas death chamber, yet he remained "serenely confident" that all deserved their fate—except one.

Nurturing a genuine sympathy for the devil, George Bush is a cruel, callous, narcissistic sociopath, and only the tattered remnants of the Constitution restrain him from unleashing a greater whirlwind of misery upon the world. Before it's too late, we must pressure Congress to do their sworn duty and impeach the blackhearted sonofabitch.

Kamikaze Christians on the March!

2007-07-28T16:01:00.000-07:00

Last week, an insurgency of radical lobbyists descended on our nation's capitol, pressing lawmakers to encourage Israeli expansion in the West Bank, ditch any Israeli-Palistinian peace plan, and launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran. Led by Christian ayatollah John Hagee, the jihadists of CUFI (Christians United for Israel), are hell-bent on fulfilling the Biblical prophecies of Revelations. (See Max Blumenthal's first-hand report, including video, here.)

Logic has never been a strong point of the faith-based brigades, and they demonstrate a profound deficiency of it here:

The Rapture will only occur after the climactic battle of Armageddon, when Jesus returns as mayor of Jerusalem. And this is why we must pre-emptively attack Iran--to prevent the Persian infidels from threatening Israel and kicking off Armageddon. Which leads to the question: do they really want it, or don't they?

I guess there may be some merely strategic calculation here, like the Japanese imperialists thought--if a big war is inevitable, might as well start if off with a sneak attack and get the upper hand. Compounding their crippled sense of logic, the faith-based zealots also wallow in historical ignorance--Tojo's gambit proved a disaster, almost resulting in total nuclear annihilation of his nation. And one glance at the developing trends in the Middle East should give the warmongers in both the U.S. and Israel qualms about igniting a wider war.

Mushariff's days are numbered in Pakistan, which already has the bomb, with an ineradicable Muslim fundamentalist insurgency in Waziristan. Another unprovoked Western attack on a Muslim nation--by Christians and/or Jews--would most probably crumble Mushariff's eroding foundation of support, and unite (at least temporarily) the Shiites and Sunnis worldwide in hatred for the heathen aggressors. That includes Hezbollah, still bunkered down and unbowed on Israel's northern frontier. Plenty of kamikaze fanatics willing to strap on a suitcase nuke in the event of all-out war.

For 4 years, the Iraqi insurgency has been learning how to defeat a technologically superior military force. Just as Hezbollah learned in Lebanon--lessons now being adopted by the Palestinians. The U.S. military--Israel's ultimate guarantor of security--is close to bankruptcy. Still plenty of hardware, but getting desperate for manpower.

In Israel, there are some religious zealots , convinced that the U.N. grant of 60% of Palestinian land in 1948 was insufficiently generous--the real deed to the whole property is registered in the Old Testament. But it is mainly secular Zionists in the both the U.S. and Israel, devoted to the concept of Jewish lebensraum, who are thrilled to employ the goofy CUFI crowd as useful idiots.

But they are dangerous idiots as well--their mission is mass suicide, embracing the horrors of the Apocalypse as desiderata, contemptuous of the higher brains God gave us (do nothing about global warming--it's His will), and absolutely thrilled with the prospect of a holocaust of Jews, Muslims, and Christians from non-sanctioned denominations alike. Their sick delusions are most blatantly manifest in this article of faith: that the Anti-Christ will be a peacemaker. Whereas the Prince of Peace, in his next incarnation, will be as merciless and bloodthirsty as a Mongol horseman.

I would give them, all of them--Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists alike--this advice: in a hurry to see the Savior, or the Mahdi? Just can't wait for it? And suicide is a sin? Fine. Go base jumping with a surplus WWII parachute. Go diving with sharks, a Sushi snack packed in your wetsuit. Sample some pet food from China. Whatever. You have the right to your own primitive, self-destructive beliefs. But you don't have the right to take the rest of us down with you.

Spanish Cartoon Scandal

2007-07-21T18:00:00.000-07:00

The cover of a Spanish satirical magazine, El Jueves, has sent one Spanish judge into a Franco-like frenzy, sending gendarmes across the country to confiscate the whole edition. The offending cartoon, depicting the Royal couple, refers to a initiative by the Spanish government giving financial help to young couples who have children, to the tune of EUR 2500 (roughly US $3450) per child, in the form of tax discounts, etc. The caption reads: "Do you realize? If you get pregnant... This will be the closest thing to work I will have ever done in my life!"

The judge ordered all printing plates of the cover confiscated, unknowing that plates have not been used in modern digital printing for years. The cartoonist, Guillermo, joked: "The best thing would be for them to cut off my right hand."

Praying for Pearl Harbor III

2007-07-21T13:53:00.000-07:00

“Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.

"Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of "executive orders" that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, "terrorist" events in the near future.”

