Final Revelations in the Whore of Babylon

The Warning

2008-10-04T19:18:00.005-04:00

Well, I am about done with this blog. This period...this era...of my life is coming to a close. A new era, beyond the ups and downs of the WoB, is beginning.

I am in the WoB now. But it is different.

So.

I am finishing a new film I've written, directed and produced.

I will stick around a while longer. But not much. This blog will pass, as it should.

Tears

2008-08-29T13:25:00.002-04:00

No cynicism. No clever phrases or jokes. No soul searching, or pondering my personal depths.

I just want to take a minute to note that last night I saw...hopefully we all saw...a moment that I never believed would come.

Although the lovely and brilliant Michelle Obama had to backtrack on her "I am proud of America for the first time" statement, I have no such pressure on me to say otherwise.

For the first time in my life, I am truly proud to be American.

Truly.

My greatest American hero is Martin Luther King, Jr. I believe he is the greatest American who has ever lived. Last night, I saw his dream realized, the uncashed check of American history finally taken to the bank and paid...not in full, but it was, at least, accepted and some of the funds released.

I watched the events at Invesco Field from beginning to end, thanks to C-SPAN, and I found tears running down my face throughout.

Not because I am a Democrat...because I am not.

Not because I believe Obama can change the fundamental imperialism and domination by the Military-Industrial Complex that corrodes the soul of this nation...because he cannot.

Not because I think the Republican Party is, at its core, run by blood-thirsty, elitist and amoral greed-mongers...well, yeah, I do believe that.

No, I cried some tears of redemptive joy for all those Black men who were lynched. For all those Black men who languish in prison on trumped-up charges, or who have been wrongly convicted by our criminal "justice" system.

For all those slaves who lived through one of the great blights on human morality in the history of mankind.

For all those brave men who marched and demonstrated and tried so hard to endure Jim Crow and segregation for the right to vote, to use bathrooms and lunch counters. Who simply wanted to be treated as human beings.

For Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron and all those Black men who refused to let racism keep them from achieving excellence.

We, as a people, have never quite faced up to the desperately immoral threads that weave through the history of our country.

But last night...last night I saw that there is some redemption in the soul and psyche of this nation. I saw a Black man...and his lovely family...take the stage and claim a position that, for over two hundred years, seemed unthinkable.

I also saw that my generation might be the last to know fully the perniciousness of our collective racism and that those who come after us have embraced a vision of race that transcends our past.

It is young people who made this moment possible. Please keep that in mind. Hip Hoppers of all races. Kids who grew up after the Cosby Show was a hit. After Michael Jordan became the most popular man on the planet. Kids who see Black Americans in ways that Martin Luther King, Jr. could only dream of...that he did dream of.

If Obama loses, it will be because we still have millions of racists. We still have a society that reacts to fear and propaganda. We still have an unpaid debt to history and to those peoples...Blacks, American Indians and people in countries around the world...who we as a collective have dominated, enslaved, murdered, bombed and stolen from.

But last night, with funky songs playing...with an anniversary in the ether...we saw that there is hope that we can transcend our history and be something more.

Please take a moment to reflect on this...because we all, in the context of American history, witnessed the single most important event we have yet seen in our lifetimes.

And feel free to shed a tear of redemptive joy.

The One

2008-02-12T00:20:00.001-05:00

She's "the one."

Has been. Always will be.

Much maligned over the years, she always accepts me. Not in spite of my faults, but because of 'em.

The Whore of Babylon. The city personified as a woman full of Biblical wrath. Washington, D.C.

I have been there nearly two out of the last four months. Both times to fulfill my destiny as the servant of a fellow man. To do what he could not. To be what he refused to be. To give him one last send off that would solidify his legacy.

Fitting. Fitting that it was service that sent me back to the city that has swallowed me and spit me out twice. Spit out, because I refused to serve the Whore. That is what "she" (funny that we call cities and boats "she," but it works) demands. Once you stop serving her and all that she is...well...you find yourself alienated and lonely and agitated. It takes participation, being one with the various aspects of her vanity and power. I was always rubbing up against her vanity and power through the media and an obsession with politics and history and "justice." My vanity and search for some avenue to exert my own power, those things brought me to her.

Once things fell apart, from health or fire or some other sort of random brimstone, I no longer served her and she spit me out. Perhaps because I made myself so distasteful.

I just could not face my own vanity, and my lust for her wily ways. I left for good, so I said, last Summer and immediately came apart at the seams. My vanity was left behind, my lust and what little power I did have quickly mutated. I wasn't serving her. I wasn't serving those around me. I was self-serving insofar as I retreated into denial over my lost opportunity. The opportunity to make a stand. To not retreat or be spit out.

Going back to help my dying friend became a salve. My wounds, mostly self-inflicted but some also inflicted upon me, felt the soothing coolness of gratitude and love and appreciation.

Felt the feeling of home.

For DC...the Whore of Babylon...is my home. One of them, at least. But the one home that strips me bare and causes me to face the reality of who I am and what I have given up over the years. What I could be. But it also is a place that has embraced me through the people I know there. The people who open their homes and hearts and families to me. People who actually care about and who know me. They do. They know me. And they've shown me my value. My worth. And shown me the self-serving indulgence of feeling worthless.

I gave. They returned the favor. By showing me that the Whore of Babylon is not just a mythical frame for the self-portrait of my persona, but it is also a place I have made a name and identity for myself...the family I have found there has made DC more than a tricky one-liner or a catchy title. It is a place I will return to again and again. I will never be free of that embrace, not fully.

I have slept with the Whore. And, dammit, I have certainly paid. Paid dearly. But it was a transaction. Not a mugging. I did so with free-will. Still am.

So, here I am in NorCal. My native land I love so much, and it occurred to me to move back to the Whore! I will not, but it didn't seem so strange an idea. My burned apartment is shiny and new. My family there, the people who I have grown to love and respect, allow me to be who I am and don't mind my idiosyncratic ways. I am not quite the crazy uncle, but I am always welcome to stay in more than one basement.

I guess the upshot is that I live in more than one place. I live on both coasts. And will. Because the Whore of Babylon, with it's enraging drivers and bad service and slimy sycophants and tax-payer troughs of money and mammon worship, that Whore is "the one." The one I am destined to embrace. As one who looks into abysses as a matter of course, as a man perpetually outraged...as a digger of dirt and overturner of rocks...and as a man who simply wants family and a home...I cannot deny that she, the city and Biblical bitch, has forever marked me.

And no, I am not going to take this metaphor to its logical conclusion and say I now have the Mark of the Beast! Rather, this metaphor has me as the one who refuses to take the Mark...but returns to the belly of the Beast because it is the one place that I can feel it all, everything I have inside me...every political, moral, philosophical and emotional wound throbs...occasionally bleeds...and is also salved...all at the same time.

America's Investment in Negative Assets

2007-06-01T08:57:00.000-04:00

Another suicide at Guantanamo.

Years and years of detention, strange psychological games and bizarre, "no really, it ain't torture" rituals led another evildoer to take his own life.

Of course, the Pentagon doesn't it call it suicide. The term is "an act of asymmetrical warfare." Seriously. When three evildoers ended their life sentence early in June of 2006, the War on Terror talking point called the suicide an "act of war."

It is reminiscent of another famous euphemism for suicide...Rev. Jim Jones told his followers that they were "not committing suicide, it's a revolutionary act."

So, just to keep in lockstep with the War of Terror terminology...Another act of war occurred at Guantanamo.

The funny thing about this one is the lead in to the story in today's Washington Post:

A detainee found dead in his cell at Guantanamo Bay on Wednesday was a Saudi army veteran who trained with U.S. forces before fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan, according to military hearing records.

Isn't that interesting?

Here is an evildoer who is being kept away from civilization, never charged with a crime or able to see a lawyer...and he was not only another example of one of our Saudi friends involved in "terror," but he’d also trained with US forces.

An anomaly, perhaps. Just a coincidence? Maybe.

But he is not the first.

In fact, during the crazy aftermath of the 9/11 attacks Newsweek ran this interesting tidbit:

"U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged hijackers of the planes that were used in [the 9/11] terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s." -- 9/15/01

And then there is this from the NY Times from the same day:

The Defense Department said Mr. Atta had gone to the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama; Mr. al-Omari to the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas; and Mr. al-Ghamdi to the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio in Monterey, Calif.

Kinda strange, isn't it?

Stranger still is the fact that these connections disappeared from the media. Vanished.

And the Joint Congressional Report on their investigation into 9/11? Redacted.

Or so we can assume, because 28 pages of the report relating to Saudi financing and other sticky Saudi issues will never be seen by the public. The Saudi-loving Bush team waved the magic wand of "National Security" over the report and made potentially difficult to explain information just disappear.

Sorry America, you are on a "need to know" basis.

That didn't stop one patriotic Air Force Lt. Colonel from speaking his mind. Not too coincidentally, Lt. Colonel Steve Butler was serving as vice chancellor for student affairs at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California when he wrote a letter to a local paper claiming Bush knew of the impending attacks and, essentially, let them happened to save his Presidency and get his War on Terrorism.

Of course, he was relieved of his duties. Duties that may have had him cross paths with one of the hijackers admitted by the Defense Department to have attended the famous language school.

No, stop that. It's a just a coincidence.

Or is it?

In the shady world of fun and games we call espionage, there are assets and negative assets.

Assets are agents, contract agents, informants and other "friendlies" who work with an agency...like the CIA, the FBI, the NSA or the recently ascendant DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency). Assets are the characters we see James Bond movies.

But there are other "assets" agencies acquire and use. Less known, but just as important, they are called "negative assets." These unfriendlies are recruited by deep cover assets to inflict damage, run terror campaigns and generally wreak havoc on...ourselves.

Really. Not kidding. Common practice.

Negative assets can be used to alter the political dynamics of a friendly country heading toward turmoil or privatization of resources our corporations want to control. They can be use to unseat public allies who are private foes or public relations liabilities. Dictators who become liabilities, for instance, can be overthrown by enemies that an agency funds, trains or otherwise helps materially to carry out a task the agency's government cannot public condone. By people the government cannot public condone.

It makes for strange bedfellows.

One of the great practitioners of this negative asset allocation is Israel.

In the early seventies, men like former Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir Ariel Sharon decided that they needed to counter the PLO within the ranks of the Palestinians. Voila! The government helped to establish Hamas. Really, it's true.

They provided funding and support, and helped to create a terrorist organization.

Now they use Hamas as a rationale for continued occupation. Hamas has, in turn, bedeviled the Palestinian Authority's attempt to govern the Occupied Territories...thus creating a low-grade civil war between Hamas and the PLO.

Bonus! Now they are killing themselves.

And now the Israelis and the United States are assisting PLO elements within the Palestinian Authority in their struggle against Hamas. The money is flowing.

Keep that “killing themselves thing” going is just common sense, right?

And it goes even further...a story today in the UK newspaper The Telegraph points to documents that indicate the famous hijacking by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP) at Entebbe may have may have had assistance from an Israeli agency…Shin Bet.

That hijacking and the heroic raid by Isreali forces that followed became a rallying point for resistance to Palestinian claims for independence from occupation. It helped to unite Israelis behind the cause. It helped to demonize the Palestinians.

Enemies are, for governments seeking justifications or legitimacy with their own people and foreign powers, golden.

British intelligence had assets working in the IRA. Italian and US agencies had assets in the Red Brigade.

And the US (the CIA) was present and instrumental in the founding of what would become Al-Qaeda.

It doesn't stop there.

Seymour Hersh has been reporting, much to the indifference of the mainstream media, that the Bush Administration has quietly been using Prince Bandar, a.k.a. Bandar Bush, to fund Sunni extremists in terror campaigns in Lebanon and Iran.

Yup. Saudi money and Wahhabism...the potent cocktail that lead to the rise of Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks...is being used to foment a spreading conflict between Sunni and Shiites in the Islamic world.

Bonus! That “killing themselves thing” is as good as it gets in the hurly burly of empire building.

The camp in Northern Lebanon that was in the news over the last couple weeks?

The terrorist attacks by Pakistanis in Eastern Iran a couple months ago?

Those money trails lead back to our, or...more precisely…the Bush Team’s, Saudi friends.

Negative assets returning dividends.

We've seen it here at home, too.

The Miami "Terror Cell?" Negative assets recruited, supplied and goaded into delusions of terroristic grandeur by an FBI agent. That case is going nowhere because the negative assets were incompetents and the operation bungled.

But how many of those operations make through to completion?

Without some slip-up along the way, it is hard to know. Because a good negative asset is one who doesn't realize that they are being controlled by an asset...a member of an agency or government who would be otherwise considered the enemy by the negative asset in question.

Negative assets, when they work out, have the greatest degree of plausible deniability possible. Plausible deniability is the mother's milk of espionage fun and games. It protects those at the top who send their orders down the chain of command. If an agent, an asset or an operation is compromised? Well, it stops at the lower level, keeping the string pullers from ever being tainted or, depending on the type of operation, convicted.

So when we think about this latest suicide...sorry, excuse me...act of war…at Guantanamo, and the fact that he, like so many others, had links to the US military...we are left to speculate about what really happened to bring him to the both Gitmo and his death.

Was he another negative asset who had to be pulled off the War on Terror battlefield to keep him from divulging compromising information? Is that why he was never charged? Was never allowed to speak to a lawyer? Was he a product of an Evildoer Enemy Factory, churned out to justify a power play for dominance of the Middle East and all that powerful and profitable oil?

Is the War on Terror just a game of shadowy puppetry...assets and negative assets unleashed to create war justification and legitimacy where once there were none?

Well, America...you are on a need to know basis. And like those 28 redacted pages on the role of the Saudis in Al Qaeda and 9/11...it has been determined that you don't need to know.

Memorial Day of Reckoning

2007-05-28T15:29:00.000-04:00

Memorial Day Weekend.

It's pure Americana. The kick-off to the Grilling Season, it is a three day intro to Summer for America’s families.

Barbecues. Picnics. The first trip the beach. A time for the American Way of Life to be celebrated with copious amounts of beer and hot dogs. It is also a weekend of sales. Cars. Mattresses. Big screen TVs. All of American Life squeezed into the brass ring of our work life: a three-day weekend.

Some people remember to display the American flag. But few people stop and consider the name for the day and the meaning behind it.

Too much consumption and too little reflection, perhaps.

Memorial Day is the set aside so Americans can remember...memorialize... the death of thousands upon thousands of American soldiers throughout our history. To thank, as it were, those who made "the ultimate sacrifice" to defend America. And, as the slightly jingoistic phrase goes, to "defend our freedom."

All of this memorializing of sacrifice is set in stark relief against a backdrop of gluttony and shopping.

Sure, there will be parades. And Arlington Cemetery will play host to a Presidential photo op. But what does it mean that a somber and sullen occasion like the remembrance of fallen soldiers became a time of fun and sun and food and cheap mattresses?

Memorial Day is a peculiarly American holiday for just that reason. Its "celebration" lacks historical context. Lacks any real contemplation of the cost in lives to preserve the American Way of Life. Or any accounting for the reasons behind those wars and the deaths that poured out of them. In typical American fashion, the memory is stripped out of the word memorial so that it becomes something totally different that it is. Than it always was.

American re-invention at work.

This year's Memorial Day this phenomenon is particularly acute. As "holiday travelers" thought about scaling back their driving due to higher gas prices, there was an ongoing reason for solemn reflection.

War. Death. Iraq.

Of all years, wouldn't this be a good one to cancel the trips and shut off the barbecues...to gather around those who've lost loved ones, or around those who've survived this and previous wars? Isn’t it a good time to look into our collective soul and ponder the question of why we've lost so many to war? Or to use that oft-referred to freedom to express ourselves and our supposed, growing disdain for this war?

No. The meat is grilling and the mattresses are selling.

It is because we, as Americans, cannot begin to take real responsibility for what we have wrought.

The blame is not for those who actually wore or are wearing uniforms. For those who have been in war and lost limbs or lives or friends in foxholes. They do what they are told to do, what they are required to do. By us. Yes, all of us.

And no, a "Don't Blame me, I Voted For Kerry" bumper sticker is not an exemption clause. Not an escape.

Because those "freedoms" and the "democracy" that those soldiers supposedly died for means that we all are responsible for the death and destruction that happens, that has happened, in our name.

The 3,435 Americans dead as of the writing of this blog. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who've died. The nearly 4 million Iraq refugees. All of that blood and pain and destruction...it's on our hands this Memorial Day.

But who in America right now, crowded around a picnic table or a barbecue grill thinks of themself as responsible for all that carnage?

And that is the problem.

For we know so little of our own history, let alone what is happening right now. This is particularly true of the various wars that were not fought to "preserve our freedoms." Wars not fought to protect our so-called democracy against invaders and enemies.

Sure, World War II was a good case of a good war against obvious threats.

But World War I? No real rationale for that one. Woodrow Wilson had a "vision" for the world and America's role in it. Wilson is, not surprisingly, a big hero to the Neo-Cons...even though his Wilsonian vision was mostly a failure.

Santayana is laughing…do you hear him?

Our entrance into World War I was far more turbulent and unpopular at home than the causally under-informed American knows. It caused an "isolationist" reaction in the 1920s and 30s. The term in now an epithet. Although isolationism might actually, in non-interventionist form, remove the giant American thorn from the World's paw and, consequently, stop all the blowback we seem to suffer.

Hey, it worked for Daniel.

And then there are the other wars. The Mexican-American War was pure expansionism. No freedom at stake there, except for the freedom of Americans to take what wasn't theirs. Same with the Spanish-American War. The Korean War. The Vietnam War. Countless little interventions designed to make business safe for corporations and to keep resources out of the hands of peasants in their far off lands.

But most Americans know very little of this history. Of their history.

They rarely think about the 1.5 million Vietnamese who died.

For what?

For our freedom?

We do recall Vietnam Veterans and finally give them the social acceptance they should've had as soon as they got back. But we underfund and occasionally cut the budget of the Veterans Administration.

Few, if any, families are inviting a group of psychological and/or physically scarred Vietnam Vets to come into their homes and yards for hot dogs and hamburgers and a few cold beers. So why, then, should we raise taxes on the dividends of our great investor class to pay off some of the human cost of their extravagant American lifestyle?

You see, it is related. The reason we have such plenty, such an abundance of beer and hot dogs and mattresses, is because we have used our military to enforce, incrementally and over time, an empire around the world. We have accumulated riches. We have secured everything from oil to bananas with our guns and our military and our dirty little covert wars.

All of American Life is made possible by the overwhelming force of our advanced weaponry and the young men and women we put into uniforms. They are more a victim to this than the rest of us, because they sometimes go in as a way out of the working poverty that also goes along with our American Way of Life. Because there is no other way to college. Because, at times and for some, there is no other way.

Still others go in for the "patriotic" reason. Because they love and believe in their country and want to serve in its defense. These are the people I am thinking about today.

All those young men and women who went in with the purest intentions, but found themselves as pawns in the great game of empire and power and oil. Who might have gone in after 9/11 to help their country respond to an attack, but ended up occupying a country of innocents who had nothing to do with 9/11, but had the unfortunate luck of being in a lynchpin country in a theoretical global strategy concocted by some corporate power players and Neo-Cons who, like Wilson before them, wanted to reshape the world.

Now they die in the service of power and greed. Not to protect our freedoms. Their families suffer. And they will suffer from the scars of being part of an immoral occupation. They will suffer like the Vietnam vets before them.

Some make the ultimate sacrifice.

Meanwhile, on this most somber of days when we should consider the high cost of America...both now and then, the vast majority of us will overeat and drink too much and maybe partake in some of those amazing sales that dot our consumerized country.

And somewhere in Iraq, a soldier may die. Iraqis are, most certainly, likely to die. And we can curse the high price of oil and the "holiday traffic" and ignore the one word that seems to have left our collective consciousness--sacrifice.

The Other Massacre

2007-04-22T12:16:00.000-04:00

There were two massacres “in the news” this week.

One, in a bucolic Virginia college town, kept the voracious, non-stop gaze of the media transfixed. Each detail described over and over again. Pictures replayed on seemingly infinite loops, the lives of victims explored and celebrated. The human cost considered and the inhumanity of random killing pondered as the massacre became a cultural obsession.

The other?

Haditha.

This week Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell issued a 104-page report on the 2005 massacre in a worn-torn Iraqi town that took 24 civilian lives. In it, Bargewell excoriated the chain of command for ignoring the misconduct that lead a group of Marines to inflict deadly vengeance upon innocent civilians in response to a roadside bombing by insurgents.

An example of the fog of war, perhaps? The grayness that colors the interaction between and occupying force and the people they were sent to “liberate.” Or that mind-shattering experience we know so well from Vietnam Veterans…inconclusive lines between friend and foe created by guerrilla tactics, a language barrier and a civil war? Or just an example of the inhumanity of forcible occupation without moral justification?

Key questions our media and culture must engage as we stumble down the road to empire and ponder the mounting human cost of a global war on “Terror.”

However, while the media focused on the sort of mentality--the mental illness, in fact--that leads an individual to kill without conscience, the report on Haditha was basically ignored. A report that, while predictably denying any real cover-up by the Pentagon, is punctuated by some startling statements by the career officer in charge of the investigation.

According to Maj. Gen. Bargewell:

"All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics."

…and…

"Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get 'the job done' no matter what it takes."

So, as we consider the value of human lives lost in Virginia shouldn’t…couldn’t we…also consider the value of human life in Iraq?

What of the over 650,000 Iraqi casualties since the invasion? The Pentagon and the White House dismiss these numbers, for obvious reasons. Perhaps for the same reasons they forbade hospitals in the newly “liberated” Iraq from counting the casualties they encountered.

Or what about the nearly 4 million Iraqis who have lost or fled their homes since the invasion?

Perhaps the size of the numbers is the problem. Too big, too hard to comprehend. They are simply statistics, not individuals.

32 people killed in Blacksburg.

It’s a staggering number, but still manageable in the media’s mind. Pictures can be shown, the lives understood. They are people…human beings with obvious value to their families, friends and their communities.

But then isn’t 24 a manageable number, too?

Yes, the story was basically told when the “not-really-a-cover-up” was exposed. Still, it doesn’t seem that the lives of those Iraqis…whether men, women or children…hold the same value for us and our media. Just as they don’t, according to the report, for the Marines in charge of democratizing them.

Although, to be fair, the Department of Defense has goen to the trouble of ascertaining the actual "value" of individual Iraqis.

In yet another report that was basically ignored, the ACLU pried loose documents from the Army that revealed Iraqis, and their co-liberatees in Afghanistan, “have received more than $32 million in compensation from the Army for noncombat-related killings, injuries and property damage.”

The devilish details from the report show just how cheap life is in Iraq.

No more than $2,500 can be offered to each person killed, although a few exceptions seem to have been made.
The family of an Iraqi fisherman in Tikrit killed while turning off his boat’s engine received nothing for his death. The Army ruled that it was collateral damage--the result of combat. But they did coughed up $3,500 for his boat, net and cell phone…all lost after he was killed.
A civilian fueling his car and an Iraqi Army officer directing traffic were shot by American soldiers in a passing convoy in Balad, for no apparent reason. The Army ruled that neither Iraqi had done anything hostile or criminal and approved $5,000 to the civilian's brother but nothing for the Iraqi officer.
Soldiers killed a man and his sister by firing 200 rounds into their car as it approached a checkpoint, apparently too quickly, near Mussayib. The Army lieutenant colonel who handled the claim awarded relatives a $10,000 compensation payment, finding that the soldiers had overstepped the rules of engagement.
An American soldier in a dangerous Sunni Arab area south of Baghdad killed a boy after mistaking his book bag for a bomb satchel. The Army paid the boy's uncle $500.
In one incident, in Feb. 18, 2006, a taxi approached a checkpoint east of Baquba that was not properly marked with signs to slow down, one Army claim evaluation said. Soldiers fired on the taxi, killing a woman and severely wounding her daughter and son. The Army approved an unusually large condolence payment of $7,500.

And in Haditha?

Various residents of the town received a total of $38,000.

Life, it would seem does have some value in Iraq. A monetary value.

Yet, wouldn’t we find it strange…even distasteful…if the parents of the Virginia Tech killer offered each of the victims’ family $2,500? Wouldn’t it be dehumanizing to put a price--and a paltry price, at that--on the humanity each of their loved one’s exhibited over the years, on the relationships and affectations that made them who they were?

It’s all part of a bizarre numbers game.

Those brutally massacred in Haditha are, like the tens of thousands of Iraqis who seen their lives inexorably changed or summarily lost, merely statistics.

Reports are issued, money is paid.

The victims in Blacksburg deserve all the humanity we can muster…in condolences and outrage and tributes. But during a week in which we grappled with the consequences of random murder, what does it mean that we so easily glossed over the reports on Haditha, on the millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of casualties?

The numbers coming out of Iraq are not abstractions…not to Iraqis. But then again, the media would never rest if they tried to deal with those murders as more than just numbers.

It just too big…which also says something about our role in Iraq, doesn’t it?

Critical Massacre

2007-04-20T14:01:00.000-04:00

Inexplicable. Horrifying. Tragic.

Shocking and senseless.

The massacre at Virginia Tech inspires language of disbelief, fear and indignation. The media, politicians and pundits offer ponderous meanderings through a maze of confusion built by one gunman in a moment of vindictive violence.

Once a name and a face, along with a thought-provoking package sent to NBC, were layered over the top of the random killing…our national attention turned to the question of “why.”

What would explain this?

What could explain this?

Who is to blame?

To the casual observer, and those of us who did not lose loved ones or have some temporal connection to Virginia Tech and Blacksburg are just that--casual observers, the obvious answer is that a troubled youth exhibiting obvious psychological warning signs just lost it…he went nuts and happened to have guns he could use to play out a twisted scenario: a personal, paranoid war against a perceived enemies.

But is this latest example of mass killing yet another anomaly we may never fully understand? Another example of how convoluted the human mind truly is?
Or is it just an outgrowth of who we are? Who we really are when we peel back the bucolic veneer of the American Dream?

Let’s be honest with ourselves. Despite all those heroic high school lessons in American history, the rhetoric we hear every election cycle about the goodness, generosity and peaceful intentions of America…the truth is that America and American history are replete with war, bloodthirsty campaigns against American Indians and Third World peasants, and violent repression and enslavement of an entire race of people.

We are a warlike and violent people. Always have been. Our God-given right to violence stretches back to our “Puritan” founders, our Colonial ambitions and the slaughter of those people who stood between us and our Manifest Destiny.
That was a long time ago. But the language they used--against infidels, Godless savages and “Imps of Satan”--echoes today in the War on Terror and our “Crusade” against “Evildoers.”

Violence punctuates our national myth--the Winning of the West, with shootouts and lynchings and posses riding out to mete justice on cattle rustlers. The entire founding of the nation “from sea to shining sea” was done with guns.
With killing and theft. With wars.

“War” is our primary national modality. Wars that mostly were, as history has shown to any willing to examine it, of choice and ambition and a bloodthirsty disregard for the humanity of our enemies. The Mexican-American War. The Spanish-American War and the brutal repression of the Philippines that followed. Too many campaigns against American Indians to list.

Since the end of the Second World War, the one “Good War” and our lone moment of moral superiority, it has been non-stop violence: the Cold War (and its numerous, violent “hot spots“), the Korean War, the Vietnam War…and countless little wars around the globe like Angola, Cambodia, Laos, Central America, hapless Grenada, Afghanistan, Panama, the Persian Gulf.

And we so love war that we declare one even when the intention is some common good, like the War on Poverty…on Drugs…on Cancer.

We have Presidents who’ve said that they are starting a war to keep the peace. Peace through war. A War on War, it would seem.

As we look at this one sociopath will we also look at the context within which he festered? An amorphous War against Terror that has cost countless “innocent” men, women and children their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whole families killed by faceless bombs, large caliber ammunition fired from planes, helicopters and Humvees.

We are a society that has, more or less, made peace with torture. A society that was easily lead into a war against a people that did nothing--no attack, no invasion--to justify the unleashing of the largest military in the history of mankind. What about the fact that we have the largest military in the history of mankind?

And what do we make of those Executive Branch sociopaths who ordered the mass killings we’ve inflicted upon the people of Iraq? Or the gunmakers who profit hand over fist fueling the wars we start? Or inspire others to start. The corporate heads of Lockheed Martin, of General Dynamics…are they, too, inexplicable killers who cause random death of innocents? The media, politicians and pundits spend no time questioning the psychology of the executives and scientists who create new and interesting ways of killing people.

In fact, we celebrate them…with huge salaries and Congressional kowtowing.
But what really separates them from the lone gunman? Profitability, perhaps?

Or what do we make of the thousands of “contractors,” a.k.a. mercenaries, who are riding around Iraq, armed to the teeth and making huge salaries. Or those who have been caught “randomly” shooting Iraqis civilians? They are reprimanded by their companies, but where is the national conversation about those mass killings?

It comes down to language. The language of mass murder, of random death dealt out by a crazed lone gunman, is reserved for those events that we ourselves are not directly complicit in. We do not feel complicit in the tragic event at Virginia tech. Or Columbine. Or any of the growing number of mass shootings our country has experienced over the last four decades. Those are anomalies in American society…examples of the mysteries of the human psyche and, in the ultimate Americanization, the price we pay to live in a free society.

But the mass killings that made our nation? That protect our national interests, like oil? The mass killings that happen when we drop bombs on civilians? Or what about the weaponry we, the world’s largest dealer of guns and military hardware, sell to governments and rebels alike? That we sold to both sides of the Iran-Iraq War?

Those are wars. Or for wars. And as a nation of war, we have found a way to disassociate ourselves from those acts of violence with the language of war:
campaigns, battles, collateral damage, casualties, enemy combatants.

We create an alternate world of skewed morality to justify the wealth, the land, the death created by those acts. We indemnify whole peoples and their ideas and cultural affectations to rationalize the violence we portray as necessary and just. Paranoid worldviews predominate our history, particularly since the end of the Second World War.

Disassociation. Skewed morality. Violence justified by paranoia.

How much of an anomaly is the lone gunman? Or has our culture reached critical mass…that to be an American is not just to be part of a culture of violent retribution, but an example of it?

Rectification of Names

2007-04-06T09:50:00.000-04:00

Confucius:
“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

So, what does an ancient Chinese philosopher have to teach us about our post-Modern world?

Quite a bit, actually.

Since the 2000 Election, we've seen our national language deteriorate into Orwellian NewSpeak, into transpositions of black for white and into lies parading around as fanciful conventional wisdoms. Propaganda and truth, until Katrina came and washed away the media's veneer of compliant patriotism, were fed to the American public, from the Administration by way of the news media, like MREs--a great Pentagon acronym for Meals Ready to Eat. Incidentally, the professional association of military reporters and editors is also called "MRE."

Isn't funny how sometimes people give us the truth unintentionally?

Anyway....

Confucius would marvel at just how completely we, the American people, have proven his axiom on "incorrect language." But even his genius couldn't foresee the power of the Corporate-American media. Still, he knew that a people who are propagandized cannot make judgments and, as we've seen for six years, "stand about in helpless confusion."

Now, it is true that Team Bush had to steal the first election and that there is plenty of evidence that the Team did it again in 2004. You can't fool all of the people...or even 51% of them, I guess. And it is true that at least 1/3rd of Americans saw through much of the propaganda offered up as truth since 9/11..and that number has grown. But those people also tend to hold their American brethren in contempt...for not being able to see through the often paper-thin tissue of lies that have been peddled by our Fearless Leaders and our Cowering Media. The Informed need to read Confucius. It is not so easy to stay informed when there is so much disinformation clogging the informational arteries...and for those who are struggling to stay afloat in this debt-ridden, fear-factored environment there is very little time to read all of the alternative news sources out there.

One of the great advantages Team Bush has is that it takes time and effort...and a serious dose distrust and cynicism...to wade through it all and make sense of it. They've cynically used cynicism to drive a wedge through the electorate.

It is true that the media is now more likely to ask questions, but it is still woefully inadequate to the Confucian task at hand. Team Bush is a disinformation machine...a prolific propagandizer and language engineer.

The Rectification of Names is a 24/7 job these days, and the confusion...along with the obvious deterioration of our morals and our art...is six years in the making (if not more, but let's do this one presidency at a time!).

Here are some examples that need Rectification:

War on Terror: If it is indeed a war on "Terror"--meaning terrorism (it's already imprecise language)--why do we support terrorism? We are supporting, through advisors in Pakistan and funding from Saudis like Prince Bandar, Sunni terrorists operating in Iran and Lebanon. And why didn't we identify the source of the money and personnel behind 9/11--Saudi Arabia--as a State Sponsor of Terrorism?

State Sponsor of Terrorism: As we see above, this is a name needing major Rectification. Iran is a SST, but isn't the US also a SST for supporting Sunni terrorist conducting a bombing campaign in Iran?

Terrorist: Anyone killing "innocent life" is considered a terrorist. How many innocents--women and children--have we killed in Iraq? What about Israel, which has killed dozens of children with indiscriminant bombs in the Occupied Territories since 9/11? Heck, they even helped to found Hamas, an organization labeled "terrorist" and who we are countering through Prince Bandar's initiative to fund Sunni terrorists in Lebanon. Well, Al Qaeda wouldn't even exist if the CIA hadn't helped to create it in 1979 to, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, to goad the Soviets into invading Afghanistan. So confusing.

Hostages: The just-released British sailors were hostages. Their confessions were coerced. So what does that make the hundreds of Muslims held for years in secret and not-so-secret prisons? What about their confessions? What's the difference between British sailors and the five Iranians we took and are still hold in Iraq? Or the confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to every plot imaginable?

Syria: Speaker Nancy Pelosi goes to Syria and sends the wrong signal. So, what was the signal sent to Syria by Team Bush when the CIA shipped "enemy combatant" Maher Arar (since cleared of all charges) on a private jet to Syria to be tortured?

Torture: We don't even know what this is anymore. No agreed upon definition. This has led to the kind of moral decay Confucius predicted, hasn't it? From Gitmo to Abu Ghraib, the US tortures because the language and definition of what torture is has been brought into question.

And on and on and on....

The "People" depend upon leaders, reporters and editors...upon the news media...to use language judiciously and accurately. They have an inherent need to trust those in power. A need that was multiplied by 3000 on 9/11, and magnified by the Anthrax Attacks and the continual drumbeats of war...on Terror, on Iraq...that followed.

The "Informed" should show some patience and spend more of their time attacking the purveyors of incorrect language and less time occupying an elitist perch above the "People." We are all in this sinking ship of state together and there are few lifeboats left. Those bobbing on the waves of propaganda should throw a line to those sinking into the depths of it. Don't blame the victim. Be Confucian and Rectify the Names under which all of this is being done.

Chiquita Bananas of Death

2007-03-21T17:26:00.000-04:00

Bananas of Death.

Every time you eat a Chiquita banana, you are eating a blood-stained banana.

Is that too hyperbolic?

Well, although it has been generally ignored by anything but the business press, eight executives of Chiquita Brands International admitted to paying $1.7 million to right-wing paramilitary death squads in war-torn Columbia during a period spanning 1997-2004.

Let's go over that again.

To keep the bananas flowing, to keep "leftists" from taking banana fields and to keep workers' rights activists from unionizing banana pickers, Chiquita Brands paid right-wing death squads to...ensure the "free and fair" trade of bananas. With guns. Automatic guns.

Do you think we'll invade Chiquita's Headquarters in Ohio for supporting terrorism? Well, it's not like they are Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, after all. Bush can give them a pass, right?

The company agreed to pay a $25 million dollar fine. I mean, c'mon, $25 million paid to the US Government is surely enough to offset the terrorism and killing done in the name of Americans' access to that phallic fruit.

Who cares if hundreds, if not thousands, of brown people had their peasant lives disrupted or ended by this terrorist campaign against the enemies of banana freedom? Because there is no chance that any of the $25 million will ever see it's way to those who suffered at the hands of Chiquita's plan to liberate bananas from Pinko anti-bananaists.

Of course, it does not do anyone any good to set off a round of recriminations. To that end, the agreement reached with Chiquita kept the names of those eight executives involved withheld from the public. Now, next time you "liberate" snack foods from a local Mini-Mart, perhaps using right-wing gangs to do your bidding, you can rest assured that your name will be withheld from the public. Let's just hope you can afford the fine. We know that Chiquita can.

The funny thing about this? It's been going on for decades.

The United Fruit Company is the paragon of death-squad free trade, the historical blueprint of covert use of violence to ensure free access to bananas. Back in the 1950s, Guatemala elected a dude named Arbenz who thought that the Guatemalan people should own the land of...well...Guatemala.

Silly man.

The United Fruit Company, of which the Bush family was a major shareholder, proposed the idea that Guatemalans owning Guatemala smacked of Communism. What to do? Well, they overthrew the elected government of Guatemala...thanks to their friends in the CIA...and they made sure that the free flow of bananas remained the backbone of anti-Communist nutrition in American bellies everywhere.

Really, it's true. CIA documents prove it. Hell, they've even bragged about it.

And it's even funnier than that! Chiquita's old name, prior to 1985? The United Fruit Company! Isn't that cool?

Now, in Columbia the stakes are even higher. Columbia is still the world's largest exporter of cocaine. During Bubba Clinton's Administration, they got Congress to agree to Plan Columbia...a multi-billion dollar plan to take back the coca fields from the "leftists" and put them in the hands of pro-American right-wingers and the Government of Columbia. Of course, the "Plan" was supposed to "liberate" the fields from evil Pinkos and end the production of coca leaves.

Didn't happen.

In fact, the Columbian government...considered the most pro-American government in South America...is in the middle of a huge scandal. The scandal? Oh...well...those right-wing paramilitary squads hired by Chiquita? It looks like right-wing paramilitary squads like them were linked to members of the parliament and to President Uribe's Administration. The self-same Uribe using American Plan Columbia dollars to fund the "fight against cocaine."

Oh yeah, Columbia also has a huge untapped oil fields, but there is no way that oil would be something we would kill people for...is it?

What's really happening with Plan Columbia is that we are funding right-wing cocaine kingpins who are friendly to America in their fight against cocaine kingpins who refuse to pay any tolls or tariffs to American drug masters...in other words, they were Commies. It's sorta like the deal "we" had with the Contras...they were allowed and assisted by the CIA in their drug-running ops during the 1980s by the CIA and members of the Iran-Contra team in the White House. In return for that help, they killed Commies. Seems like a fair trade. Get it? Fair trade.

So what if it led to the crack cocaine epidemic? Yes, there is empirical evidence for this. Read Gary Webb. Read about Freeway Ricky Ross and the Meneses Brothers. It's all there. That is, if you want to know.

So here we are, some fifty years later and Chiquita is doing the same damn thing that the United Fruit Company did. But dammit if we don't have the freedom to buy bananas each time we go to the supermarket.

Isn't free trade fun, even if it isn't close to being fair?

Sheikh Your Booty

2007-03-16T12:26:00.000-04:00

It's an elegant dance, the Texas Two-Step Side-Step. So far, DubbaYou's Administration has danced around some of the most pernicious scandals in presidential history.

Enron. WMDgate. Abramoff. The Department of Interior. Plamegate.
And can you believe Halliburton is still the largest contractor in Iraq? It's sorta impressive when you think about the things they've gotten away with.

They keep on dancing, sliding around these and other impeachable and firing offenses like a young John Travolta at Gilley's. But, although they don't ride the mechanical bull...they do produce the bull mechanically. Like a factory.

The cleanest getaway may be 9/11. The unanswered questions are legion. The 9/11 Commission was the most compliant of dance partners, following the Administration's lead like a Texas Debutante.

Is it possible that they'd refuse to hear testimony that Prince Bandar, as in Bandar Bush, and his wife were funding Al Qaeda? Yes.

That they'd use that famous Texas Two-Step Side-Step to justify not telling us who put those pesky put options on American and United Airlines? Yes.

But putting aside fact that the 9/11 Commission's version of that fateful day is one of the most fanciful conspiracy theories ever concocted, the real boon to the Administration has been the dance partner they've embraced over and over again: Al Qaeda Evildoers--the Terrorism Two-Steppers they whirl out onto the public dancefloor every time they need a little misdirection.

The Miami Terror Plot, the Re-Killing of Al-Zarqawi, The NY Tunnel Plot, those exquisitely timed internet video releases from Bin Laden on servers we just can't seem to find...and don't forget that Terror Alert "Thermometer" they used to stick up our collective ass just to remind us to be scared. Hey, John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge coming at you with a rectal thermometer is enough to scare anyone.

This "Nexus of Terror and Politics," as it's been called, stretches the definition of coincidence. But it has, until recently, worked quite well. The White House danced around scandal after scandal by trotting out their latest terror jig and keeping us all off balance. So, is it surprising that just as US Attorney Firing-Gate was leading right into the White House and the email trail left by Rove that they'd hit the dancefloor with the Grand Confessor, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? It's been three years since they took him into their torturous bosom and now they got him confessing to everything but kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.

When the story begins to terrorize the White House, they turn the story to terrorism.

It looks like the Sheikh was the best dance partner they've had yet...following their lead like a fawning Texas Debutante. The question is what would you confess to after three years of torture, sensory depravation and humiliation? Of course, the parts of the transcript where the Sheikh was asked about his being tortured are blacked out. So is much of the information he gave about the killing of Daniel Pearl. Which is strange, because you'd think they'd want this hot-button example of Evildoing exposed in full...getting the maximum effect. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Pearl was in India working on another, very damaging story when he got the "out of the blue" call to meet with Al Qaeda's braintrust. He was digging into a huge Enron scandal in India...a multi-billion dollar boondoggle Kenny Boy had perpetrated on the Indians.

Another misdirection, perhaps?

It's hard to tell anymore. The Two-Step Side-Stepping has had the media in such a whirl for so long that reality and perception management became indistinguishable. And the media was, for years, paying the piper while they did his dance. Can't risk coddling terrorists by asking our leaders hard questions. Can't risk losing access to the propaganda. To the Bull Mechanism.

However, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession, which includes a bombing plot on a bank that had not even been founded when he was captured, is not working the same dancefloor magic of previous fleet footed flurries. This time the media is not dazzled, which is refreshing. Not that they are asking questions about the impact of torture, or why it has become so tacitly acceptable to so many. Or why we didn't get anything that would lead us to bin Laden. But it's a long-overdue start.

Now, the question that hangs out there like the Hindenburg over New Jersey is whether or not people will begin to look back and see if we've all been swung around since these Unitary Executives came into office. It seems like an eternity ago, but the questions--about Bandar, about Bin Laden investments in the Carlyle Group and DubbaYou's first company Arbusto, the money funneled by the Head of Pakistani Intelligence to Mohammed Atta, Marvin Bush's role in the company handling security for the World Trade Center, Dulles and the airlines in question--they are a pertinent as ever. There is quite a bit of Terrorism Two-Stepping we need to retrace. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is, for the purposes of mis-directing us from another potentially impeachable and certainly firing-able offense against the US Constitutional and judicial systems, a perfect follower of Karl's lead. Can Karl dance his way out of this? Perhaps.

There is a glimmer, though, reflecting off the great Disco Ball...mirroring back to us a faint image of what's happened: false terror alerts, torture and extraordinary rendition...and the false flags under which so much has been done.