—Paul Craig Roberts
Counterpunch, 7-16-2007

These refreshingly blunt words come from a former Asst. Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, and—former Republican. Roberts has been speaking and writing passionately about the Neocon criminals and imbeciles who’ve hijacked his party. He is joined by Bruce Fein, Pat Buchanan, William Normann Grigg and many other paleo-conservatives and former high-ranking government officials who are convinced that 9-11 was orchestrated or allowed to happen, answering the prayers of the Neocons for “a new Pearl Harbor” to ignite their imperial war. (see their testimony here: Patriots Question 9-11

And, Roberts argues, given that their train has nearly derailed, the Neocons desperately need a booster shot of terrorism:

"If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.

"A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel."

Indeed, the Republicans are virtually Praying for a Terrorist Strike, as conservative commentator William Norman Grigg writes, quoting Rick Santorum:

"Between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public’s going to have a very different view of this war, and it will be because, I think, of some unfortunate events, that like we’re seeing unfold in the UK. But I think the American public’s going to have a very different view."

And Arkansas Republican Party chairman Rick Milligan:

"At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001]."

And dark horse Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul recently opined:

"A contrived Gulf of Tonkin- type incident may occur to gain popular support for an attack on Iran.”

But the leading indicator is Homeland Security Fuehrer Michael Chertoff’s gut, rumbling with intimations of a terrorist strike, based on… nothing specific he can cite.* Chertoff should undergo a colonoscopy to give us a better picture of this nebulous threat. Or maybe he should heroically fall on his sword, enabling a soothsayer to read his entrails for greater detail.

But that would be dangerous, not only to Mr. Chertoff, but to his sponsors and confederates—his bloody bowels might foretell this about the imminent strike: “Made in U.S.A.” Or “Made in Israel.”

* In a recent speech at the USC, Chertoff’s gut belched forth a speculation about a simultaneous L.A./San Francisco dirty bomb attack “that our enemy is surely planning.”

PS: Oregon representative Peter DeFrazio, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, recently attempted (as he is authorized to do) to review secret White House plans for operating the government after another terrorist attack. The answer, no doubt from Dick Cheney, who already may be hunkered in his bunker, was ACCESS DENIED.

Nancy Pelosi vs. Cindy Sheehan

2007-07-13T10:13:00.000-07:00

The punditocracy may laugh now at this possible match-up (Sheehan announcing that she may run against the Speaker), a titled heavyweight against a scrawny street punk on the scales of campaign funding. But as a majority of the public demands, with increasing stridency, the end of this hemorrhaging in Iraq, Pelosi’s and Reid’s approval ratings are hovering near Dick Cheney’s—elected to abort the war, they have presided over its escalation. Meanwhile, Sheehan is hardly an unknown, has a massive base of support among Democrats, and after camping outside the fantasy ranch in Crawford during the blistering Texas summer, it’s not likely she’ll wilt under the heat of King George’s stubborn smirk.

Pelosi makes all the good gestures, but then capitulates in the final quarter. In March, yet another war funding bill ($100 billion) was about to be approved by the House that included a provision forbidding military operations against Iran without congressional approval (“You may continue this bollixed war, but don’t start another one!”). A few days later, Pelosi attended the annual conference of one of her and her party’s largest investors—AIPAC—where her speech defending the bill was roundly booed. I don’t know if the runny mascara was from nervous perspiration, or actual tears, as she hurriedly fled to Capitol Hill for emergency surgery. By dawn, she had removed the offending tumor about Iran, and stitched up the bill with a realpolitick rationalization: “Of course, we’re not really going to attack Iran. Mercy, no! I abhor any kind of unseemly aggressiveness. But to prod Iran forward, we must not take the stick off the table.”

If only Ms. Pelosi would apply this same strategem to the domestic front, she might successfully contain our own fundamentalist megalomaniac—but no, the impeachment stick is off this table. Here, too, she is bucking the trend: 46% of the public, in a recent poll, is all for impeaching the Evil Cretin. But it will never happen with this reverse Teddy Roosevelt philosophy: Speak loudly, and drop your stick.

The House did just pass a resolution for withdrawal by Spring 2008 (CNN, almost as “fair and balanced” as Fox, megaphoned this belligerent headline: “Bush Blasts the House!”). The King will certainly veto it. Then Pelosi and Reid will dance another mournful jig, pleading, “Oh, we tried. We really, really tried!”

Nancy, dear, your heart’s in the right place, but your purse is plumped by foreign lobbies who would like nothing better than a perpetually escalating Crusade in the Middle East, whatever the cost in American blood and treasure. But the nation is begging for a virgin warrior with the moxy to wield the big sticks in the Homeland—defunding the war, impeachment. As has been said about many of our adversaries, "Force is the only language he understands." There is no better candidate than Cindy Sheehan to lead that insurgency, for many reasons, but one overriding one. His name is Casey.