Media-ocracy....aren't You as Mad as Hell?

2007-02-08T15:56:00.000-05:00

What is news? And why do we just call the whole damn blathering mess "the media"?

Is the message the media itself, as Marshall McLuhan famously said?

God help us if it is...because the media is morass of prurient details, bogus scarefests and misanthropic misdirections. It's hard to find "news" in between all those Astronauts in Diapers, Amber Alerts and endless political babbling by putrid pundits who claim to actually know something about something. Whatever that may or may not be.

At this moment, CNN is airing wall to wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith dropping dead.

As one CNN anchor said to another, "It's tragic...because she did make great television."

A.J. Hammer, the other anchor, replied, "Yes, it was great television because it was train-wreck television."

And then Hammer re-regurgitated all the details of her sordid, perhaps even tragic, life to Wolf Blitzer, keeping the coverage going and going and going.

What the hell has happened to the media? Where the hell is the news?

Real news.

For example:

...mounting death and destruction in Iraq and the total collapse of the surge strategy before it even starts...and, by the way, there are tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Iraq, leaving their broken homes and picking up their broken families and fleeing the "liberation." Has that been on CNN today?

...$8 billion worth of hundred-dollar bills, packaged by the US Treasury and shipped to Iraq after the Great Liberation, is missing...gone...like a cheap magic trick by a cheap kiddie party magician. Viola, taxpayer…now you see it, now you don’t

...Merck is pushing its HPV drug on the entire pre-teen female population of the United States by attempting to make it a mandatory vaccination which, at approximately $300 per shot, is poised to be one of the greatest drug deals of all time.

...the NAFTA Superhighway being built from Texas all the way to Canada which, by the way, is going to be one giant toll road...mostly owned by foreign companies. Huh?

...or the fact we still haven't caught the anthrax attacker, owe 45% of our national debt to foreign banks and nations...and on and on and on.

No. We get day after day of the Diapered Astronaut. Perhaps NASA can get Depends to sponsor a Space Shuttle, like NASCAR. Now we will get endless hours of Nicole-Anna-SmithTV. We get Amber Alerts aplenty...giving us the impression of rampant child abductions despite FBI statistics that show abductions have fallen every year for over a decade.

We get Lindsay Lohan's latest drinking binge or rehab visit, but Lara Logan...just as pretty...but far more trenchant...is unable to get CBS to air her reports from Iraq. That's right, she actually had to organize a media campaign to pressure her own media employer to air the news she was reporting from Iraq on their dime.

Somewhere along the way the news we grew up watching mutated into a freakshow...with national networks covering “breaking” local news like apartment fires, car chases, small-time crime in small town America. Fine fodder for the affiliate in Peoria, but worth hours and hours of national coverage?

No, like Paddy Chayefsky’s foreboding anchor in the movie Network, we should all be “mad as hell.”

One might think we are being conditioned to live in fear, to ogle at the misfortunes of various and sundry people...and, in the timeless process of misdirection, to accept less news so we accept more injustice, more organized corruption.

Many media folks think it’s the viewers who want less. The lowest common denominator is the commoner in front of the TV set, choosing the course obediently followed by their dutiful servants in corporate offices at all the major networks, newsrooms and movie studios

But Rupert Murdoch let the cat out of the bag at the Hyper-Elite Conclave Called Davos.

Asked if his News Corp. managed to shape the agenda on the war in Iraq, Murdoch said: "No, I don't think so. We tried." Asked by Rose for further comment, he said: "We basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East...but we have been very critical of his execution."

Now, had it been an actual cat, in an actual bag...lit on fire and placed in the lap of a stripper? Hell, it might have made national headlines.

But…no.

It came and went, like a cool breeze gently and inconspicuously blowing a no-bid Halliburton contract from Cheney's office to the Pentagon. One would think that a big-time mogul admitting intended manipulation of the news would, at least, make news.

Network’s fictional anchor Howard Beale, after being used, duped and suckered into a corporate-ized newscast said it best:

Like Howard Beale, we've been had. Duped. Conditioned to accept more and more of less and less. And it is conditioning by the gatekeepers, the editors and the corporate boarders who decide what we, the people, want and need and can handle. We can’t, according to many of them, handle the truth.

But people aren't totally stupid. Parents, in a recent poll, said they are more afraid of the media's influence on their children than of their children having sex. Well, that and the fear their kid might get fat (between endless food commercials and non-stop “skinny is best” messages, what’s a kid to do?).

They’re basically, right, though because the media is filled with more sex and violence than an orgy at an Ultimate Fighter afterparty.

The always over-hyped commercials during the generously-timed Super Bowl were, this year, filled with "pain and humiliation." It stood out from the hard helmet on helmet impacts during the game...products pitched with all sorts of petty violence, humorless jabs at humanity and that “whatever/so what” cynicism that dominates sitcoms and newscasts. Widgets sold to those looking for the big laugh at the expense of others and captivating gasping rubberneckers who love a good car crash.

Is that who we are now? Is that the message of our media?

Sometimes it’s easy to despair of it all. On the media side, trying to break news through the semi-permeable barrier of elitism that dominates places like D.C. can eventually break you. Or me. Or both.

D.C. is L.A., but the celebrities have the power of life and death in their hands. And their hands in your pockets.

Those of us in this morass we call the media take solace in lunches, exchanging war stories and decrying the shortsightedness of executives who “fail upwards,” refuse to think that their viewers can think. We spin eulogies over drinks. But many of us give up. Many have and many more will if they start out in their “careers” thinking the media is anything more than a whore for corporate interests.

And those who play pimp? They become media moguls, just ask Rupert.

Blowing Out the Surge Protector

2007-02-02T10:13:00.000-05:00

The Surge.

It sounds so sexy. So overwhelming. So forceful.

But, for an administration that ignored General Shinseki's admonitions about troop requirements, it's hard to figure what they figure will happen when they surge up to 50,000 troops into a war-torn, incessantly-bombed and now-failed state like Iraq.

Or is it?

Perhaps there is a logical answer to why "they" are moving ahead with a plan that most of their GOP compatriots, except McCain and Lieberman (yes, folks...Joe is a de facto Republican now) in the House and Senate refuse to endorse.

Iran.

Yup, it's gotta be Iran.

A second Carrier Task Force is steaming towards the Gulf. Submarines abound. Fly-overs being secured. Special Forces gallivanting around the Iranian countryside. A surge is coming...to fight the in-surge-ncy.

And the "Iran is behind the insurgency" mantra is being chanted in the media so often that DC is beginning to feel like an ashram.

The media buzz is all about whether we are going to attack Iran, as if it's in question. Isn't it strangely reminiscent of the media's meaningless navel-gazing about questions regarding WMDs in Iraq before that attack?

No, the debate is being framed. A faux debate. The overall message is one of Iran as bad guy.

In fact, a group calling itself the American Foreign Policy Council is showing "Iran is evil" commercials during CNN broadcasts...roughly one per hour. Only in the DC area, though.

Take a look at what DC'ers are seeing everyday:

And this is the text of a similar American Foreign Policy Council ad clogging up the minutes between CNN's live shots of apartment fires, car chases and celebrity gossip:

The nuclear clock is ticking… and time is running out.

Iran is the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism - supporting attacks that have killed hundreds of Americans.

An Iranian group boasts 25,000 members who are ready to become suicide bombers in the US and Europe.

Now, in violation of the UN, Iran is developing a dangerous nuclear capability and has threatened to share it with others.

Stand up for peace. Call the White House and tell them to enforce sanctions against Iran today.

Check this "council" and what they are obsessed with...which reads like another Neo-Con laundry list of imperial pretexts.

What does this have to do with the surge?

Everything.

The surge is a great way to get additional troops into Iraq to deal with the backlash…the oh-so predictable chaos surge that will occur once the bombs start dropping around Iran.

It is likely that many of the surged troops will be protecting the Iran-Iraq border from friendly confines of the string of permanent bases we've quietly, at least to the tin ears of our mainstream media, been building since day one of Operation Iraqi Liberation.

Oops! Not O.I.L.

No, after reflecting on the intrinsic irony of that acronym it was re-named Operation Iraq Freedom. O.I.F.

Yeah, that’s much less...FUBAR.

Hey, when it comes to propaganda, a little goes a long way.

Frankly, the impending fun and games with Iran should surprise no one. Really. No one.

The groundwork has been laid since Bush's post 9/11 State of the Union, “Axis of Evil” speech. In fact, even earlier than that.

But now we have the lives of our boys and girls on the line. The Iranians are, according to the Bush Ashram, responsible for the deaths of American troops with their sophisticated I.E.D.s, their advanced planning capabilities...all fueled by their hatred of our ability to watch American Idol, eat Cheetos and burp up aspartame sodas. Yes, it's true...the Koran, via the Old Testament, forbids idolatry. Perhaps even American Idolatry.

So that's why they hate us!

I guess it has nothing to do with our protectorate over the Saudis and the long-standing conflict between the Western-loving, gold-plated despotism of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran. A people who could not be motivated by our intervention in their democracy back in 1953. Or by the Shah's Savak...a brutal Gestapo-type internal police force that enforced the rule of our Puppet Regime.

Nor does it have anything to do with the fact that Iraqis have been dying by the thousands since we invaded their country.

It’s not that Iraqis want us out.

It's that Iran is using Iraq to challenge our benevolent, democratic protectorate over the Persian Gulf. To stop the Iraqi people from practicing their own form of American Idolatry.

That’s the Kool Aid…would you like ice with that?

So take this surge for what it is and realize what it isn't. It's a Trojan Horse solution to the amazing disarray and death we've unleashed in Iraq. Really, it's a subterfuged way inside the gates of Hell...a Hell we are going to unleash on yet another country in the Middle East. It's a protection racket for our anti-democratic, beheading-friendly and summary-executing compatriots in Saudi Arabia.

And Israel gets some dirty work done, too. It's a two-fer!

But it isn't going to solve the mess we call Iraq. No, it’s simply going to increase the death and destruction of Iraq as we widen the war. Iraq, alas, it as the crossroads of the Bush Ashram's Roadmap for a New Way Forward, for a re-made Middle East.

Fire up the bulldozers, we've still got work to do...re-making the map of the Middle East is a multi-generational affair. The surge will help to make us the protector.

Let’s just hope the Iraqis appreciate it before it blows us all out.

The Lame Duck and Cover President

2007-01-21T08:48:00.000-05:00

It's happened quite often in American politics. A president faces the last two years of his presidency with a hostile Congress, fully or partially controlled by the other party.

That "divided government” situation will, according to the Lame Duck Axiom, disable the president's ability to get much, if anything, done. His wing broken, the president is left with only the Bully Pulpit and agenda-bending compromises at his disposal.

There is no re-election to win. Scant legacy-burnishing legislation to pass. He's a wounded duck on the pond...and the guns are trained on him.

The big sweep by Democrats in November clipped W's wings. In fact, his Right Wing is almost gone. He is bobbing in the troubled waters on unpopularity, surrounded on all sides by political hunters in Congress and, because of massive budget deficits and a messy war, he is increasingly separated from his flock of conservative supporters.

The election was a rebuke, and it's logical to assume that many people voted, or skipped their turn to vote, because they wanted to disable the presidency. Americans opted for divided government so as to clip Bush's high-flying, Icarus-like agenda to remake the Middle East and reshape Governmental agencies into cash machines for wealthy contributors.

W, it would seem, is the ultimate Lame Duck. Right?

Wrong!

In fact, he is now liberated...freed from the constraints of feigned conservatism, exempt from the pressure of elections and re-elections. He has nothing left to win. The flipside? He has nothing to lose, either.

His true colors, painted the in the dark grays of shadowy Neo-Conservatism, are now in full bloom. Iraq is neutralized. Caught up in civil war, Iraqis are killing Iraqis...saving us from the unseemly task of having to kill them all ourselves. The chaos in Iraq serves its purpose, as stated by Neo-Cons on the Project for A New American Century website. It will keep us there for generations, establishing a permanent military presence in the Middle East. If Iraq were to break out in peace, love and understanding we'd be hard-pressed to stay.

But that was merely the predicate. The subject is Iran. Iran is the target, and has been for some time. The bombing campaign was designed a while ago with approximately 1000 targets in mind. US Special Forces have been creeping around Iran for three years. There are covert and overt attempts to gin-up support for anti-government forces within the country...setting the stage for mass demonstrations by students and youngsters that will, in the Neo-Con fantasy, destabilize the Iranian regime.

And then there are the Carrier task groups (officially, there are two) deployed to the Persian Gulf and the submarines that skulk beneath those massive displays of force and intention.

But the most stunning evidence that Bush is not the Lame Duck so many want him to be is the "re-shuffling" immediately after the election. An old Iran-Contra vet, Poppy loyalist and intelligence-bending CIA agent was brought in to "relieve" Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was so detested that Robert Gates was a breath of fresh air, even though he's blowing the same smoke up our collective asses that Rummy did. Gates has been subtly bellicose regarding Iran and his arrival in the Pentagon may be the finishing touch on the six-year process of transferring covert ops from the CIA to the Pentagon.

Next? Admiral William Fallon was brought in to head up CENTCOM. CENTCOM is defense-speak shorthand for US Central Command, the regional headquarters covering the Middle East. Yeah, North America is not the "central command" of our US military…it's the Middle East. Isn't that strange?

So Fallon, a Naval Aviator and well-established Neo-Con, has been brought in at a propitious time. That is, if one plans on attacking Iran.

Why?

Any attack on Iran will be fought in the air and on the water. No, there will not be an invasion. A massive bombing campaign will trigger a naval reaction by Iran, as they deploy their sizable fleet of small attack boats to cut off oil exports from the Persian Gulf. This sort of fight is an Admiral's bathtub dream...a chance to play in real-time scenarios once done while mommy scrubbed his back.

Congress is moving to pre-emptively strike what many are seeing as the next step in Bush's doctrine of Pre-Emptive War. Journalists and opinioneers are blathering about Bush’s bellicosity as he uses the Bully Pulpit, the last redoubt of the Lame Duck President, to be the biggest bully on the Middle East’s block.

But this has all been coming for years. It's been planned and talked about in Neo-Con circles and at their Fortress of Solitude within the American Enterprise Institute. It's part of the Project for a New American Century's "vision" of a 21st Century run on American military power. It's part of AIPAC's vision of an American protectorate in the region.

Look, traditional axioms of American politics have been, since the Reichstag-esque tipping point we call 9/11, jettisoned in favor of new axioms of Executive action. While Bush lost the Congress, he still has a grip on the courts. The grip has loosened a bit, but when key issues of Executive action get to the Supreme Court, he's got a vanguard of "Unitary Executive" believers who can give him the right to act, even though Congress might try to shoot him down.

The collective sigh of relief that came after Bush was transformed into a "Lame Duck" fits nicely into the black hole of conventional wisdom we've all been sucked into. The axioms and traditions we still cling to mean little or nothing to the Bush Presidency. In fact, those "truisms" are decoys...drawing the flock a little closer while Cheney is loading his gun. Guess who gonna get shot in the face?

Quite frankly, our President really doesn't care what Congress or the American people think. Not really. He never has. And it's the consent of the governed, and the loss of that consent, that transforms a president into a Lame Duck.

So we yammer on about decoys like "surges" and "new ways forward," bipartisanship and working together, changes in personnel and our well-managed perceptions. Meanwhile, our Lame Duck-in-Chief is using them as cover for the continued implementation of a plan that has been two decades in the making. The Surge is a convenient way to bolster forces in anticipation of a bombing campaign and possible cross-border action with Iran. The New Way Forward is a catchy and meaningless talking point. Personnel moves have shuffled more Neo-Cons into the deck. Rhetoric gets hotter every day, as Iran...and Syria...are pointed to as the primary obstacles to the latent democracy we imposed on Iraq.

Public opinion and Congressional maneuvers may look like the brakes are being applied, but the Unitary Executive has, according to Team Bush's thinking, the ultimate say-so on matters of war and peace.

It may be time for us to duck and cover, because this Presidency is anything but lame.

Bush 41 in the CIA? It's not Poppycock!

2007-01-09T16:37:00.000-05:00

They do not confirm or deny.

It's company policy.

“The Company" is what CIA agents affectionately call the shadowy agency and, in an effort to "protect" operatives, they refuse to confirm an agent's identity or deny whether or not someone works for The Company.

Except when George Hebert Walker Bush is the person in question.

The CIA has long denied that Poppy Bush was a CIA agent. Despite his Skull and Bones past. Despite the historical ties between the Dulles Brothers, Allen being the first CIA director, and the Bush family. Despite the fact that Poppy was appointed CIA Director in 1976 at a crucial juncture...just as the Church Commission was shedding a glaring light on the darkest of The Company's business: mind control experiments, infiltration of the news media by agents, assassinations, drug experiments on unwitting civilians and more.

And, in what must be the strangest of all predicates for a continued denial of Poppy's CIA career, the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was renamed the “George Bush Center for Intelligence” in 1999.

What? How can that be? How can a guy who never served in The Company's ranks and spent just under a year as CIA director get a whole building named after him?

It's like re-naming Yankee Stadium for Roger Clemens or Randy Johnson because they pitched there for a couple years. Not the House that Ruth Built, but the House that Roger or Randy Built.

No one in the media ever questioned why Langley was re-named for one of the CIA most famous non-members. No one called it the House that Poppy Built.

It's a non-starter...questioning the family history of the Bushes and their history of covert hijinx.

Just ask Kitty Kelley.

She wrote a well-researched, multiple-sourced account of "The Family" and didn't get one media interview or one nationally televised opportunity to plug her amazing book on one of America's most important political families.

Larry King cancelled. The Today Show cancelled.

Why?

How can she get multiple chances to expose the Uber-icons of the GOP, the Reagans, as astrology-obsessed weirdoes on shows like Larry King, but couldn't get a minute of airtime to tell us about the Bushes?

Why? Because the Bush family is a no-go zone. Nothing on W's cocaine party days. Nothing on the family’s association and financial dealings with Rev. Moon. Nothing on Neil Bush's soap opera divorce. Nothing.

The key to understanding the Bush family requires understanding Poppy's role in the CIA. A role often ignored, continually denied and deftly obfuscated.

Yet, circumstantial evidence abounds and key documents are there to be perused.

The Nation bravely tried to inject the issue into the 1988 Presidential Campaign, but it was never picked up by the media.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans remain ignorant of the covert actions, system-bending tendencies and financial jury-rigging of the Bush Clan...a pattern that dates back to Prescott Bush and his days on Wall Street in the late 1920s.

For those who've done some digging, it looks like the history of the Bush family is intertwined with much of the history of America. You can't fully understand American history without knowing something about the wheeling-dealing Bush family.

Now, new documents have peeled back the curtain…offering yet another peek into Poppy's CIA career.

Although you won't find this in the NY Times or on CNN.

Take a look at this article:
Bush Senior Early CIA Ties Revealed
By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen The Real News Project

January 8, 2007

NEW YORK--Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.

Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'

But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.

…or scroll down to read the full text and find links to the documents the article cites.

But it’s still just a taste of what is known but never mentioned in by “journalists” and “reporters.” Researchers, authors and alternative journalists have done the work and dug up some interesting tidbits about the man called Poppy.

Take a look at these fun facts:

He made a phone call to the FBI’s Dallas office (there is a written record of this) on the morning of JFK's assassination stating that a "radical student" was going to make an attempt on JFK's life that day.

During his short time as Director of the CIA (less than a year), logs show that he went into the CIA's JFK assassination files more than any other Director of Central Intelligence. He was all over those files, despite the fact he said when asked in an interview that he couldn’t recall where he was the day JFK was murdered. Wow, isn’t that strange?

The Bay of Pigs was codenamed Operation Zapata, and the two support boats called the "Houston" and the "Barbara J."

His family had large sugar growing interests in Cuba that were nationalized by Castro. Where in Cuba was this agribusiness? On the Zapata Plain.

Poppy speaks fluent Spanish, by the way.

His long association with Felix Rodriguez...a Bay of Pigs veteran some believe Poppy "turned" into an asset. Strangely enough Felix was on still on CIA's the payroll in the 80s and part of Iran-Contra.

His family had a large investment in the United Fruit Company, which had huge agricultural interests in Guatemala. In 1954, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala. A government that, strangely enough, wanted to nationalize its banana plantations. You know...turn over much of the land used to grow bananas and other agricultural products to help the people of Guatemala...the people actually living and working on the land. That operation unleashed to a civil war that lasted over thirty years and claimed tens of thousands of lives, mostly civilians.

Then there is his feud with Ross Perot over POW/MIAs in Vietnam. That's a helluva story...which the cowards at 60 Minutes refused to run. They had Perot, who had been appointed POW Czar by Reagan, in a taped interview recounting his confrontation of V.P. Poppy. Poppy was the point-man on intel, and Perot’s investigation into our lost soldiers led to revelations about CIA drug trafficking in Southeast Asia, the CIA’s use of men listed as POWs and MIAs in that enterprise...and Poppy's knowledge of both. When the story was killed by CBS the producer quit and wrote "Kiss the Boys Goodbye."

How about strong circumstantial evidence regarding Poppy’s part in both the October Surprise and Iran-Contra.

Again, he was the acknowledged "point-man" on all intelligence issues in Reagan's Administration.

But he, like the Gipper, knew nothing about Iran-Contra?

Yeah, sure.

He knew enough to pardon:
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Duane R. Clarridge, Clair E. George, Robert C. McFarlane, Elliott Abrams, and Alan G. Fiers Jr.

Each of these players had been indicted and/or convicted of charges by the Independent Counsel, Lawrence Walsh.

Variations on that theme include:

Poppy Bush giving “executive clemency” to Aslam P. Adam, a convicted heroin dealer.

Poppy Bush pardoning Orlando Bosch, another anti-Castro guy…a terrorist who was linked to the bombing of Mackey Airlines in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Oh yeah, Bosch was previously convicted of firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter in Miami harbor.

And what about the strange coincidence that John Hinckley, Sr. was, according to FEC records, a long-time contributor to Poppy's political campaigns? Or that they were neighbors in Houston and the families had long-standing social ties? Or what about the acknowledged fact that Scott Hinckley was scheduled to meet with Neil Bush the day Reagan was shot...to talk to Neil about Vanderbilt Oil's "tax issues" and SEC issues that needed fixing? And then there is the oddity of all oddities that had John Hinckley, Jr. been successful...Poppy would've been President. Really...it's all true.

Lastly, but not leastly…remember Poppy's "No Quid Pro Quo" dealings with Manuel Noriega?

Noreiga was a key player in laundering drug money from the burgeoning cocaine trade of the 1980s. Noriega was “Our Man” in Panama and he allowed CIA planes to refuel at an airport outside Panama City…planes like the one flown by Eugene Hasenfuss. Hasenfuss was part of a Contra gun and drug running operation that the CIA was tacitly, sometimes explicitly, participating in. Hasenfuss was shot down, tipping over the first domino that exposed the operation and led to the Iran-Contra Scandal. The dominoes never quite made it up the chain of command, though.

When Noriega became a bit of an embarrassment, Poppy ordered the military to invade Panama, killing a couple thousand civilians and capturing Pineapple Face, as Panamanians called him. He was put on trial. His trial was a farce. All of the witnesses his defense called, mostly CIA agents, were denied by the judge on the grounds of “national security.” Noriega is currently rotting in a Miami jail, his story never told. His conviction silenced him and kept him from telling us about the “quid pro quo” he made with Poppy.

So, here we are...with a large number of men…the Secret Team of covert players…filling the ranks of W’s Administration.

Abrams, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Poindexter, McFarlane, Negroponte, Otto Reich, Wolfowitz, Perle…all men who’ve been linked to the Uber-Agent…the CEO of “The Company”…good old Poppy Bush.

If you find yourself perplexed by what’s happening around you, take a peek behind the curtain and examine the life and times of the Wizard--Poppy. His life runs parallel to the events that have shaped the United States over the last fifty years. He can be, if you look hard enough, a Rosetta Stone for decoding recent American history.

So, here’s the full article. Take a peek and enjoy!

Bush Senior Early CIA Ties Revealed
By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen The Real News Project

January 8, 2007

NEW YORK--Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.

Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'

But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.

According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The '75 memo describes Devine as an “oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush.” The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.

“Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil,” the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine's role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.

It was while Devine was in his new CIA capacity as a commercial cover officer that he accompanied Bush to Vietnam the day after Christmas in 1967, remaining in the country with the newly elected congressman from Texas until January 11, 1968. Whatever information the duo was seeking, they left just in the nick of time. Only three weeks after the two men departed Saigon, the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies launched the Tet offensive with seventy thousand troops pre-positioned in more than 100 cities and towns.

While the elder Bush was in Vietnam with Devine, George W. Bush was making contact with representatives of the Texas Air National Guard, using his father's connections to join up with an elite, Houston-based Guard unit - thus avoiding overseas combat service in a war that the Bushes strongly supported.

The new revelation about George H.W. Bush's CIA friend and fellow Zapata Offshore board member will surely fuel further speculation that Bush himself had his own associations with the agency.

Indeed, Zapata's annual reports portray a bewildering range of global activities, in the Mideast, Asia and the Caribbean (including off Cuba) that seem outsized for the company's modest bottom line. In his autobiography, Bush declares that “I'd come to the CIA with some general knowledge of how it operated' and that his 'overseas contacts as a businessman' justified President Nixon's appointing him as UN ambassador, a decision that at the time was highly controversial.

Previously disclosed FBI files include a memo from bureau director J. Edgar Hoover, noting that his organization had given a briefing to two men in the intelligence community on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The memo refers to one as “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” and the other as “Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”

When Nation magazine contributor Joseph McBride first uncovered this document in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush, then vice president and seeking the presidency, insisted through a spokesman that he was not the man mentioned in the memo: "I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late '63. I don't have any idea of what he's talking about." The spokesman added, "Must be another George Bush."

When McBride approached the CIA at that time, it initially invoked a policy of neither confirming nor denying anyone's involvement with the agency. But it soon took the unusual step of asserting that the correct individual was a George William Bush, a one-time Virginia staffer whom the agency claimed it could no longer locate. But that George Bush, discovered in his office in the Social Security Administration by McBride, noted that he was a low-ranked coast and landing-beach analyst and that he most certainly never received such an FBI briefing.

It was perhaps to help lay to rest the larger matter of the elder Bush's past associations that the former president went out of his way during his recent eulogy for President Ford to sing the praises of the Warren Commission Report as the final authority on those days.

"After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And a conspiracy theorist can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Gerry Ford put his name on it and Gerry Ford's word was always good."

In fact, Ford's role on the Warren Commission is seen by many experts as a decisive factor in his rise to the top. As a Commission member, Ford altered its report in a significant way. As the Associated Press reported in 1997, “Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford took pen in hand and changed - ever so slightly - the Warren Commission's key sentence on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy's body when he was killed in Dallas. The effect of Ford's change was to strengthen the commission's conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally - a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman.”

This modification played a seminal role in ending talk of a larger conspiracy to kill the president. Knowledge of Ford's alteration has encouraged theorists to scrutinize the constellation of other figures who might have had a motivation to cover up the affair.

Meanwhile, there is much more to learn about George H. W. Bush's friend, Thomas Devine. The newly surfaced memos explain that Devine, from 1963 on, had authority from the agency to operate under commercial cover as part of an agency project code-named WUBRINY.

Devine at that time was employed with the Wall Street boutique Train, Cabot and Associates, described in the memos as an “investment banking firm which houses and manages the [CIA] proprietary corporation WUSALINE.” These nautical names - 'Saline' and 'Briny' - or, for the Bay of Pigs invasion 'Wave' - are CIA cryptonyms for the programs and companies involved.

George H.W. Bush's own ties are amplified in the 1975 CIA memo, dated November 29, which makes it clear that he had knowledge of CIA operations prior to being named the new director of the CIA in the fall of that year.

The 1975 memo notes that, through his relationship with Devine, “Mr George Bush [the CIA director-designate] has prior knowledge of the now terminated project WUBRINY/LPDICTUM which was involved in proprietary commercial operations in Europe.”

The Bush documents, part of a batch of 300,000 records the CIA provided to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, were publicly released in 1998 as the result of a lawsuit, donated to a foundation, scanned into a database - and only just noticed by an independent researcher.

Click the following to view original supporting documents: [1] [2] [3]

Project Censored Exposes Our Banana Republic

2006-12-30T07:58:00.000-05:00

Every year Project Censored compiles a list stories that are, despite their obvious importance, ignored by our mainstream media, our newspapers of record and our nation's sycophantic horde of so-called journalists.

This year's top 25 list is out in the public sphere and, in keeping with a decades-long theme, it will be treated like a leper by the amnesia-afflicted hurdy-gurdy monkeys who populate inceasingly flaccid newsrooms across America.

These monkeys are...wait...no...they are not monkeys.

They are chimps.

Yeah, chimps.

They tucked their tails so long ago that evolution has selected out this now unnecessary trait. And they are trained. At top Journalism Schools. Well trained, in fact. They are well trained NewsChimps.

These NewsChimps come in three varieties:

Hear No, See No, and Speak No.

But Project Censored soldiers on and goes where no NewsChimp has gone before.

Into a strange land of inquiry and awareness so bizarre...so alien...that overwhelmed NewsChimps scurry in the opposite direction, seeking corporate bananas to feed on and, thusly, soothing their suddenly upset stomachs.

Here are some of my favorite stories our NewsChimps ignored on this year's list:

#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran:
See below...

#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo:
Never again. And again. And again. And again.

#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy:
Too many whistles blowing could confuse and frieghten our NewsChimps. As they quickly scatter, running wildly in different directions, they might inadvertently stumble onto some truth. We can't have that, can we?

#10 Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians:
Our NewsChimps have completely avoided the massive civilian death toll in Iraq. The British medical journal Lancet estimates it to be around 650,000 people.

Their methodology is quite sound. But not reported on.

Oh yes, our NewsChimps mentioned it....but they never investigated it or checked out the veracity of the science. No, they aped the Administration's disclaimer about wild estimates of civilian causalities and ignored the fact that our government ordered Iraqi doctors to stop counting civilian casualties once we controled Baghdad.

#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed:
Monsanto has a pesticide built into corn. Into the genetic structure of the corn. There are serious cross-pollination issues. Corporations are designing crops with "terminator genes" that keep poor farmers from harvesting seeds to grow more cops. Yum Yum! Could someone get our NewsChimps some genetically modified bananas to chew on?

#13 New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup:
But gee, don’t the Joneses have a nice looking yard? Better buy another gallon so we can keep up.

My personal fav:
#14 Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US:
Just look for yourself, this is scary stuff. KBR, by the way, built Camp X-Ray at Gitmo...so at least we know they are the right company for the job. Who those camps are intended for is an interesting question, right?

#22 $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
And our NewsChimps still call this Administration "conservative"?

#24 Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year:
The full and yet untold story is that Cheney drove down the price of the stock while he was CEO of Halliburton. In fact, he acquired a company with a huge asbestos liability during his tenure. That move was widely criticized in the business press and by Wall Street analysts...and it caused a major downward spiral of Halliburton's stock. Right before the presidential campaign of 2000, Cheney's Halliburton was on the verge of bankruptcy (according to Business Week and others). The stock fell below $10.

Now...if you knew that Cheney was going to be in the Veep's office, running the behind the scenes program to maneuver us into a war with Iraq and that his office, as it has now been proven, would be coordinating contracts to his "former" company...you might want to buy up the suddenly cheap stock and sit on it for, say, 6-8 years. You would make quite a bit of money. An obscene amount of money. And your taxes on those profits would go down precipitously because the GOP was planning to approve the President's proposed tax cut on capital gains. A huge tax cut.

Also, doesn't Censored Story #2--Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran--make you wonder if they were helping to build up yet another threat that, should we need to take pre-emptive action, would lead to even more Halliburton profits?

Halliburton, by the way, also made millions off of the Iraq Oil for Food Program. But you didn't hear much about that either.

Once again go to the full list for the details. You'll have to do it yourself because our NewsChimps are too busy feeding themselves from corporate trees to report these stories.

Thanks again, Project Censored. Every year you expose our NewsChimps for what they are...the gatekeepers of our Banana Republic.

A Greenfield of Manure Covering President Ford

2006-12-28T07:44:00.000-05:00

"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over"
-President Gerald Ford

Pardon me? The nightmare is over?

What a statesmen he was, the ever-stumbling "Yes Man" from Michigan. In death, Ford has...according to the countless media-hacked paeans and odes...become President Everyman. A “sound man” who came into the Oval Office during a constitutional crisis and soothed the savage beast of justice in favor of national reconciliation.

That's the take Media Uber-Hack Jeff Greenfield gave those unfortunates who happened to be watching CNN last night. Greenfield positioned himself over the years as a font of historically nuanced perspectives on American politics. He's had a long and, doubtless, remunerative career.

The manure he was spreading last night about the vapid Presidency of Gerald Ford is a fairly strong smelling indication of how he achieved that punditcratic position of commentating wise guy.

Greenfield's argument was that, at a time of great crisis and public unrest regarding President Nixon, his pardon before the fact kept America from descending into the world of “Banana Republics” by having a President face criminal charges. Ford saved the integrity of the Highest Office. Ford kept America from losing its luster.

And Greenfield is keeping us from the truth. From truth and justice. I guess that's the American Way, because the media has failed over and over again since 1963 to ask questions that might expose to the light of day the cloak and dagger of darkness that has enveloped the Presidency.

It is fitting that Greenfield points to Ford's brave and worthy decision to save America from the messy business of prosecuting criminal activities by a high-ranking government official. Watergate wasn't the first event that Ford approached with those paternalistic preconceptions. Ford served on the Warren Commission and, in keeping with Greenfield's axiom, did his part to keep unseemly details from the American people. A quintessential Yes Man, Ford's participation in the Commission presaged the pardon of Tricky Dick.

When high crimes and misdemeanors of constitutional proportions spill over into average Americans' lives, the Ruling Class must protect the fragile fabric of America…even if it means covering up crimes, driving down dead-end inquiries and allowing criminal acts to go unpunished.

That's where our friends in journalism step in. As with so many scandals over the last forty-plus years, journalists and blowhards like Greenfield have done there part to preserve American innocence, both socially and criminally. Since JFK's assassination, the media has bent over backwards to ignore evidence, to ask questions and to listen to the public they serve. While over 80% of Americans consistently poll year after year expressing their belief that the "lone assassin-magic bullet" theory is wrong, media hacks like Greenfield keep spoon feeding us elitist crap discounting any foolish conspiracy theories. They keep giving us black and white snapshots of our collective past. They keep airbrushing out anything that would destabilize The System that sustains them and the Ruling Class they feed off like lampreys.

They determine the mainstream, channeling it away from any destabilizing banks...calming any uneasy eddies.

In the case of JFK's assassination, it was the ultimate nexus of "journalists" and "leaders" setting the scene.

They all bought into the argument that America was teetering on the brink; that the murder of President Kennedy could lead back to Castro and, therefore, another World War. It was all set against the terrible backdrop of the Red Menace and nuclear holocaust

But what it did was let loose decades of criminality. The Bay of Pigs crowd pops up over and over again. They pop up in murder of JFK. Of RFK. And, in a beautiful symmetry of menacing irony, in Watergate. Yes, many of the Plumbers were Bay of Pigs vets.

When Ford took over, he knew the score. Keep the scandal out of the courts and out of politics. Americans will move on, with journalists driving the moving truck. Ford inserted the Bush team...both Poppy's and W's...into the Executive Branch and set in motion much of what we've experienced since. Jim Baker, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld...all came of age under Ford.

Poppy was Chair of the Republican National Committee, managing the Watergate scandal with his Texas friend and Democratic counterpart Bob Strauss. They...the nefarious and seemingly faceless "They"...took it upon themselves to save us from the mucky process of dredging up the deepest parts of the Watergate scandal.

Ford came in and did what he did best...he complied. He rubberstamped the decision to protect us from a longer nightmare. He put in place Poppy's men and they kept the darker parts of Watergate from flowing over onto the public. They, along with a complicit style of journalism, made sure the mainstream didn't drown the Bay of Pigs crowd or upset the ship of state.

So, Greenfield is right. Coming from his perspective as a veteran commentator on politics, Jeff's take on Ford is fitting. He, along with his colleagues, have bought into The System and pledged allegiance to a flagging desire to ask tough questions and dig up skeletons.

The October Surprise, Iran-Contra, CIA drug trafficking, Iraqgate, the Savings and Loan Scandal, the BCCI Scandal...all those stories have been half-told by half-assed "journalists" like Greenfield. The politicians they abet have persisted. The Executive Branch is filled with Iran-Contra vets.

It is any surprise that Ford's inner circle has been in power over and over again?

The Iraq War, and the hundreds of thousands of casualties and the hundreds of billons of dollars that came with it, was just the latest nexus of "journalists" and "leaders" setting the scene. No real questions were asked. We were treated once again to the team assembled under Ford and the journalists who dare not bite the hand that feeds them. They kept us sheltered from the truth.

And there is little being done to explore the criminality of the last six years, or to bring to justice those who perpetrated those high crimes and misdemeanors. Bush the 41st, in a Ford-like move, issued pardons to many of the Iran-Contra crowd. And many came back into the Executive Branch under Bush the 43rd…with mainstream journalism sitting idly by as criminals, pardons be damned, slid right back into the comfortable confines of The System.

Greenfield praised Ford. And he should, because the symbiosis between the Ruling Class and journalism has sustained both through even the most troubling of scandals and constitutional crises.

Wake up, people...our long national nightmare never ended.

Rep. Weldon Got Cooked, and Other Recent Stories on Terrorism

2006-12-27T06:55:00.000-05:00

Republican Representative Curt Weldon is out. Swept away. Goose cooked. Gone.

Yes, it was part of a larger rebuke of the GOP in the mid-term elections, but Weldon's story is a bit more nuanced. A popular Congressman known for bringing home crispy bacon, Weldon's re-election campaign got burned in the final weeks leading up to the election.

The FBI announced that they were investigating his daughter for using her political connectivity to make some money. Gasp! That never happens, does it? And when it does...like, say, in the instance of Tom Delay...it requires immediate and thorough investigation.

Not!

While Delay's crimes are massive, even involving a de facto labor camp in the Marianas Islands, those transgressions are not worthy of a thorough investigation.

But Weldon...now he really went overboard. He exposed Able Danger and, in so doing, raised questions about the Pentagon's and FBI's foreknowledge of the 9-11 hijackers.

Now that's a doozie!

Although Weldon was, for the most part, motivated by a political desire to push some of the blame onto the back of Bill Clinton...he asked a trenchant question: What did the government know and when did the government know it? What he found was that the Defense Intelligence Agency and Pentagon had been tracking Mohammed Atta for at least a year prior to 9-11. That the program, called Able Danger, had a chart of names and interconnected relationships that foreshadowed the 9-11 attacks.

Weldon became a thorn in the Pentagon’s side. And those charted relationships...a chart that a Pentagon whistleblower told Weldon and a congressional panel about and was initially said to have been destroyed...sounded exactly like the chart FBI terrorism expert John O'Neill made after investigation the USS Cole bombing. You know, important stuff like the players, who they knew and what they were up to.

Embarrassing stuff to the Pentagon and the FBI respectively.

Particularly since the FBI had agents living next door to two hijackers in San Diego, and by two more in the D.C. suburbs and....thanks to Weldon...we know the Pentagon was tracking Atta.

Lotsa foreknowledge in there.

Weldon was pissed. He put the issue before Congress. He put the issue before the media. And who cares if it started as a way to taint Clinton...he was on to something very important. On to questions that remain unanswered.

But the FBI made certain that his continued tenacity would be rewarded...with an investigation. And it was announced at a crucial time. Weldon lost.

But so did John O'Neill. He was railroaded by the FBI for a briefcase bungle. He, apparently, had some papers he was working with in his briefcase and exposed those papers to possible theft. He was compromising national security, or some such bullshit.

Fighting for his career and to expose the terror network he predicted would attack the World Trade Center; he was offered a job as head of security for the WTC. A highly paid job that, coincidentally, was offered by a company called Stratasec. Stratasec also did the security at Dulles Airport and for United Airlines. Marvin Bush, coincidentally, sat on Stratasec’s Board of Directors.

John O'Neill took the Stratasec job. John knew the attack was coming and thought he could do something to stop it. John O'Neill's body was found in the rubble of 9-11.

So Weldon did okay...lost his job, but not his life.

Like Timothy McVeigh did...executed before the full story of the Oklahoma City bombing could be told.

McVeigh said as much to Gore Vidal in a series of letters. We still have nothing on John Doe #2. Even though an enterprising reporter named Jayna Davis in OKC found and identified him. Even though a police officer responding to the Murrah Bldg bombing claimed to have seen someone not fitting the description of McVeigh.

Some in the building talked about a missile and other explosives being brought into the Murrah Building before the attack. Yeah, years later the US Customs Service admitted that they did bring in a TOW Anti-tank missile, but they it not have a warhead in it.

And there is the story of Officer Yeakey, who responded immediately to the bombing. He saw FBI and ATF agents running around withing minutes of the attack. He saw quite a bit and kept on digging. He is now dead.

McVeigh's involvement is clear, but the network that he was part of remains a mystery. He was living evidence. The evidence was destroyed...much like the Able Danger Chart.

A chart that, coincidentally, may have also predicted the attack on the USS Cole.

The same attack that John O’Neill investigated and, in what is perfect symmetry, led him to create his predictive 9-11 chart.

But, no need to trouble yourself. A congressional investigation determined that Weldon's Able Danger scandal was the 800-pound gorilla who whimpered. Nope, we just found out that there is nothing to the Able Danger story. And now that Weldon has lost his congressional privileges, the Able Danger story is in no danger of being prodded and the investigation is closed.

But the Congress did just say that the FBI blew the investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing. Too bad McVeigh is dead. Yes, there are questions. But, alas, we will never get the answers. It's okay, we are still busy forgetting all those troubling "foul-ups" of 9-11. We don't have time to forget the anomalies of the OKC bombing. Like Hussein Al-Husseini, the John Doe that Jayna Davis found and identified. Davis, interestingly enough, was sued by Husseini before he was ever identified...for defamation of character. A pre-emptive strike of sorts.

Al-Hussein was working at Boston Logan Airport on 9-11, by the way.

He came over after the 1991 Gulf War...part of an entire class of high-level Republican Guard and Iraqi secret police who were given safe passage by Poppy Bush. You know...to have that intelligence at hand...just in case. Just like the Nazi scientists and SS officers the CIA brought over in Operation Paperclip after World War II. Men put into key positions in the Military-Industrial Complex and the Pentagon.

Which is ironic because we are about to destroy more evidence. When Saddam is executed the full story of his alliance with the Reagan-Bush team will die with him. The illegal sales of chemical and biological weapons. The intel we gave him to attack Iran and the Kurds and those other unseemly parts of the long-standing relationship that are known will never be filled out in painful detail. Saddam had a WMD...a WMD of information about his patrons in Washington, D.C.

His WMD will be decertified by a simple noose.

But the other Hussein...Mr. Al-Husseini...remains on the loose. It stands to reason that a high-level operative of Saddam's Iraq would be valuable to US intelligence. But, according the latest investigation, we will never know what we don't know because the FBI "blew it."