Whatever Cindy Sheehan's prospects for election, her candidacy just may be the stick to prod Nancy Pelosi forward, or at least arrest her unseemly backpedaling.

Two Posthumous Confessions: JFK and Roswell

2007-07-05T10:58:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the favorite shibboleth wielded by skeptics or “debunkers” against conspiracy theorists is this: “No conspiracy could endure this long without exposure. Surely, somebody would have spilled the beans by now”—typically uttered by the average Clueless Clark who has never bothered to crack a single tome in the often vast literature generated by certain conspiratorial subjects. The elusive inside bean-spiller can be found in many of these pages—and that’s where he stays, quarantined from broader exposure by the powerful clergy of American mainstream media editors. If the panjandrums of the NY Times do not hear the tree falling, then it has not been felled.

Two recent cases in point, totally blacked out by our presshood: 1) E. Howard Hunt’s posthumous confession about the JFK assassination. 2) Lt. Walter Haut’s posthumous affidavit about the alleged Roswell UFO crash (reported in the British Daily Mail). First:

Lt. Walter Haut
who died last year (2006), and whose sworn affidavit dated Dec. 2002, to be opened only after his death, was so revealed this June. (read it here) Lt. Haut was the public relations officer at the Roswell Army Air Field in 1947, year of the infamous crash. He issued the original press releases about the crash being no more than a weather balloon, on the order of the base commander, Col. William Blanchard. Haut’s affidavit now claims that was a cover story, and that he observed the recovered wreckage in a tightly guarded hangar:

“It was approx. 12 to 15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high, and more of an egg shape. Lighting was poor, but its surface did appear metallic. No windows, portholes, wings, tail section, or landing gear were visible… Also from a distance, I was able to see a couple of bodies under a canvas tarpaulin. Only the heads extended beyond the covering, and I was not able to make out any features. The heads did appear larger than normal and the contour of the canvas suggested the size of a 10-year-old child. At a later date in Blanchard's office, he would extend his arm about 4 feet above the floor to indicate the height…

“I am convinced that what I personally observed was some type of craft and its crew from outer space… I have not been paid nor given anything of value to make this statement, and it is the truth to the best of my recollection.”

The hardcore debunker will aver that the affidavit could have—or must have—been forged. Or that the whole hangar scene was staged to bedazzle Haut and others in some kind of psywar/disinfo campaign by Army intelligence (the UFO phenomenon was a serious concern within the Cold War defense establishment, with documented discussions of how to either exploit it, or defend against possible mass hysteria). But the debunker himself becomes a conspiracy theorist himself at this point, and may be hoisted on his own petard: where’s your proof?

The reflexive skeptic often argues from certain faith-based presumptions: Aliens do not exist. Political assassinations are impossible in God’s country. Hence evidence of either is, ipso facto, fraudulent or misconstrued. A standard accusation, or slander—that the conspiracy/cover-up author is a charlatan, retailing sensationalist fables for fame and profit—is hard to pin on Lt. Haut. He avoided all publicity about the matter during his lifetime, the affidavit is not generating any profit, and the only fame accruing to him is in the afterlife.

E. Howard Hunt
has been an alleged conspirator in the JFK assassination almost since the beginning, when he was accused of being one of the three tramps arrested in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22. In 1985, he lost a libel trial—Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby—that was successfully turned into a virtual trial of the JFK assassination by defendant attorney Mark Lane, who also represented Lee Harvey Oswald before his untimely murder by mobster Jack Ruby. Lane brilliantly dissected Hunt on the witness stand, exposing the multiple, contradictory lies about his whereabouts on Nov. 22 (in Dallas, acting as paymaster of the hit, according to witness Marita Lorenz), and convincing the jury that the CIA (Hunt’s longtime employer before he joined Nixon’s plumbers’ squad) participated in the assassination.

It should be one of the most famous trials in American history, but it also was successfully quarantined by our own Pravda poodles, never making headlines beyond the local Miami news (see Lane’s book about the trial, Plausible Denial).

Hunt died in January of this year. In April, his handwritten and taped confession, delivered to his son, was published in Rolling Stone, alleging a chain of command with LBJ at the top, and CIA operatives Cord Meyer and David Atlee Phillips as the two main capos organizing the JFK hit. Hunt’s own role, according to the confession, was only as a “benchwarmer.”

True believers have heralded the confession as the long-awaited lost gospel, while the debunkers and MSM have simply ignored it, diverting the public’s attention to Vincent Bugliosi’s massive defense of the Warren Commission, the just published Reclaiming History. Like the 16 volumes of the Warren Commission, it attempts to awe by sheer weight (1600 pages!), but it must struggle against the Himalayan mass of pro-conspiracy literature (much of it exceptionally well-researched) over the last 45 years. I have yet to read his account of the Magic Bullet theory (concocted by Arlen Specter), but I’m sure it’s as risible as all the other absurd rationalizations.