Yeah, a presidential commendation and big salary bonus went to the FBI guy who personally stopped the investigation of another piece of living evidence...Zacharias Moussaoui...before his computer could be scanned for plot details.

Sen. Charles Grassley asked questions.

He got no answers. But Grassley didn't persist. And he wasn't up for re-election this time.

But Sen. Mark Dayton persisted...on NORAD and the massive contradictions between the various stories they gave...to the press, to the 9-11 Commission and to the Congress.
He kept asking. No answers were given.

He retired before this latest election.

Unlike Weldon, his exit from Congress closed the door on electioneering vendettas.

Now, clearly there is no excuse for nepotism and trafficking in one's political connections. But the FBI did not hammer former Sen. Frank Murkowski, or the cushy jobs given to the children of Justice Scalia and Justice Rehnquist in 2001, or a dozen other Congressional sycophants who have families who've profited from political connectivity.

No, Weldon's lost his place in the pan. He was dumped into the fire by the FBI. In terms of cooking up cover-ups, this one was well done.

A Poisonous Conspiracy Theory. Are we Russian to Judgment?

2006-12-13T08:29:00.000-05:00

It's amazing. Unbelievable. Perhaps it's even crazy.

Put on your tin-foil hat and jump into the rabbit hole on the grassy knoll...we have a real-life conspiracy on our hands. An assassination, no less, using a strange, cloak and dagger weapon--radioactive polonium. Who was murdered? A fierce critic of President Vladdie Putin who, by the way, was himself a former spy for the KGB.

Why was Col. Alexander Litvinenko murdered?

Well, the mainstream media is hot on the trail of a conspiracy to silence him. To punish a man who wrote in 2003 that the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings were, in fact, carried out by the successor to the KGB--the FSB. He claims that the bombings, which were quickly blamed on Chechen terrorists, were used by Putin to invade Chechnya and consolidate his then-tenuous grasp on power. Used to solidify weak public support for his regime.

What a strange idea!

Further, this came on the heels of Anna Politkovskaya's murder...a Russian journalist who was working the same conspiracy angles as Litvinenko. She, too, saw pernicious conspiracy in the apartment bombings and both were making similar claims about the Beslan School Massacre.

In fact, there is quite a bit of evidence to support both of those "theories." Which is why, many have theorized, both of those voices have been silenced...by assassinations that, as it happens, are also widely considered conspiracies.

It's funny how readily the media and commentators and journalists have jumped on board this wild conspiracy theory regarding these assassinations: that people who, themselves, were exposing conspiracies were murdered by conspiracies to keep them silent.

We even have some proposing that they were murdered by yet another hidden force so that the blame could then be placed at Putin's door and, thus, undermine his growing power as Russia's president.

Whoa! Now that's a conspiracy theory.

All acceptable. All mainstream. All treated with "breaking news" updates and journalistic scrutiny.

All completely contrary to the way the media and the press regard the verboten idea on "conspiracies" right here in the U.S. of A.

They happen in Russia, to Russians and by Russians. Or in London...but still essentially a Russian deal.

Not like America.

Nope, America is pure. A land of blind coincidences, oppressive randomness and soul-saving chance. Like so much of the American Way, history and inquiry are closed off by a sense of purity...the American future guided by the glorious simplicity of freedom and clouded by an indisputable fog of fair play.

Our national bird could be...should be...an ostrich. Eagles are known for their keen eyesight. We prefer to bury our heads in the sand.

The conventional wisdom, derides as "wild conspiracy theories" anything that challenges that air of purity.

The assassination of JFK is the Uber-Theory. Although over 80% of Americans consistently in poll after poll believe there was a conspiracy, the media has pulled out all the stops to put a stop to such nonsense. Much admired in death, one of the great peddlers of this elitist obfuscation was Peter Jennings. He gave us his final word on the assassination in 2003...titled "Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy."

That's right folks...we are now "Beyond Conspiracy." Even the House Select Committee on Assassinations was wrong. Only Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger that day, not the two shooters that the Congressional inquiry concluded had to have been there that day.

Still, no one has been able to replicate those three shots on a moving target in Dealey Plaza. Or can answer why Oswald defected to Russia after getting Russian language training as a Marine. Or why Oswald the defector...who, strangely enough, also served at a U2 spy plane tracking station in Japan...returned to the US without being arrested for treason. Or why he was given that job at the book depository by a known CIA asset. Or why he was hanging out with Bay of Pgs vets in New Orleans. And on and on. Look for yourself.

Or not. It's much easier to buy the big lie. At least, that's what Adolf Hitler said was the key to controlling a democracy's masses.

And we've had our share.

The Gulf of Tonkin...a conspiracy to escalate in Vietnam? No way! Ignore that document now prove that there wasn't an attack by Vietnamese forces and that LBJ used the ginned-up "incident" to get the Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed.

No...things like Operation Northwoods are mere fancy, best regarded as objects of ridicule. The Joint Chiefs of Staff would never concoct a fake terror campaign, complete with a shot-down drone masquerading as a civilian flight, just to start a war with another country.

Or how about Bobby Kennedy being shot by Sirhan Sirhan as he was rolling towards capturing the Democratic nomination? Now, the Brits have no problem questioning why the fatal wound was in the back of his head while Sirhan was in front of him. A Brit asked the question...and found three CIA dudes hanging around the Ambassador Hotel...men positively identified by former colleagues and two of which were Bay of Pigs vets.

But c'mon...America is the land of lone gunmen. Speaking of which, watch this excerpt from the first episode of a short-lived series called The Lone Gunmen. Created by Chris Carter of X-Files fame, it was sure to be a ratings hit. It was cancelled after only a few episodes. But that first episode, airing months before 9-11, was eerie...to say the least.

According to an actor on the show, the story for the debut installment was proposed by a CIA agent.

It's just blind coincidence, though.

Just like the Bay of Pigs guys--men like E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and Felix Rodriguez--popping up in RFK's assassination, Watergate, JFK's assassination and Iran-Contra. Chance and randomness are the only explanation.

Just like Reagan randomly being shot by the son of one of Veep Bush's oil buddies and political contributors. Yup, John Hinckley the son almost put John Hinckley the father's neighbor, business buddy and campaign contributor in the top slot.

Oh, the mysteries of America's divine providence.

And mysteries they remain...at least in the media. Because the media ignores oddities and inconsistencies and ridicules those who do not.

Gary Webb was one journalist who dared. Dared to ask the hard questions about the role of cocaine dealing in Iran-Contra. He was ruined...even though he was mostly right. The crack cocaine epidemic was a by-product of...well...a conspiracy. But forget that...because all those Iran-Contra connections to cocaine dealing and are mere coincidence. Just ask Manuel Noriega! As Poppy said, "No quid pro quo."

No, America...listen to your trusty leader George W. Bush. Shortly after 9-11 he went to the U.N. and told us to not tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories."

He wouldn't mislead us. And the media would never cower away from trying to make sense of all those strange facts surrounding that event.

Hey, the Russians might carry out bizarre conspiracies and secretive assassinations.

But here...in America? No way.

I mean, the anthrax attacks were pure coincidence. Never mind that the source for the anthrax is narrowed down to two places--Porton Down in the UK and Fort Detrick in Maryland. Both government-run bioweapons labs. Or that Congress is still, years later, asking for answers. Or that White House staff was, according to a public statement by Ari Fleischer, on Cipro before any letters were received. Heck, the fact of randomness is made ever-so more convincing by the fact that the first person to die from exposure to a specifically addressed letter was an editor for the National Enquirer who, as it happens, acquired and ran that photo of the Bush twins drunk.

C'mon now...this ain't Russia. We are exceptional.

Yeah, we were wiretapping Princess Diana, playing games with the Osama and the Taliban in the 1990s, mixed up in the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. Sure we had BCCI, Enron and the California Energy "Crisis."

Oh yeah...and there was the Neil Bush-started Savings and Loan collapse, the fact that John Hinckley, Jr. and Mark David Chapman crossed paths as members of World Vision Ministries, the many single-car accidents that plagued witnesses on JFK's murder...and Willie Brown being called by Condi Rice and warned against flying on 9-11.

No, America. Rest easy. The very fact that we have this obvious conspiracy to poison a former Russian spy shows us that our media is on the job, our press not supine.

They know a conspiracy when they see one.

It's sorta like the exception that proves the rule.

The rule being that we as Americans are excepted from conspiracies. Take off the tin-foil hat and cozy up in front of the tube and watch 24, or Sleeper Cell...and go to bed knowing full well that it's all just make-believe. Nothing happens for a reason in America.

Stopping GOP Corruption? It's a pile of Democrap.

2006-12-10T08:43:00.000-05:00

The gates of Hell have been opened.

Or, have been open for decades here in Washington. The Whore of Babylon...open for business...with barbarians at the Gates.

Like Watergate.

Or Debategate (the Reagan-Bush campaign had a mole in Carter's campaign passing along Carter's debate briefing books).

How about Iran-Contragate, sometimes called Irangate.

Remember Iraqgate? Yes, there was an Iraqgate.

Can't blow by Monicagate, can we?

And the latest Gate...Foleygate.

In fact, we should have Jackgate for Abramoff. WMDgate. Gatesgate, although the only "scandal" regarding the confirmation of Robert Gates is that he was confirmed. Scandalous? Yes, but not really a scandal.

Actually, the Democrats' big election victory portends an opening of many new "Gates." At least, that's what the voters want...or said they want according to exit polling. See, the amazing thing about the election was that "corruption," not Iraq, stood out as the number one issue for voters.

Okay, let's try that again...just for kicks.

Corruption beat out Iraq as the issue of greatest concern to voters.

The media, and the blabbering heads that dominate it, have focused on Iraq as the number one issue. They proclaim daily that the vote was a rejection of Bush's Iraq fiasco.

True enough. But imprecise.

Because "the people" actually had corruption on their minds and housecleaning on their agenda. Really, isn't it possible that Iraq is just a subset of the idea of corruption: the lies and propaganda that got us there; the no-bid and cost-plus contracts; the lack of Humvee armor and flak jackets; billions of reconstruction dollars gone missing.

The Iraq war is a study in corruption.

Still, the point is that the angry mood of voters requires some bloodletting, some redemptive retribution. Crime cannot be allowed to pay. And there is some crime to pay for. Hey, if lying about fellatio is worthy of impeachment...how about lying to get into a war?

Enter the Democrats. They've been given the sheriff's badge by the American people and they've been told, "Clean up that town and get rid of those varmints."

They've got subpoena power and a mandate that grows daily in direct proportion to Bush's failing approval ratings.

They won't do it.

Already we have their first, submissive volleys across the stern of the GOP ship of corruption.

Pelosi rules out impeachment, wants to work together for the American people. She may not be able to restrain Rep. Henry Waxman or Rep. John Conyers. But she's set the tone. Move forward.

Funny, that's what W keeps saying about Iraq, "We need to find a new way forward."

Okay, Dems...now you've had a week of so-called "truth-telling" by Gates, Jim Baker and the omnipresent Democratic guide through scandals...Lee Hamilton.

Now what?

Investigate the big lies on WMD and intelligence malfeasance? Stop filling the military-industrial trough with our tax dollars? Stop spreading the American people over a pork-barrel? Follow the trails of corruption from K Street lobbyists of all stripes...trails that lead to every major Department in the executive branch and right into the halls of Congress?

Unlikely. They want to set a positive agenda for the future, not get mired in the past.

But it's the past that gives us the clues to the future.

Iraqgate is a good example...a lesson from history. The lesson being that when given a perfect opportunity to consign to the dustbin of history those scandalous dirty-dealers in the GOP the Dems will do nothing.

After the great, ballyhooed triumph of George the Elder in the Gulf War some disturbing facts started to rear an ugly, opportune head out of a sand of patriotic fervor.

As it happens, the elder Bush's Administration had been illegally funneling weapons to Saddam throughout his tenure in the White House. Weapons that would be used on Kuwait and the American-led forces that expelled him. Illegal cluster bombs and pre-cursor chemicals for nasty WMDs. You know, those WMDs that terrorized the Kurds...that keep Iraq in sanctions for a decade...that provided a phantom menace against which Bush the Younger predicated his invasion.

It's all there in a great, meticulously reported...but widely-ignored...book called Spider's Web:

Congress had moved to curtail and, in some instances, stop arms shipments to Iraq after the cessation of the Iran-Iraq War. Saddam relied on the Reagan-Bush White House to keep up his end of that bloody conflict throughout the 1980s. He was "our" boy in the Middle East...much like Manuel Noriega was "our boy" in Central America. Saddam attacked Iran, urged on by the incoming Administration in 1980. Saddam had come to power with CIA assistance. Remember the infamous video of Saddam at a Ba'ath Party Conference calling out names, the named then being led away for execution? Many were "internal threats" called "Communists." Commies who had been identified by the CIA. Saddam gratefully took that list and eliminated Iraqi pinkos.

And we've all seen that famous handshake...one that led to a decade of sales: military, biological and chemical.

And Saddam gassing the Kurds? Well, our Cold War friends the Turks gave us regional base of operations and had more than a minor problem in there eastern region with Kurdish nationals...rebels who called themselves the PKK. Saddam had Kurds, too. So, he took some of those nasty chemicals we were shipping him and attacked the Kurdish menace. A menace the Turks were failing to control. It was a big help to there drive to crush Kurdish nationalism in Turkey. Which they did.

Coincidence? Perhaps.

But it's the Iran-Iraq War that exposes some of the darkest corners of the American Way in foreign lands.

As Saddam was unleashing hell on Iran with our support, assistance and weapons, Reagan-Bush was covertly selling weapons and spare parts to Iran. They were selling to both sides of the war that, it is strongly suggested, the Reagan-Bushies asked Saddam to start. In fact, they goaded Saddam into attacking before they formally took office and, not coincidentally, we know the arms pipeline to Iran was established in covert meetings before the 1980 election.

Iraq, though, was openly favored...nothing covert about it. Foreign Minister and eventual Iraqi bad-guy Tariq Aziz was welcomed to the White House by the Gipper himself.

The relationship between Washington and Baghdad was strong and rooted in a history of cooperation when Bush the Elder took over. This, despite the fact that Saddam saw the same Iran-Contra reports that showed his ally in DC was also arming his enemy.

Which, by the way, was our "enemy."

When Poppy took the hand-off from the Gipper, he was more than willing to sustain the pipelines between the Whore of Babylon and the ancient home of Babylon...oil in and weapons out. Congress tried to use legislation to stop the weapons side, but Bush knew ways around trifles like "law." He was the "point man" on intelligence in the Gipper's White House. Make no mistake; he was not "out of the loop" on Iran-Contra.

So the weapons and chemicals kept on keeping on, despite its illegality.

There was a problem, though.

The Kuwaitis were slant drilling into Iraq's southern oil fields. This pissed off Saddam. In fact, Saddam and many Iraqis considered Kuwait a geographical fiction. They referred to Kuwait as "Iraq's 19th Province." Little Kuwait...a country created by post-Colonial mapmakers and, coincidentally, saw its oil industry created with the help of a young, enterprising oilman named...George Herbert Walker Bush.

So there is Saddam...an ally of America...beneficiary of our chemical and military technology. He's got Kuwaitis drilling Iraq's oil and, according to Our Boy in Baghdad, driving down oil prices by flooding the market.

Enter April Glaspie...Elder Bush's representative in Baghdad.

She chats with Saddam about oil prices and the issue of Kuwait comes up.

Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

HUSSEIN: Twenty-five dollars a barrel is not a high price.

GLASPIE: We have many Americans who would like to see the price go above $25 because they come from oil-producing states.

HUSSEIN: The price at one stage had dropped to $12 a barrel and a reduction in the modest Iraqi budget of $6 billion to $7 billion is a disaster.

GLASPIE: I think I understand this. I have lived here for years. I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.

Was that the go ahead? Well, if Bush the Elder was still arming Saddam almost to the day of the invasion of Kuwait and then Glaspie says we don't have a dog in your fight with Kuwait...and Saddam had done so much to kill Iranians...why wouldn't he think he had a green light?

That's Iraqgate...because all of this started to come out after victory and the press and Congress began asking questions. Questions that persisted.

Now we get to the problem.

Bill Clinton was elected President. Of course, Poppy pardoned the Iran-Contra gang. Not much one can do about that. But Iraqgate was a unique opportunity to root out the Secret Team, the oil and war profiteers who had manipulated events and flaunted the Constitution since 1980. Clinton was taking control of the Justice Department. The foggy stink of the Reagan-Bush years could finally be lifted and crimes punished.

So, what did Bubba do?

He did George the Elder "a solid."

When asked about investigating Iraqgate at a 1994 White House power party:

Clinton “didn’t feel that it was a good idea to pursue these investigations because he was going to have to work with these people,” Sender told me in an interview. “He was going to try to work with these guys, compromise, build working relationships.”

Robert Parry...intrepid investigator and journeyman journalist...reported on this exchange in his book Secrecy & Privilege.

Given a chance to investigate, prosecute and tarnish indefinitely some of the biggest names in the GOP....to stop the Secret Team and keep them from, say, coming back into government...Bubba passed. He said no. He wanted to work together.

Work and play together.

It's just that simple. Which is why it is hard to have confidence in Congressional Dems. The country has been ravaged, the government corrupted and tax dollars spent wildly by many of Iran-Contra's and Iraqgate's cast of characters...people who slithered right back into the Executive Branch when Bush the Younger got his turn.

The foggy stink is now a toxic cloud.

Already, though, we've seen the bi-partisan inquiry into Foleygate do...nothing. Nothing. Hastert? Nothing. Key players in the cover-up? Nothing.

So, here we go.

We get Lee Hamilton on the 9-11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group. Hamilton stopped Congressional Inquiries into Iran-Contra before they could get to Poppy or the cocaine-dealing Contras working with CIA elements. No, Ollie was enough.

And the language coming from Congressional Dems in leadership positions is all about looking forward, forwarding agendas and moving forward.

Forward, forward, forward.

It's the Great American Dreamworld...forgetting the past and moving forward. And, in so doing, consigning us to infinite repetition.

Democrats should look back to the election that put them where they are today. Just one month ago the American people said, "Enough is enough!"

But here comes Robert Gates...there goes Hastert unpunished...and here we go again...moving forward and forgetting the past.

Iraq Study in Futility Group

2006-12-07T08:45:00.000-05:00

It's official: we are "losing" in Iraq. That's right, Robert "Let's not talk about Iran-Contra" Gates got fast-tracked into Rumsfeld's job with only two Republicans dissenting (yeah, Republicans...no Democrats). Why? Mainly on the basis of his "candid assessment" that we are not winning in Iraq.

Oh. My. God. Really?

I can't imagine what would cause him to say such a forward thinking, insightful and courageous thing!

The Democrats kissed his feet and placed laurel leaves on his head. Yup, you know you can count on those Dems to ask the tough questions. Forget the fact that many voted for the Patriot Act and, for the most part, the war authorization that got us into Iraq. Forget Iran-Contra and Gates' history of intel jury-rigging. No, really. Forget it...it helps the medicine go down.

But they get a pass, I guess, on Gates because the "truth" he was telling was intoxicating. They were drunk from "candor-filled" cup Gates served them. But Gates was a mere aperitif.

The main course?

The Iraq Study Group. The ISG.

Weeks of build-up. Hours of blathering by "journalists" and the commentators they have come to resemble. The ISG is bi-partisan dish served piping hot...eand veryone's scarfing down the "truths" like a Thanksgiving dinner. Lots of thanks being given for their "hard work" and "bi-partisan consensus." That's right...both sides agree that the strategy in Iraq has failed. Wow! Revelatory stuff.

To bad it's mostly bullshit. A plateful of cold re-hash, warmed enough to convince the hungry to eat it.

It's even a bit offensive.

The two thrusts of the report are redeployment of American forces and increasing responsibility for the Iraqis.

Redeployment is likely to happen. It was probably part of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld plan all along. Yup, our troops will be "redeployed"...to the permanent bases they've been building near the Iraq-Iran border, to the largest US embassy in the world and to the safety of the Kurdish-controlled area. They'll be redeployed to Qatar and the Central Asian "Stans." Phased out of the quagmire only to remain in the imperial mix.

The civil war, a.k.a. sectarian violence, is not really a problem over the long term. In fact, it keeps Iraqis busy killing each other and makes it impossible for US forces to exit completely. If the Iraqis were a functioning democratic state the first thing they'd do is ask us to leave. Had the Wolfowitz-Rose Petal Scenario transpired, we would've been forced to leave two years ago.

But no, Iraq began it's "democratic period" with the dissolution of internal systems of governance, of security and widespread looting. Initially, Sunnis and Shiites cooperated in their attacks on US forces. Remember that? Yeah, it's true...that was the story. But shortly after Negroponte entered the scene of the crime...the crime being the blatantly illegal invasion...roving death squads appeared and sectarian vengeance eclipsed cooperation between Sunnis and Shiites.

It's merely coincidence that Negroponte is infamous for setting up death squads in Central America. Christ Almighty...it's so hard to get rid of those Iran-Contra bastards.

Then came the mosque bombings. Now, many in Iraq believed that it was not Iraqi Sunnis or Shiites attacking mosques, but an outside force. Many believed the US was behind it. And when you have roving bands in masks...when you have wide open borders unprotected by US forces...and you have British troops caught red-handed conducting "sectarian attacks" in disguise...well, it's something worth considering. Because the sectarian violence has keep the $2 billion per week pipeline open. A pipeline from the American taxpayers that runs into Washington, DC, through Baghdad and back into the bank accounts of US defense contractors.

Is it any wonder that we read this week that there are almost as many contractors in Iraq--100,000--as there are US troops. Blackwater, CACI, Titan, KBR...they are making a killing off of the killing.

The other beneficiaries of the sectarian violence are oil companies and the Saudis. Quarter after quarter of record profits with the second largest oil reserves in the world tied up in chaos. Oil markets get spooked. Oil stays in the ground...so those irresponsible Iraqis cannot pay for our invasion of their country, as Wolfowitz predicted.

Oil markets get spooked and prices rise. Sure they've fallen in the $60-70 range. Isn't that great? Yeah, until you look back to pre-9/11 oil prices down in the $15-$25 range. And if you think oil companies are making a killing, just think about the petro-dollars pouring into the accounts of those Bush-loving Saudis!

By the way, the Iraq Study Group still likes the idea of privatization of Iraq's oil resources and likes the idea of "foreign investment" to rebuild what we've destroyed.

It is notable, though, that the Iraq Study Group did recommend that Bush "assure" the Iraqis that the bases we've built are merely temporary. Sorry, ISG...those bases are there to stay. I guess they ignored the Project for a New American Century's openly secret plan for the Middle East: Rebuilding America's Defenses. It's okay, though...so has everyone else in the media and those oversight overseers in Congress. Oversight has two completely different meanings, by the way.

Ignoring PNAC is an oversight, I guess.

Part of the proposed redeployment, according to the ISG, involves increasingly embedding US troops in Iraqi army units. Which brings us to the great, disgusting lie at the heart of our involvement in Iraq: "Iraq as a Fledgling Democracy."

This is the kind of bullshit that fertilizes half of the farms in Iowa. Rich, fresh and copious amounts of bullshit that is spread far and wide.

Iraq is not a democracy. People "voting" and dipping their fingers in ink means...they voted and dipped their fingers in ink. There is no legitimacy in the system. Iraq did not evolve into a democracy. It did not have a revolution. It did not have a struggle of Iraqi people to create a democratic state. No, it was imposed upon them. The Iraqi leadership's legitimacy comes from...the barrel of a gun and the whims of a foreign power. Hmmmm, does that sound like a democracy to you?

That's why we keep hearing about training the Iraq army...so they can stand up and "take responsibility" for their own future.

Think about it.

The democratically elected government of Iraq needs a large, functioning military to enforce and preserve its legitimacy. Now that doesn't sound like a democracy...not by any definition of the word. We are not splitting hairs here...between a republic or a democracy, between federalism of parliamentarianism. We are talking abut a militarized state that imposes legitimacy for the "elected government."

Hell, that describes many of the communist states we used to battle as enemies of democracy.

No, the idea that Iraqis have to take responsibility for their own future after we decimated their ability to provide even the most basic services to its people...it's a disgusting and immoral idea. Unfortunately, Democrats are increasingly on board with this bullshit idea of Iraqi responsibility. The ISG gives political cover in the guise of bi-partisan statesmanship to those who want a graceful exit from Iraq, who want a way out without accepting blame for the mess they've made...for the awful decision each and everyone involved made, both in the Administration and in the Congress.

As former military man and think tank talking head Anthony Cordesman wrote: "The US in effect sent a bull in to liberate a china shop, and the ISG now called on the US to threaten to remove the bull if the shop doesn't fix the china."

Which brings the issue of the Iraq Study Group front and center. Despite Bush's instant, yet amorphous, intransigence to some of the recommendations, the ISG is doing him a big favor. It is sharing the responsibility. It is bi-partisan. It really isn't anything new. And it is opening up the issue of blame.

Because the responsibility is not on the Iraqis...it's on us. All of us. We destroyed a nation. This is another Afghanistan...or Congo...or Guatemala. A nation that could be a failed state for decades.

It's the issue of responsibility that is at the heart of the Iraq Study Group. Shifting the onus on to the victim and sharing future blame....from the report's issuance forward...in a bi-partisan way.

The ISG says little or nothing that is new, save that it transforms future thinking about responsibility for the crime that is the war in Iraq. In "rebuking" Bush in a bi-partisan way, the GOP has it's exit strategy from association with W's legacy.

And the Dems have now taken a big bite that they'll spend the next two years chewing.

Good.

Because so few stood up before the invasion. Because somehow they didn't see the voluminous reports in both the alternative and European media debunking the Iraq-WMD-Al Qaeda mythos. Because the Senate was empty when Sen. Robert Byrd made his amazing speech before the authorization vote...a speech that warned of the Constitutional crisis and long-term damage that open-ended vote would create. Because they were complicit cowards in the face of outrageous claims and less-than opaque lies.

In the final analysis, unfortunately, Cordesman has it right. The Iraqis will end up be punished the most...punished for not cleaning up the mess we've made.

Robert Gates and the Covert Vampires

2006-12-05T08:24:00.000-05:00

We can't stop them. Sure, they retreat to corporate coffins once exposed to a little sunlight, but they rise again once darkness falls. They are the Covert Vampires, the undead bloodsuckers who, it seems, find ways to keep feeding on the lifeblood of our increasingly tenuous democracy. The names are strangely familiar, even if their exploits are scandalously unknown to the masses: Negroponte, Reich, Poindexter, Abrams.

The one thing they all seem to share? Allegiance to, or association with, the great Covert Vampire of our time: George Herbert Walker Bush...who, a wealth of circumstantial evidence indicates, began biting and transforming mere humans in the lead up to the Bay of Pigs.

His first? A guy named Felix Rodriguez who was a Bay of Pigster and was, strangely enough, still on the CIA payroll during Iran-Contra. Felix was doing "something" in Central America. Thanks to a paper-thin investigation of that scandal, we still don't know.

Robert Gates is the latest vampire to crawl out of his coffin, a plumb presidency of at the University of Texas. This time he will stalk the halls of the Pentagon. Gates has a history as a man of action....covert action...which is well documented. Journalist Robert Parry was the Bram Stoker of the Covert Vampire story, shedding enough light on their dark world to open up a crypt-ful of secrets we now know as Iran-Contra. Enough light to keep Gates from being confirmed the first time he was proposed for DCI, Director of Central Intelligence.

But Gates finally made it through, thanks to strong support from Poppy Bush. Now, the reign of Poppy seems like the salad days of American foreign policy...so Gates' fangs look small compared to those we've seen in Rumsfeld's growling mouth.

In fact, we've been a fed a steady diet of Poppy's people as a rational alternative to the Neo-conned administration of his son. Gates is a creature who has had his hand in intelligence jury-rigging, proposed covert bombing in Central America and stuck closely to uber-Covert Vampire Bill Casey during Casey's tenure at the CIA...when Casey was sucking dry our Constitutional lifeblood as he managed Iran-Contra.

It's Gates' knowledge of covert ops in Iran that makes him the logical choice for Secretary of Defense. Iran's throat is target one, and Gates knows the ropes...the "way in" that Poppy and Casey latched onto during the 1980 Presidential Campaign. He knows how to bite the arteries that flowed money and arms, delayed release of the hostages, led to the Iran-Iraq war and, ultimately became an elaborate money-weapons-drugs triangle that keep the Contras illegally supplied.

Now that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has, under the guidance of Rummy, eclipsed the recalcitrants at the CIA, Gates is the perfect man for the job. He is breezing through simply because he's not Rummy. Because he said we are not winning in Iraq. Wow! What an amazing insight. But he remains part of the larger team...a team of Covert Vampires and their Frontman Familiars who've been running things for decades.

When the son entered the White House, there was little talk of those Covert Vampires so loyal to Poppy...even though they quietly took up key positions. Sure, we knew that Cheney and Rumsfeld were Poppy's bloodsuckers. But post-9/11, the talk was all about the Neo-Cons. Pre-emptive strikes, spreading democracy...changing the map of the Middle East.

Neo-con, Neo-con, Neo-con.

Many Neo-cons were also there during Reagan-Bush and the covert antics that typified that presidency. Leeden, Wolfowitz, Perle...and more. Some were involved in Iran-Contra. Wolfowitz began jury-rigging intel way back in 1976, under Poppy's CIA directorship.

Again...Poppy is a common denominator.

But these Neo-cons we've grown to despise are not really in the same class as the Covert Vampires. They are more like Zealous Zombies...operatives who are trotted out into the public sphere to spout their monotone intellectualizations about democracy, freedom and American power.

Like Covert Vampires, they also seem to keep on coming...like Night of the Living Dead extras...stalking and feeding...never dying...a march of undead intellectuals blathering on about rationales, transformations and power projections.

Many of those Neo-cons have been thwarted...at least publicly. The Zealous Zombies are, it would seem, in retreat. But they are the bad cops...and the Covert Vampires look like good cops. Doesn't Gates look like a good cop?

But let me unmix my metaphors.

Because the key ingredient of the vampire metaphor is the Frontman Familiar. In vampire lore the bloodsucker has a minion...a non-vampiric human who "takes care of things" for the master. When there is too much sunshine the familiar takes the lead in covering up the location of the vampire, securing transport and picking out future victims. He acquires coffins and helps the vampire travel.

And we've got some Frontman Familiars on our hands. As if this metaphor is coalescing like a Hollywood script, James Baker and Lee Hamilton, the single greatest Frontman Familiar of all-time, have emerged to "save the day" in Iraq. Timed perfectly with the arrival of Gates, they are going to "shed light" on the darkness of our destruction of Iraq and give us "a way forward."

But really, they are there to provide misdirection. To provide cover in the midst of all that light glaringly exposing the disintegration of Iraq. It's what they do.

When Iran-Contra broke...and, by the way, Veep GHW Bush was the point man on all CIA/Covert Ops matters in the Reagan White House...Familiar Hamilton began a slow, methodical derailing of the investigation. He threw a cover of darkness on much of the scandal and hid from view the worst aspects of Iran-Contra: the CIA-Contra cocaine pipeline into the Los Angeles and the deep politics of the October Surprise...when the covert arms pipeline into Iran was first opened.

Hamilton did it for Bush the Younger when he sat on the 9-11 commission. When the Vampires need darkness as they cower in the light, Lee Hamilton is there to provide plausible deniability...to give the vampires a safe, dark place to hide.

And so it is with Gates. A Covert Vampire taking the reigns of a newly invigorated covert intelligence operation in the Pentagon at the same time the Baker Commission provides misdirection...a misdirection that has entranced our Senate with the idea that things are changing, that policy is changing.

The Bloodsuckers are still in control. Negroponte...Mr. Central American Death Squad...is still there. Eliot...Next Target Iran...Abrams is still there. And the lifeblood of our nation...tax dollars...is still being sucked out of the contractors' artery that is Iraq. The bases are still being built. We just learned that there are over 100,000 contractors in Iraq. The blood is flowing. The vampires are still drinking.

You see, since the toppling of Mossadeq in Iran back in 1953..on through United Fruit in Guatemala (the Bush family had a large share of stock in United Fruit)...then to the Bay of Pigs, the assassination of Idealistic Triad the 60s...to Watergate and Iran-Contra and BCCI and Iraqgate.... Well, you get the picture. It's been a non-stop series of covert ops. And it's been the same damn vampires all along. Although men like Hamilton pose as Van Helsing, we find they are, in fact, familiars.

When people try to drive stakes through their hearts they are ruined, isolated, removed...and some die.

How else could these guys keep coming back, time and again, after they've appeared to have died...to have exited the stage of history. The Democrats certainly haven't driven stakes into their hearts...even when they were helplessly exposed to te light of day.

No, they keep on escaping, retreating to well-paid coffins and then rising again...and feeding.

Occupational Hazards in Iraq

2006-11-30T07:56:00.000-05:00

It's not just a job...it's an adventure.

Or, it was in the 1980s when the Cold War held us frozen in a strangely intangible struggle with Soviet Commies. There was real fear of war with the Soviets...a ground war in Europe, that is...and we also had the looming reality of Mutually Assured Destruction. But our widely dispersed military was meant to deter our foe...not engage it. Nor did we do much "occupying." We were "guests" on NATO soil, or of petty dictatorships we supported as bulwarks against Godless Communism. Our global reach in deterring the Commie menace meant soldiers did get "adventure" in the form of deployments to exotic places like South Korea, Germany, Italy and the Philippines. Shooting, invasion and house to house searches were not likely. In fact, the post-Vietnam military rarely was adventurous, save lame duck Grenada and an ill-advised sojourn in Beirut.

The irony is that the "adventure" of specialized training followed by exotic deployments in Europe and Asia was, in fact, a job. A good job. The stagflation of the late 70s and early 80s, the difficulty in paying for college for so many poor, working and middle-class kids...these factors converged with the Reagan build-up and its goal of forcing the Soviets' hand. The all-volunteer military was a way out of the dead-ends of urban decay, rural myopia and suburban burger flipping. It was a job, sold as an adventure.

Although the economy "recovered" and "grew," failed again during Poppy Bush's tenure and then "recovered" and "grew" again during Bubba Clinton...the imprint of the 80s build-up was indelible. Military service was a way out, offered techincal training and promised college money to those who couldn't afford it otherwise. It also corralled hundreds of thousands of former active duty and wannabe weekend warriors into Reserve and Guard units. For a people growing accustomed to working multiple jobs to make ends meet, it was an easy and patriotic way to get by. The ranks of the Guard and Reserves swelled.

But then the "adventure" part kicked in.

Poppy's Gulf War was the first, but it was a cake walk. Most of those killed were in friendly fire incidents, we had a world of support...literally, the whole damn world joined us...and there wasn't even a hint of occupation. Those soldiers' job was not an occupation...it was pure liberation. They did not fall victim to the hazards of occupation.

Then came W.

Now, those weekend warriors, young men and women seeking a way out and up and those military professionals who have served long enough to remember when the task was to deter, not to invade...they all have found out that their occupation is, indeed, an adventure. Or, more precisely, adventurism.

Now they find that their occupation is, well, an occupation...an ethical quagmire of control and domination of another people...in a land with a strikingly different language, different religion and culture. A country that lived through a decade of bombings and sanctions by those who now sell occupation as freedom and liberation and democracy.

They are wholly unprepared to live...and to fight to live...in a foreign land, coping with a hostile people who don't particularly care for being occupied. Sorta like Vietnam, or the West Bank and Gaza. Or like the Japanese faced in the Philippines and the Germans did with the French Resistance.

Although, the World War II analogies are flawed. No real internal strife. The Allies really were liberators who turned over whole countries to the people who lived there. And there was another occupying force being ejected...an enemy for the locals to despise...either German or Japanese.

No, the most precise analogy is the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And what we've seen over the last two decades is that an occupation of a people is dehumanizing. Dehumanizing to the occupied and to the occupier. We saw it in Vietnam, too. The "Strategic Hamlet" policy, destroying a village to "save" it from the Commies, the inherent racism that develops in troops as they are overwhelmed by a confusing, foreign environment in which enemies and allies are hard to discern. The Vietnamese became "Gooks" and atrocities started to mount as the years of occupation wore on.

But the American people are, conversely, quite removed from the occupational hazards our men and women face everyday in an Iraq coming apart at the seams. But we've had glimpses of just how dehumanizing military occupation is to both the Iraqis and our military. Abu Ghraib is the obvious example.

But it is those little, everyday ways that we don't see in our mainstream media maw that show just how dehumanizing occupation can be.

Incipient racism develops. Both major and minor cruelties occur in the cause of daily survival. Those cruelties emerge out of the frustration and the callousness that long-term deployment must create...the disassociation of one's basic humanity in a conflict with no rhyme or reason and no end in sight.

Cruelties like this:

It's disheartening to see Iraqi children toyed with for a momentary laugh, filmed by the perpetrators so they can laugh again later...back in the confines of the rarified world of the basecamp. Posted on the internet, it offers a glimpse into what must be dozen of incidents just like this everyday as kids...yes, 19-21 year-old soldiers are essentially kids...try to cope with the occupation of occupation. It is not an excuse, it's a truism. Occupation is hazardous to both the occupier and the occupied.

That is putting aside the fact that Iraqi children would clamor so desperately for a simple bottle of water. What that says about the Iraq we've created...our creative destruction...is just as horrific as the daily abuse the occupied Iraqis must feel simply from having foreign soldiers cruising their streets.

And it does get worse. The Brits, too, are falling victim to the dehumanization their presence in Iraq must have on British soldiers:

The glorified beating of young Iraqis, cheered while one particular boy screams for mercy, is tainting all of those involved...the soldiers doing the beating, the soldiers cheering and the soldiers filming it, or standing-by doing nothing to stop it. Think of those children...either chasing a highly-valued bottle of water, or being beaten mercilessly for throwing rocks...think of the generational fury we've created within them. Think of the orphans we've created, or those who have had soldiers storm into their homes in the dead of night. Or seen their father harassed or killed at a checkpoint. Their humanity is at stake...and their dignity is being bound up in feelings of revenge and hatred.

And then there are our soldiers. Vietnam's inherent cruelties created a generation of mental health problems. Suicides, homelessness, drug abuse. The men who suffered through the Strategic Hamlet program, the daily inhumanity of that war...they were scarred for life. Now we have two generations...the young Regulars and the older Reservists and Guard...who will come back after multiple deployments bearing the scars of their occupation. The scars of occupation. The price paid for greedy adventurism.

Taking out a Contract, Occupation-Style

2006-11-17T08:03:00.000-05:00

America loves the Mafia. Loves it. The Godfather tops many people's favorite movie list. The Sopranos are, well, the Soparanos...a prime example of America's pop culture love affair with the brutal world of "it's just business." A world where life and death are traded like junk bonds. Since the 1930's, American cinema has been riddled with organized crime movies.

We love the simplicity...the "business" of it all. The profit motive stripped bare to expose it's most basic principle: in business and the bottom line, there are winners and losers. In the Mafia culture we seem so fascinated with, those bottom line decisions are tinged with the black and white outcomes we crave as Americans...a sort of Christian fatalism of redemption and damnation, of reward and punishment, played out in the marketplace.

The Capo di Capos, a.k.a. "the Boss" in this cinematic universe of absolutes, plays God. When he sees a "business opportunity" held by a rival or a moral failing among one of his underlings, he "puts out a contract" on his life. I guess this makes the person who carries it out a "contractor."

Enter Iraq...a land of contractors. Blackwater, Dyncorp, Custer Battles...companies filled with men who are there to fulfill a "contract." The contract, often, is a general one taken out on the Iraq people. Hey, it's just business, right? And damned if it ain't a lucrative one. Blackwater has grown like mold in a humid basement, spreading itself out across a re-newed, 6000 arce training center in North Carolina. Growth funded in no small part by contracts in, or "on," Iraq.

Dyncorp came of age in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. And Custer Battles has been fending off investigations for the last year.

And they are not the only ones. Like the Mafia and Organized Crime during Prohibition, Iraq has spurred an explosive growth of contractors...many of which are, simply put, contract killers. And make no mistake, these "security companies" are just that...contract killers who operate outside the system of accountability that applies to the US military. Like those contractors at Abu Ghraib who directed the torture and humiliation of Iraqis...which was, in turn, blamed on low-level troops. Those contractors slithered in, got the job done and slithered away without question.

C'mon. It's just business.

Don Rumfeld was a leading architect of bringing contractors into Iraq. Get it? "Don" Rumsfeld. He knew the business of America is business. A quote attributed to Calvin Coolidge...or was it Don Corleone?

And that business is making a new, psuedo-military mafia quite rich. So some Iraqis get killed...fuggeda 'bout it! Literally...they'd like you to forget about it.

See, the contract killers populating the hurly-burly of a totally disintegrated Iraq have free reign like those mythical mobsters we admire. And, as we learned today, there are some of these made men who make Joe Pesci look like Eliott Ness.

Contractor’s Boss in Iraq Shot at Civilians, Workers’ Suit Says

By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: November 17, 2006
CAMP FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 16 — Two former employees of an American private military contracting company have claimed in a Virginia court that they witnessed their supervisor deliberately shoot at Iraqi vehicles and civilians this summer, and that the company fired them for reporting the incidents.

The allegations, made in a lawsuit filed in Fairfax County Circuit Court, say Triple Canopy, one of the largest private military contractors to work with the United States in Iraq, retaliated against the men for reporting that the supervisor had committed violent felonies, and perhaps murder, on the job.

And this isn't the first time this has happened. Remember this video of Aegis Defence Services' "Greatest Hits"? These contracted killers videotaped a leisurely drive around Baghdad and randomly shot at Iraqis.

So, when we hear that contractors, formerly called mercenaries and properly called contract killers, get attacked, killed or, as we heard today, kidnapped...it's hard to have much sympathy. I mean, it's just business, after all.

George Carlin to summed it up in his last HBO special, Life Is Worth Losing:

"Besides, who cares about some mercenary civilian contractor from Oklahoma who gets his head cut off? Fuck 'em. Hey Jack, you don't want to get your head cut off? Stay the fuck in Oklahoma. They aint cuttin' of heads in Oklahoma, far as I know. But I do know this: you strap on a gun and go struttin' around some other man's country you better be ready for some action, Jack. People are touchy about that sort of thing."

Those Darn Iraqis

2006-11-15T08:29:00.000-05:00

C'mon guys...can't you get it together? Can't you just get along?

You know what's causing all that strife in our country? What's making Americans so despondent? What's causing American men and women death, dismemberment and psychological scars? What's caused the Liberator-in-Chief to trot out Daddy's Damage Control Team (guys who cut their teeth on Iran-Contra) to think up some way to control the damage...the incredible damage...to our image around the world?

It's those darn Iraqis!

They're so unwilling to just come together and realize that the United States of Creating Failed States has given them an amazing opportunity to create a brand-spanking new country! Just look at what we've done for Afghanistan. Twice.

So listen up, Iraqis. Our election was the final straw. Now, we can't get all involved in hand-holding...those salad days are over. Now you have to take responsibility.

That's why we destroyed all that infrastructure. Just consider the fact that you have power about 6-8 hours per day, as compared to nearly 24 hours per day before the Great Liberation? This is a chance to create a new democracy of electricity.