As a longtime student of the JFK assassination, I judge Hunt’s confession to be a mixture of truth and disinformation—typical of spook work, and typical of Hunt himself, who published numerous James Bond-like novels, and forged documents to implicate JFK in the Diem assassination. LBJ and Phillips—I would rate their involvement as 90% certain (along with Hoover and a few other characters from military intelligence and the radical anti-Castro exile community). But Cord Meyer’s involvement, and Hunt’s role as “benchwarmer” are doubtful. Meyer was a liberal, accused of Communist sympathies by McCarthy, while Hunt evinced a visceral hatred of JFK, even claiming years after the event that the Soviet missiles were never removed from Cuba after the October crisis.

Hunt asserts the affair between Mary Pinchot Meyer, Cord’s ex-wife, as a motive for his involvement, but the Meyers were divorced in 1958 and the affair began in 1960. Mary was murdered in 1964 and the case remains unsolved. In a 2001 interview with writer David Heymann, Cord was asked about Mary’s murder—who could have done it? Cord replied, “The same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy.” (Read the full story about Mary Meyer including her acid trips with JFK here.)

One of those SOBs was probably E. Howard Hunt. I credit the information brought out in the Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby trial. Replace Hunt himself for Cord Meyer at some level, and the amended confession rings true.

Cell Phone Cyborgs

2007-06-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

One sure symptom of incipient geezerhood is becoming a Luddite—an old crank, suspicious and hostile towards newfangled technology. This worries me, as I have been grousing lately about the cell phone. But there are objective factors to consider:

I don’t deny their great utility and convenience for travel, emergencies, and urgent communication, but for too many people they have become a social pacemaker—life is impossible without them! Every 15 minutes, the CP junkie must check for messages and respond immediately, and if there are none, then some traffic must be stimulated by sending out feelers: calls, text messages or snapshots. When a call is received, all other input stimuli must be backburnered: the highway at 70 mph, a dinner conversation, an organ about to be transplanted in the operating room.

I have friends and relatives who flip open while leaning out of the shower, sitting on the throne, riding a bicycle, cooking, eating… there are no boundaries. I suspect that for many a cell phone is integral to their sex life: “Talk to me dirty, then hang up and call back. I’ll switch to vibration mode.”

Then there are the CP prima donnas: frustrated thespians who find a captive audience in a packed airport, bus, or ticket line, and regale the crowd with some personal drama or impressive power talk: “Jensen’s still in Norway?! Then how is he going to meet me in Bangkok? You tell him to call me in Monaco tomorrow, or the deal’s off!” Pity the poor bored soul stuck in an airline layover without a cell phone! The problem is, the poor bored soul is often the CP junkie’s companion, fiddling idly while the junkie conducts business or pleasure far more urgent or compelling than your miserable company.

I would suggest that unless you are on-call in some official capacity, following behind POTUS with the nuclear launch codes, or expecting ransom instructions from a kidnapper, you don’t need to be tethered to your device as permanently as a parolee to an ankle monitor. But that’s the way it’s evolving: on an overnight train ride recently, I groggily awakened to glimpse the woman opposite the aisle, town lights strobing her eerily through the windows, a large Bluetooth headset grafted to her ear as she snoozed in her chair…and for a minute I thought I was experiencing a sci-fi nightmare about futuristic cyborgs, perpetually tuned to bogus Homeland Security alerts and subliminal mind-control messages from the Ministry of Truth (aka Corporate Media): “Terrorists are stalking you this very moment! You have everything to fear, except fear itself. They want to control your body and soul with diabolical national health insurance. But don’t panic—Big Bubba is planning a pre-emptive strike. Vote for Big Bubba.”

Of course, I don’t have a cell phone, which makes it easy for me to decry their sins as I am not enjoying their virtues (the source of all moral self-righteousness). But if I ever do succumb to the CP seduction, I’m going to do it in a big way: when the technology advances, I will dive to the Andrea Doria wreck, 240 ft. down in the Atlantic, with my Divemaster iPhone and text message a climber on the peak of Mt. Everest, setting new records for both vertical distance and wireless histrionics. I imagine it would go like this:

ME: How goes up there?
CLIMBER: White-out. Can’t C thing. U?
ME: Black-out. Can’t C thing. Cold, scary.
CLIMBER: Dittoooooo… sorry, fingers freezing.
ME: Glimpsed 10tacles giant squid!
CLIMBER: Snapshot me?
ME: 10-4. Got my leg!
CLIMBER: Montsteeerrr!... Hands & brain freezzzzig now…
ME: At least we have each other.
CLIMBER: Ditttttooo…