And all those bombed roads and bridges? Avenues to a Western-style democracy waiting to happen. C'mon Iraqis...build a bridge or two to the 21st Century? Hey, we've even made your oil wealth easier to distribute...less people means more money for living!

Potable water, safe shopping at a market, education (particularly for women), torture and detention...this is the chance to create democratic versions of the tyrannical water, shopping, education and torture you once endured. As we say...give an Iraqi a fish and feed him for a day, teach an Iraq how to reorganize the rubble we've left behind and make him democratic for life! The fish will come later through the magic of the free market our Provisional Authority set in motion! Believe me, our agribusinesses invested in buying up farming rights for a reason! You just wait and see.

You see, the real problem in Iraq is not that we've destroyed your nation. Nor is it that we've unleashed pent-up antagonism created during Saddam's American-endorsed, American-supplied reign of tyranny. You know, that period from the late Seventies right up to the invasion of Kuwait...when we helped him eliminate internal enemies we identified as Commies; when we supplied him so he could attack Iran (while we were also illegally arming Iran, too, by the way); when we shook hands with him and channeled chemical and biological weapons to him; when gave him a nod and wink after he complained about Kuwaiti slant drilling into Iraq's southern oil fields and when he killed Kurdish rebels who were so darn annoying our Turkish friends.

Hey, we even told you to rise up after the Gulf War and take your country back from...well...the guy we had supported. You know, you could've made a democracy out of the tyranny we'd supported simply because we wanted a solid, united Iraq. Oh yeah, we didn't give you any air or ground support for that uprising, nor did we go to Baghdad and topple that all-important statue. But you have to remember, as Brother Rummy said, creating a democracy is a messy, long and hard slog.

Hey Iraq, don't lose faith in the long and hard slog we given you!

Heck, we're even going to hang Saddam! What more impetus do you need to take your future by the short a curlies?!?!

You see, Mr. and Ms. Iraqi...the onus is now on you. You have to take responsibility for our actions. You have to take control of your own security. We, by eliminating the army and internal security forces, made it possible for you to take responsibility anew. You can create a democracy of security!

And by flooding your country with billions of dollars that cycled back to crony American defense and construction companies...we have given you a chance to take responsibility for missing money. And since we've elevated the Kurds and the Shiites, aligning ourselves with Islamists who want women to wear veils and crave vengeance for the Sunni control we exploited for two decades...well...we've given you a chance to come together in peace! Get a time-table, you fortunate Iraqis. Take control. Take responsibility.

I mean, what's a democracy without responsibility?

Oh yeah, that'd be America, huh?

Suprise?! No October Surprise!

2006-11-08T17:19:00.000-05:00

Okay, I was wrong. No worries...not the first time, not the last. But I thought Team Bush would pull out all the stops to keep the Dems from taking over Congress and using subpoena power to investigate every sordid nook, each scummy cranny that we've see in the darkened face of the Imperial Presidency.

I predicted an October Surprise.

Nope. Nada. Nothing.

October Surprises aren't unprecedented:

The sudden end of President Carter's deal with the Iranians to release the hostages back in 1980, which would've given Carter the late push he needed to beat Reagan...and mutated over ensuing years into Iran-Contra.

This Administration's ever-so-good fortune in having Osama make a last minute appearance before the 2004 election.

Or the 2000 October Surprise which wasn't felt until November...the pre-emptive purging of over 50,000 voters from Florida's voter rolls...people who, quite coincidentally, were mostly Black and Democrats and would've voted for Al Gore. People who were convicted of crimes in years like 2008, 2010. A purge lorded over by Katherine Harris.

This time? I was certain we'd see Osama's dead body. Or a major plot uncovered. And if all else failed? Diebold would deliver.

But I was wrong. Why? Because something has changed since Katrina, the brutal storm that blew open America's eyes. Then came all those terror plots kept coming out just as revelations of Republican malfeasance spun into the news cycle. And Lou Dobbs went on a one-man crusade to scream and shout about electronic voting machines. And then there were scandals...scandals that the scandalizers assumed would fall into the infamous American memory hole and leave the perps unscathed. In the end, it was all too much. Too much Abramoff and earmarks, too much Halliburton and torture, too much talk of a fading Constitution and the end of ethics, too much Iraq and to many polls showing that America was seen around the world as despised and dangerous.

There are many other factors, including a growing feeling (over one-third, according to one poll) that 9-11 stinks...the official story stinks. People may not know why or what, but many can no longer ignore the smell.

But the key to understanding the cyncism that undid the Mayberry Machiavellis, those cynical users of power and propaganda? Look no further than gas prices. Yeah, gas prices. Remember how high they were? Coupled, of course, with stories of record profits for oil companies. Add a jigger of Texas Oil Mafia crude (or is it the crude Texas Oil Mafia?) and people knew. They knew they were getting screwed. Then September came, the campaign got hotter and the prices dropped. This time the story was too blatant to ignore. The mainstream media and mainstreet America didn't hesitate to think it was a fix. That the Oil Boys in the White House had tacitly, implicitly or explicitly made it so...so it would ease American anxiety before they went to the polls. Gas got cheaper as the stakes got higher and nearly no one flinched at the idea that there was...gasp...a conspiracy to affect the outcome of the election.

Bring up electronic voting machines and you'll get, for the most part, the same reaction. As a people, we've become acclimated to the idea that there are no coincidences. And why not? We've endured six years of a presidency that leaves nothing to chance. Mission Accomplished pasted onto the photo op, then it is airbrushed out. Bush goes to Iraq for Thanksgiving as poses with a plastic "stunt turkey" in a Baghdad mess hall. Terror plots that aren't really plots at all. No bid contracts. Stage managed rallies with hand-picked audiences. Staged evidence to get into Iraq, complete with vials of supposed anthrax and child-like drawings of mobile weapons labs...none of which were based in reality or fact.

So, for people who've been so relentlessly propagandized, so consistently cajoled and manipulated...many headed into this election expecting "something." Like I was expecting "something." But the tipping point may have come last night...when all that chatter about Diebold and terror scares, all that media jabbering about a shoo-in Democrat victory...it all made it nearly impossible for our Perp-in-Chief and his Roving propagandist to play three card monty with the election. They couldn't steal this election. They couldn't do much of anything but let the election actually happen. The ether was too thick with cynicism, too full of skepticism...too gorged of a diet of misdirection.

Live by the sword, die by the sword...ain't that the way that saying goes? They've had six years of unfettered swordsmanship. Last night, they finally fell on it. And the crackpot crazies of conspiracy-land are no longer yelping on the fringe. Not anymore. There has been to much conspiring...or, as exit polls called it, too much corruption. Because, my fellow fringers, what is corruption without a conspiracy to make it work?

Last night? Last night we saw the corruption exposed and rejected. I was wrong...Americans didn't get played one more time. Christ, I love being wrong.

Take a Toke of Some Homegrown...Terrorists

2006-06-23T19:33:00.000-04:00

Today:

Revelations about spying on bank records.

Mueller gives a speech on "homegrown terrorists."

Gonzales faces Senate questioning on domestic spying.

The Indian Affairs report released, detailing how Abramoff worked with Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist to launder money from tribes through various organizations. Norquist writes much of Bush's corporate crony-ass policies, Reed is God's boy and Christian frontman and key broker of the Bush's Christianity illusion.

The debate about Iraq still in the air.

Iraqi gov't proposes an amnesty for insurgents who've killed our soldiers.

AND:

And FBI informant poses as an Al Qaeda rep, goes to this feeble little group of malcontents and gets them on board with a "plan" to attack the Sears Tower and FBI offices. No bombs found. No weapons found. No money found. Only the "aspiration" to join in with the faux Al Qaeda operative. But, last night...and early enough to change the lead on every paper in America, they arrest this group of "homegrowners."

The news cycle is now sucked into this story, the rationale for spying on phone calls and bank records is clear...we have homegrown terrorists. We need homegrown spying. Now who on the Senate panel is going to argue against the tools to stop these homegrown terrorists? And they've got Alberto's boy, sycophant and shill who has slowed down Abramoff investigations—Alex Acosta--in Miami's US Atty's office to lord over this "sting." Timing is everything, and it's good to have a timekeeper in place.

This is taking the Indian Affairs report out of the news cycle.

This is taking the bank record story out of the news cycle.

This is proving that Al Qaeda exists.

This is showing we need to be afraid of homegrowners, people living in your neighborhood. And they are Black men, too! Double fear!

This is proving that the War on Terror is "real."

This is better than an elevated color alert.

This is showing the Bushies as vigilant, protectors of our safety

This is going to prep us for the GOP to hold the Congress and hold onto subpoena power (they just need the polls to be close enough, should they need their Diebold machines to pump out papertrail-less victories in key races...you know, plausible deniability)

Watch Bush's poll ratings climb.

Watch the timing.

Dead Again...The Zarqawi Effect

2006-06-08T10:16:00.000-04:00

Al-Zarqawi is dead.

Again.

That's right. This is the second time he's been reported dead. This time we have a Polaroid of his peaceful-looking face after an airstike apparently killed the visage of Al-Qaeda’s franchise in our imperial outpost. This time we have officials pushing the story.

This time.

Last time, it was just news reports and low-level official claims. This time, there is no news reporting getting in the way of the carefully displayed military announcement. No independent verification to muddy the water.

The timing couldn't be better. For Bush. For the new Iraqi "government," and for those Congressional sycophants who can't quite run away from their support for the war come November.

In fact, the Iraqis announced and swore in a Defense and Interior Minister at the same time Zarqawi was being bumped off...taking care of two persistent problems for our puppeteers in Baghdad. Those Ministry vacancies were a huge source of criticism.

In fact, the news of Zarqawi's re-death came during a meeting with Congressionalzoids...giving them what they needed. Some sort of victory in Iraq that also makes the bogus case for Al-Qaeda's "International Terrorist Network" in our occupied "terror-tory." It makes the case for referring to insurgents as terrorists.

And for Bush? Well, it takes Haditha and the mess of Iraq out of the news cycle. Perhaps for a day, perhaps for a week. And it makes our presence seem like a positive force in Iraq. We are trying to stop "the killers," as Georgie likes to call them. It's bullshit, of course...because Haditha and the thousands upon thousands of civilians we've killed did not benefit from our presence. But this is a perfect counterpoint to the boiling blood here and there about Haditha and the growing image of US occupation as torturous, murderous and self-serving.

And it's a perfect closing of the circle...between Zarqawi and Haditha. Because both are predicated on military sources. All of our info on Zarqawi...his rise from the dead, the regeneration of his leg, the beheading of Nick Berg, the various "video" of him, the website postings...all have come without independent verification. Without any verification, in fact. No one in the media asked questions...about Zarqawi being reported dead, losing a leg in Afghanistan, about Nick Berg's strange path to Zarqawi which had him sharing his computer and internet account with two 9/11 hijackers...and had him working on a radio transmitter at Abu Ghraib when he was beheaded by Zarqawi. No questions asked, no real verification of what we are told. Excuse me if I think Zarqawi has been a PsyOp from day one, particularly since we've seen Pentagon documents that say he was/is. He was. And is.

Which is the story of Haditha, right? We were told a totally bogus story. We are told what the military needs to tell us. And it took a long time to get the truth. A truth that came out because people asked questions. Because the verification was sought independently. And now we have the Zarqawi story, which has not been verified at all over the last couple years and which is...as I sit here writing this...being used to push Haditha out of the news cycle in favor of a new, shiny image of an effective military presence out to protect the Iraqi people from "terrorist killers." A shiny image of a War on Terror. A bogus image...but shiny.

So, Zarqawi is dead again. And so is a catch-all evildoer for most anything and everything that happened in Iraq. The link between Al-Qaeda, whether real or not, is now going to be harder to make. This is the downside from this stage PsyOp... that Team Bush is not going to have Zarqawi to kick around anymore. A cynic might think this is a sign of desperation...that they really needed a victory. Really needed to counter the Haditha story of a brutal military presence with no real benefit for Iraqis. That they needed to stop the bleeding in the polls.

Okay, so I'm a cynic.

Haditha

2006-06-02T10:06:00.000-04:00

This just in...we might actually care about Iraqi deaths.

Might.

It's been some time since Lancet, the British medical journal, determined that over 100,000 Iraqis were killed in the invasion and immediate aftermath of our pre-emptive strike against the non-threat known as Iraq.

It's been some time since the massacre at Fallujah, where we employed white phosphorus on the population...killing everything in that besieged town. Men, women, children, animals and insurgents. Dead.

It's been well over a decade since we began raining depleted uranium on Iraq, irradiating the land and the air...causing a massive spike in cancer rates and birth defects among the Iraq people. This is particularly so in southern Iraq.

And it's been two years of returning soldiers telling stories of Iraqis being killed at checkpoints, being run over by tanks and other imposing, high-priced military vehicles. Since we heard about torture. Since we heard British military commanders criticizing us for treating the Iraqis as subhuman.

Now we have Haditha. And yet another "civilian massacre" emerging in Ishaqi. And maybe we do have a conscience.

It's taken some time and tens of thousands of Iraqis being "liberated," as in liberated from their corporeal bodies and ushered into the freedom of death. Until now, we've spent countless hours mourning our dead and consoling our wounded. Close of 3,000 dead, close to 18,000 wounded. Soldiers. People sent into "battle," if that what it's been. But we've ignored the lives of human beings who saw their homes, their livelihoods and their families bombed into oblivion, shot apart in a mail of bullets....destroyed.

Warfare requires a level of dehumanization....that's a cliché of military history. Dehumanize the enemy to engender bloodlust. To soothe the humanity within that may, during the drive of destroy, short-circuit the command to kill. Haditha has finally broken the stranglehold on dehumanization...a stranglehold that kept its grip even throughout Abu Ghraib and countless bombing raids. We've soothed ourselves with the idea that Iraqis are terrorists, that they were connected to 9/11, that they would come here if we didn't kill them there...that we were liberating them.

Now we see what we are. What we are doing. What dehumanization spawns.

And we are beginning to see what dehumanization is doing to us. To the soldiers who buy into the mission, out of a desperate need to justify the unjustifiable and to make sense of the senseless of the killing they see...the killing the do.

Because dehumanizing the enemy ends up dehumanizing ourselves. Life becomes cheaper than usual. Everyone is an enemy. And our soldiers return home and fight the battle within themselves between their wounded humanity and lingering anxiety about day to day survival. They end up dehumanized. Alive...but not fully human.

Now it is time for us...the American people upon whom this war is justified...to wake up to our collective dehumanization. We are all responsible. It is easy to blame Team Bush. It's fruitless, because they don't care. Lives and humanity are not on their agenda. They care only about geopolitics, oil and war profiteering. They care about controlling us. And like other historical powers, they use war and dehumanization...the blood thirst for an enemy...to keep us in line. To preserve their agenda. Yes, they have lost support. In polls. But no one is camping out in the National Mall. Few are speaking out. Few are demanding justice and an end to the rape and murder of Iraq.

Coming out of the 20th Century, we find that there is little excuse for succumbing to the dehumanization. From the Nazis in WWII to our dehumanization of Vietnam and the various wars we were involved with around the globe, we saw over and over the result of dehumanization. We have no excuses.

Perhaps it is not too late. Haditha may finally humanize the plight of Iraqis, the death and destruction we've wrought. We, my friends. All of us. Because this is, at least nominally, a democracy and we bought into the big lie. It may not be too late for us to stop the dehumanization. It's too late for the thousands of dead Iraqis. But it may not be too late for us to stop ourselves.

I'll Be Back

2006-05-24T12:07:00.000-04:00

I am heading to my beloved California...Cally-fornia, as the Governator calls it...and I will be back to this blog upon my return. There is so much to write about...the fake story about Iran requiring minority religious groups to wear a badge, more media failures, the poll re: Americans' desire to re-open the 9/11 investigation...losta stuff.

To coin a phrase..."I'll be back."

NSA Spying and Two Framing the Debate

2006-05-17T13:14:00.000-04:00

The Bush Administration is spying. Spying big-time. Not just on foreign calls, not just on suspected terrorists. They are spying on us. All of us.

This story has been developing for years. It began with Iran-Contra luminary John Poindexter and his Total Information Awareness program. The TIA was initiated shortly after 9/11 and it was designed to create a massive, cross-referenced database of all sorts of information--financial transactions, phone calls, bank accounts, internet searches and usage--compiled on Americans. Eventually, it would include medical records and, once the data was collected, genetic information. It was Big Brother on steroids.

Congress didn't like that...so TIA was officially "ended." Sort of.

It was broken up and farmed out to private companies in bits and pieces. It lives on.

Then there is TALON, the Pentagon's other spying program which has been monitoring radical terrorists like The American Friends Service Committee, a.k.a. the Quakers, PETA and various peace groups and organizations. This program included human intel...spies going to meetings and collecting license plate numbers, for example. Just imagine how much info on terrorists the Pentagon can get from a meeting of Quakers!

But the Pentagon did have a seemingly successful monitoring and data mining operation called Able Danger. That effort was actually tracking Mohammed Atta and a couple other hijackers before 9/11. But that program got derailed. Derailed before 9/11 and before it could stop Atta and his flying circus. Funny that.

So, when we hear that millions of phone records were handed over to the NSA...it shouldn't come as a surprise. They...the proverbial "THEY"...want to have as much information on us as they can.

Why? To find terrorists?

Perhaps.

But the obvious conclusion is that they want to know what we are up to. The whos and whys and whens and that help THEM understand the population they govern. The population they need to...want to...control and manipulate. To identify "enemies." Not necessarily of the terrorist kind, either. As Brian Ross of ABC just found out, they want to find out who the enemies of their polices are...the people fighting their exercise of control and power. They want to shut up dissenters. Within the government and, based on TALON, those within the civilian population who disagree with them. Perhaps "stop" is too harsh a word vis-à-vis the TALON program. More like...keep tabs. Keep tabs on the arguments made and activates of dissenters.

This could come in handy for targeted efforts to infiltrate, to harass...to create election strategies. To undermine dissent.

But when it came to actually stopping Atta? Well, Able Danger had the plug pulled. But not the domestic spying on ordinary citizens. That is something we need to keep doing. Something the Administration has lied about, and now tries to justify.

Polls and polls and more polls pop up on this NSA thing. People may be uncomfortable, but the cache of stopping another 9/11 has quite a few American accepting the previously unacceptable.

In fact, the lingering fear from 9/11 has allowed the Administration and their minions in Congress to push through quite a bit. A couple versions of the Patriot Act. The accepted use of torture and of holding American citizens, among others, indefinitely without trial. The invasion of a country that posed no threat. Massive budget deficits that are, essentially, a wealth transfer from taxpayers to Bush-Cheney-Rummy buddies in the Military-Industrial Complex.

All to protect us.

It's all about protection. Just like the spying is, most likely, so they can protect themselves from the growing dissatisfaction with the strange road they are driving us down...using $3 a gallon gas to fuel their other buddies in Saudi Arabia and the oil industry.

Just like the $5 million windfall Rummy made off of Tami-Flu...selling his stock in Gilead after the Administration, in and effort to protect us, ordered an orgy of Tami-flu purchases.

Catastrophes are big business. And fear of catastrophe means big bucks and a level of compliance from the governed.

So the governed look at the NSA spying revelations and, according to those aforementioned polls, say, "Hey, I’ve got nothing to hide. If they want to hear me talk to my friends and family...fine. So long as it stops another 9/11"

There is a certain logic in this line of thinking. What can THEY do with tedious information on people who are innocent of terrorism? The "I’ve got nothing to hide" argument is a strong one.

Except when it is reversed. When there is something to hide. When hiding leads to suspicion.

Which brings us to the release of the Pentagon-9/11 “video” yesterday. Video that, according to newsreaders, disproves "wild conspiracy theories" about 9/11. Video that isn’t actually video. It is two frames added to the three frames previously released from one of many video cameras that caught the attack on the Pentagon. It took years and lawsuits to give us those two frames. Two frames that show little more than we saw before.

So, I ask all those Americans comfortable with the NSA spying...what is the Administration hiding? Why not give us the complete video? Not frames, but video we can watch and render comprehensible with slow-motion. Video we know they have.

And what about the video from the Sheraton Hotel or the Pentagon’s gas station or from the Virginia Dept. of Transportation cameras that would’ve shown the plane flying over the highway before impact?

Why, if we have nothing to fear from letting Uncle Big Brother Sam monitor our calls, don’t we ask for the video on the same grounds?

The timing of this release indicates that they are fearful...the THEY...not the American people. Because people are asking questions. Because Charlie Sheen, despite his messy divorce, asked good questions. Because there are films like Loose Change using simple science, photos, anomalies and basic questions to illustrate that something is being hidden.

Something.

The spying and the failure of Able Danger and the obvious lies about WMDs--yes, lies...just do the reading and you'll see that the lying is clear--all these oddities have people scratching their heads about this Administration and their agenda. They seem to be running wild and telling us things that don’t pan out...don’t make sense. They seem like hiding…energy policies, who leaked Valerie Plame’s name, reclassifying declassified documents.

They keep on hiding.

And people are finally waking up to the fact that they are being manipulated.

They...yes, that THEY...have something to hide. They are afraid. That fear led them to release two frames...framing the debate and allowing media cowards to debunk, use epithets and, generally, obfuscate a clear problem. Fear has THEM monitoring millions of phone calls and tracking the activities of peace groups. Fear has them hiding what they are doing.

But don’t expect media cowards to ask the obvious question: What are THEY hiding?

O.I.L. aka Operation Iraqi Liberation

2006-05-15T14:43:00.000-04:00

Here's a little vindication for the artificial scarcity thesis.

Today on Democracy Now!, investigative journalist Greg Palast discussed his new book Armed Madness.

Palast is the guy who, after fleeing to Britain in search of a chance to actually report news, broke the story of over 50,000 names purged from voter lists in Florida before the 2000 election. Names that "sounded Black," were in predominately Democrat districts...names with felony convictions in 2007, for example. A purge carried out by Choice Point...a firm hired by Katherine Harris.

Palast has been all over Hugo Chavez and the US-supported coup that failed shortly after the Bushies took office. Hugo’s got some oil, btw.

Palast also pointed out that the acronym for the invasion of Iraq, used by Ari Fleischer in his first invasion press conference, was Operation Iraqi Liberation--O.I.L. I love the Bushies’ sense of humor.

Now, in his new book, Palast gives us the document that proves the artificial scarcity thesis promoted in this blog. Here is an excerpt from today's interview:

AMY GOODMAN: Is the war in Iraq a war for oil?

GREG PALAST: Is the war in Iraq for oil? Yes, it's about the oil, but not for the oil. In my investigations for Armed Madhouse, I ended up with a story far more fascinating and difficult than I imagined. We didn't go in to grab the oil. Just the opposite. We went in to control the oil and make sure we didn't get it. It goes back to 1920, when the oil companies sat in a room in Brussels in a hotel room, drew a red line around Iraq and said, “There'll be no oil coming out of that nation.” They have to suppress oil coming out of Iraq. Otherwise, the price of oil will collapse, and OPEC and Saudi Arabia will collapse.

And so, what I found, what I discovered that they’re very unhappy about is a 323-page plan, which was written by big oil, which is the secret but official plan of the United States for Iraq's oil, written by the big oil companies out of the James Baker Institute in coordination with a secret committee of the Council on Foreign Relations. I know it sounds very conspiratorial, but this is exactly how they do it. It's quite wild. And it's all about a plan to control Iraq's oil and make sure that Iraq has a system, which, quote, “enhances its relationship with OPEC.” In other words, the whole idea is to maintain the power of OPEC, which means maintain the power of Saudi Arabia.

And this is one of the reasons they absolutely hate Hugo Chavez. As you’ll see in next week's Harper's coming out, which is basically an excerpt from the book, Hugo Chavez on June 1st is going to ask OPEC to officially recognize that he has more oil than Saudi Arabia. This is a geopolitical earthquake. And the inside documents from the U.S. Department of Energy, which we have in the book and in Harper's, say, yeah, he's got more oil than Saudi Arabia.

Now, if you gotta understand the relationship between the Bush family and the Saudis, and the Kuwaitis, for that matter. The relationship between Enron and the California energy crisis. The ultimate two-fer that they and their corporate base are now enjoying...the use of war to both profiteer the defense budget and to profiteer the oil market. Plus, it generated a terrorist state where there wasn't one, amplifying the fear they use to preserve power and justify huge budget increases.

Palast also writes about the continued gaming of elections. The fact that Black voters are, from one election tot he next, finding more and more of their votes thrown out as "spoiled," or as votes unable to be counted. Add Diebold to that and, well, you’ve got a huge consolidation of control over the outcomes of elections.

Now, Palast had to go overseas to do the reporting he does. Reporting that British viewers see. But not us. When he had the Florida election scam by the short and curlies, he took it to CBS and they bought exclusive rights to the story. CBS then, just a few days before the story was to air, told him they would not run the story because it wasn't strong enough...they did not have enough verification. Because actual documents are not strong enough to make a good story. Because they had exclusive rights, the story died there. And the Bush Presidency lived on.

Welcome to our news bubble, my friends.

So, I take Palast's use of an actual document with a grain of salt. The document will be ignored by our mainstream media whores...much like the PNAC's stunning plan for Iraq and the world--Rebuilding America's Defenses.

For those of us crazy enough to ask questions and consider documents, Palast has given us a cool drink of water in a dry and thirsty land. A little refreshment in this choked-off bubble.

Thanks, Palast.

Artificial Scarcity, Gas Prices and You

2006-05-10T12:55:00.000-04:00

Iraq is a big success.

Well, it is for US oil companies, defense companies, construction firms and Saudi Arabia.

A ripping good, record profit bonanza. Dividend heaven.

Which may account for the "investor" tax cut House and Senate GOPers just dreamed up. Don't want those profits getting into the wrong hands, after all.

But Iraq doesn't register in the debate about record profits for oil companies, or enter into the equation when babbling heads ponder the source of our gas pump woes.

It's Iraq.

And artificial scarcity.

Here's the deal.

When Bill "He's like a member of the Bush family" Clinton bombed Baghdad in 1998, he forced out the UN inspection team. What we now know comports with what some of those inspectors went on to tell us--that Iraq was nearly in compliance with UN resolutions regarding WMDs. In other words, Iraq didn't have WMDs.

Iraq had destroyed stockpiles for years, but the real kicker is the basic scientific fact that WMDs--biological and chemical--have a really short shelf life. So, anything the inspectors didn't get would be useless by 2000. By 1998, for that matter.

There's Iraq and Saddam, sitting on the verge of ending sanctions and sitting on the world's second largest oil reserves. Second only to Saudi Arabia.

Imagine if you will, a world where Saddam is free of those sanctions...with all that oil...with infrastructure contracts going to Russia and France...with the capability of rebuilding his country and flooding the oil market with a newly opened spigot. Imagine Iraq in charge of its own oil.

Imagine your gas at $1.15 per gallon.

Add to that Saddam's threat to trade oil in Euros. The same threat the Iranians are trying to make good on right now. Silly Iranians.

Imagine oil profits sinking and Saudi Arabia with a real threat to it's dominance of oil markets.

They did. Team Bush, the Saudis, oil companies...they foresaw lean times ahead if Saddam drove the price of oil down to $20 per barrel. Now, there are lean times and there are lean times. No starvation on the horizon for those folks, to be sure. But not the flood of cash they are now seeing. Not even close.

So why did we go into Iraq? It’s money. And in our fake free market...it's fake, believe me...artificial scarcity is the golden goose. The destabilization of Iraq, which is producing less oil now than it did throughout the sanctions, was goal number one of the invasion. Oil rockets up in price. Profits follow. Because the price of getting that oil to market hasn't changed. The supply has been choked and the psychology of the market has been manipulated. Much like the bellicose talk about Iran is doing now. A double whammy for oil prices.

Oil execs know this is a win-win. They get more profits per barrel, and they lengthen the life of the resource. Get that last part? They take a resource that most say is limited--lasting until 2040, or earlier or later, depending on the numbers--and they choke off production. Rather than Iraq, for example, flooding the market and expending their oil for $20 per barrel and, therefore, using it up at a steady rate...they oil stays in the ground and gets to market over a longer period of time at a much higher rate of return.

Simple, pure economics. Artificial scarcity.

Now, when you look at who got us involved in this Iraq bullshit it's obvious there is a cui bono, or "who benefits," question that is easy to answer. Hello...it's oil companies, Saudis, construction companies. Simple, simple, simple.

But we hear about ANWR, refining capacity, the huge American appetite for oil. We hear about China sucking up oil.

Not Iraq.

Remember when we were told Iraq's oil would pay for our invasion, for their rebuilding...remember that?

What a joke. What a lie.

They knew it wouldn't work that way. They didn't want it to work that way. This is what they wanted. An Iraq in turmoil. Oil markets spooked. Saudis getting rich. Oil companies getting rich. A permanent military presence in Iraq. Once the country is poisoned with depleted uranium, the population is in tatters and the country in a long, seething civil war...big oil can begin to extract the oil and sell it at $70, $90, or even $100 per barrel.

But that comes later.

When China is desperate for oil to make us plastic shit we buy at Wal-Mart with credit floated by their banks...when China is desperate enough to pay those massive prices.

And when we are desperate here at home. When any last shot at the middle-class American dream is eaten up by the consumption culture we've bought into...and we pour those ephemeral dreams into the gas tank to fill up our must-have vehicles. Vehicles we need to get to work to earn money to pay the monthly minimum on our credit cards, to pay those rising mortgage rates...to drive to Wal-Mart to buy more plastic shit.

Iraq is the linchpin of the long-term strategy of sucking the life and money out of the middle class. I know it’s counter-intuitive, but civil war is good. Divided populations are good. Hey, it worked for the Romans.

The Iraqis will never be able to manage their oil like, say, the Venezuelans. Or the way the Iranians wanted to under Mossadeq...until we overthrew him and put the Shah in power.

That oil belongs to the rich. To the investor class. To those who will get yet more tax cuts on their dividends. Not to those who provide the children and the dollars to fund their expeditions into the brave new world of geopolitics and petropolitics. We get artificial scarcity, the daily struggle to make ends meet and the sort of power that is afforded to those without the money to buy influence.

In other words…not much.

It works. It worked in California. Enron and other energy corporations screwed the market, created artificial scarcity and shut down electricity generation. The country gasped at the rolling blackouts. Cheney got his Energy Commission. Corporations got their handouts and deregulation. And now California has power plants that they don’t need. But construction companies sure made out. And we got the rationale for the Bush-Cheney energy policy. A policy of profiteering.

But keep on thinking it's about refining capacity. Even though, in this supposed free market, it’s up to oil companies to build those refineries...not taxpayers. Why haven’t they built them? Hmmm. Maybe it's artificial scarcity?

Keep thinking we need hybrids. Even though Honda made a gas-only car in the mid-80s...the CRX HF...that got 60 miles per gallon. More than most hybrids get today. Artificial scarcity, perhaps?

Keep thinking it's about ANWR. Even though every oil analyst knows that any oil pulled from that reserve will be shipped to Asia, not to the domestic market. Artificial scarcity?

You see, we don't have a free market. We have capitalism. And capitalism is run by a small oligarchy that uses the system, uses government, to monopolize and profiteer. They manipulate the market. They get their cronies and agents elected. They get taxpayers to fund resource grabs and to undercut their own power as consumers. They use artificial scarcity to increase their profits which, in turn, increases their power by giving them more money to buy political influence.

When you go to the pump and bitch about the high price of gas, just think about the high price paid by tens of thousands of Iraqis...many of them children...who’ve died to keep those prices high. Think about the price paid by thousands of soldiers...their lives and their limbs...to keep those prices high.

Think about a power system that has the gall to try to extend tax cuts to the investors who are making money hand over fist because of artificial scarcity.

Think, for Christ's Sake.

Colbert Exposed the Whores of Babylon

2006-05-05T11:25:00.000-04:00

Revelations 17:13
These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.

Last Saturday a one-man vice squad rolled into town and, using a killer set of elegantly written jokes, exposed the DC Media Scrum for what it is...a bunch of whores.

The Whore of Babylon, a.k.a. Washington DC, thrives on intellectual, ethical and financial prostitution. The power elites pimp out their whores--politicians, lobbyists and, woefully, journalists. We are expected to buy their services. Most of us do get screwed, after all. And we certainly pay for their "services" with copious amounts of taxes, gas prices and other forms of consumerism.

But the vast majority of Americans have no idea of how incestuous, how totally whored-out the media is. They watch, read and listen...hoping against hope that journalism happens. Will happen. That they'll get some semblance of the truth. That the "journalists" actually give a damn.

Enter Stephen Colbert. The Mock O'Reilly, the faux uber-journalist...the comedic babbling head of Babylon. Well, he's based in NY...but you know what I mean.

Colbert was invited to DC's annual clusterfuck...the White House Correspondents' Dinner. A special event at which "the covered" and those "who should be covering them" get together and glad-hand, share cocktails, suck up and back-slap. A night when DC can be Hollywood...glammed out and ready go down on each other on their way up.

It's a night the Prezzie and the Pressies try to laugh at themselves. Good natured ribbing. Like W's routine a couple years ago about looking for WMD under a desk in the Oval Office. You know, while ten of thousands are dying. Funny stuff, that.

It's usually a tame affair. They invite a celeb to come and toss some soft jibes...you know...jokes that caress their egos with the touch of importance.

But this year they got Colbert. And Colbert's mock media-whore persona was a perfect foil, an ironically appropriate messenger...an unsullied voice speaking truth in one blistering joke after another. Ripping, funny, biting comedic genius.

It was a truly funny set. Just on the merits of comedy writing. He killed. Because good comedy must be based on an element of truth. It's the bitter truth at the center of a good joke that makes that joke so damn funny.

And Colbert had losta truth to work with.

But all that truth and comedy has caused a stir. The media has blacked out his appearance, not mentioning it or showing it on television, preferring to show W and his impersonator. No mention of the seethe on W face while Colbert hammered him.

Meanwhile, print journalism is in an uproar. Journalists and opinionistas are ranting and raving about Colbert...his rudeness, his lack of graciousness...his supposed lack of humor. That last one is the most specious of the arguments. Colbert was damn funny.

You see, it wasn't just that Colbert attacked a sitting Prezzie with his rapier wit, but Colbert also skewered the press. The supine and facile bunch of whores who suck face with any official source who can make their career. Who get in bed with the power elite and do what it takes to preserve their access...to stenographic interviews, to self-congratulatory dinner parties...to the high-life of perceived importance that makes America journalism the joke that it is.

The joke that Colbert told over and over again all night long.

But it hasn't been covered in the mainstream media...they won't show the jokes...and they are trying to bury him. Because they are the real whores...all Jeff Gannons of one sort or another. They care far more about keeping their status and their paychecks and their kids in elite private schools than a vague, quaint ideal of journalism. They do, however, like to prostitute the idea that they are journalists. Meanwhile, they serve the corporate pimps who keep them on the streets.

Colbert's shtick encapsulates all that is wrong with media whores. His faux attack on "truthiness" and on the "well-known liberal bias" of reality...and his generous heaps of sycophantic praise for the Administration. Colbert's shtick mocked the utter and complete lack of real reporting by the White House Correspondents' and the vast majority of DC's media whores.

And they cannot stand to see themselves for what they are...on the one night they all get together to celebrate the very sense of importance and entitlement that makes them the whores that they are. Colbert's media whore persona offers Americans far more "truth" that they get in a month's worth of news from the crowd se faced that night.

So, they've come together to banish Colbert into the margin, to minimize and trivialize and criticize. Because they want to keep turning their tricks. Because they've been shamed.

Not surprisingly, the internet is buzzing with praise for Colbert. People, despite the media's best efforts, realize that they've been getting screwed for years and they are responding to Colbert's appearance. Because he was funny. Because he was ballsy and bold in front of a bunch of cowards. Because he was right.

Judging Nuremberg, Judging Ourselves

2006-04-26T12:58:00.001-04:00

The Nuremberg Trials closed the book. A book of horrors, a book of torture and killing and genocidal zealotry. A fitting end to those who set in motion the death of 40 million people. The end of World War II.

Filmmaker Steve Palackdharry has made a poignant and strangely trenchant documentary, Journey to Justice, about the story of a German Jew who, after fleeing his homeland, wound up participating in the Nuremberg Trials...in the prosecution of the men who forced him out of his home, his life...and took from him his family.

A German Jew. The irony is that German Jews were, up to the rise of the Nazis, very German. Very patriotic, supportive of their country in World War I...a wealth of talent and intellect and manpower that the Nazis squandered. That they drove into nations of their enemies. That they murdered.

Journey to Justice takes us back to Germany, and back through the events that lead to Nuremberg. The personal story is compelling. The history of Nazism through the eyes of a victim. Judgment at Nuremberg made personal.

Watching this unfold--all the warnings that turned into indignities, evolved into injustice and then mutated into torture, ethnic cleansing, war and Holocaust--is compelling. Yes, it's history...well-known history. But in watching the film one is struck by just how little we've learned from history. How little long-term success has come out of the Nuremberg Trials' attempt to put man's amazing capacity for inhumanity into a rational, law-based context. How little the precedents and laws on war crimes seem to matter just six decades later.

Because it was not war that was on trial. It was war crimes. Crimes that stretch the elastic boundaries of war itself into untold brutality, terrorism, torture and genocide. America spearheaded those trials. We were, at that one gleaming point in time, the beacon...the hero...the lawgiver.

But now we are the enemy of the laws we helped to create. We are exploiting every loophole, telling every lie...committing war crimes without remorse. You see, it's the remorse that really matters. The insanity of war causes men to do terrible things. But the lack of remorse, after the all the battles have been fought, cannot be explained within the insanity of war. It begins to look like evil.

So we torture. We found out last week that Rumsfeld was monitoring the torture of one man on the weekly basis. We bomb civilians. Tens of thousands of them. We put thousands of Iraqis in "detention centers"--a soft euphemism for concentration camps--and we torture them. We hold them without charges. We drive them from their homes.

We use chemical weapons. At least, that's what the Pentagon called White Phosphorus in the early 90s. But now it is an "incendiary weapon."

Not "chemical" according to the current euphemism.

And we are committing acts of genocide. Not the terribly efficient kind of Nazis camps, but a slower sort of genocide. Slower, but with even longer consequences. Depleted uranium has rained down on Iraq. First in the Gulf War, and now since our invasion and occupation. This depleted uranium disperses and contaminates. The air. The soil. The water. The body. Cancer has grown exponentially since the Gulf War. Birth defects are rampant throughout Southern Iraq. The pictures of deformed and stillborn Iraq babies are staggering. And now we've done it again. All across Iraq. Even in Baghdad.

This genocide will last for centuries. There is no liberation from the radiation. The Allies were too late to save millions upon millions of European Jews, various democrats, homosexuals, dissenters and gypsies. Will we ever be able to stop the poisoning of a land and a people? Poison that, by the way, floats on the air to far-flung places around the region. Poison that affects our own troops. That caused Gulf War Syndrome.

I am a historian of fascism. I've studied it. Written about it. Reviewed it over and over in my mind. Watching Journey to Justice reminded me why I looked into the abyss. It is there...it is real. It must be understood. It is a journey, too. Into the depths. And it has changed me. But it is history, right? It's over, right?

The journey Steve Palackdharry took, across sea and land and time, has not stopped. It did not stop in Nuremberg. As much as we'd like to think it did. As much as I'd like to think it did. To think that the last chapter of that book has been written, the tome placed upon a shelf to gather dust. Rather, we are merely writing the next chapter of that book. A book that has been filled with war crimes in Guatemala, Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, Angola, Rwanda and the Sudan.

Strangely, a close look at the history of the last sixty years finds us...the US...involved in many of the war crimes. In most of those countries...we did it, or trained and armed and advised those who did it. And here we are again. Like Vietnam. But worse. Because Americans are, unlike that war, not too concerned. Gas prices. American Idol. Distractions. Indifference. A lack of remorse.

In Journey to Justice, Hermann Goehring's lack of remorse is noted. Unabashed. Defiant.

Sound familiar?

But it is too much to expect our leaders to show remorse. Not these leaders. Not leaders who pulled the plug on US involvement in the International Criminal Court, who did legal gymnastics to find loopholes in the Geneva Conventions. To undermine the laws that flowed with retributive humanity out of Nuremberg...to protect themselves from prosecution.

Here we are. We can watch one man's Journey to Justice. We can learn. We can try. We can feel remorse.

Or, we can wait and hope...that someone will stop us and that someday, somehow...some tortured, displaced and exiled young Iraqi who lost his family will have his own journey. And that we will finally learn the lessons we once tried to teach.

Problem, Reaction, Solution

2006-04-24T14:38:00.000-04:00

G.W.F. Hegel. Philosopher of everything, and everything else not contained in the known universe. Hegel's tough. Real tough. So much Hegel, so little time.

We've all had a bit of Hegel in our education. Maybe you had him in your high school world history/western civ class. Most draw a straight line from Hegel to Marx to communism. It can be argued, and I have...at great length, that he spawned fascism, too.

Maybe you had a taste of him in high school science. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. Remember that?

That simple formulation was Hegel's most famous contribution. It's scientific...but it's also philosophical...and political.

But the language is off. Not totally off, but off enough to cloud the impact ol' Heggie had on political thinkers and power elites.

Try this: Problem, Reaction, Solution. Notice the subtle difference? Not so antiseptic. A bit more ominous. A lot more enlightening.

It's simple. You, "Mr Power Player," want to get something done. But there is this new social reality...mass culture. Industrialization, the growth of cities, early democratic ideas and that damn bastard Guttenberg have changed the top heavy, aristocratic world into a new, mass-oriented world. A world that demands the active building of support from the governed. Consent of the governed, some dreamers called it.

But some of what you, Mr Power Player, want to do isn't necessarily in the interest of the governed. Their consent is not a given. Not anymore. Let's say...you want to invade another country...maybe to get their bananas. Maybe Bonzo is hungry. Whatever. You gotta feed the monkey.

What to do?

Turn to Hegel. He's got the formula. You need to create a Problem. A big Problem. If it ain't big? Well, make it dramatic enough to appear big, or ominous enough to sell it as big. Let's just say, for the sake of our example, that evil, Godless, atheist, anti-freedom and anti-apple pie Badguys are about to take away the right of peasants to work tirelessly on huge banana plantations owned by a small clique of elites. Plantations that, it just so happens, ship cheap bananas to Bonzo through the loving and gracious auspices of Bananas for Bonzo, Inc.--a wholly-owned subsidiary of Freedom Businesses Worldwide. The Badguys take power through an "election" and...gasp...nationalize the banana plantations, and...gasp deeper...redistribute the land to the peasants.

Now, the Badguys may have been elected. But, c'mon...elections are conditional events. The condition being the outcome and whether that outcome works in the interest of Power Players. If not? Well, Great Men in History...as Hegel called them...are like great chefs. They gotta break some eggs to make those tasty omelets.

So the Problem is that Banana Country is now Godless Pinko dynamite and the battle to protect Apple Pie and Mom requires stopping the Pinkos there, before we have to fight them here. Propaganda, fear, disinformation. Good ways to illustrate the problem. Maybe you try bombings, start up a band of Freedom Fighters, fund a future dictator. The bombings are good, though. You might even be able to blame them on the Pinkos. No one will ever figure it out. The terrorism is cladestine, so anyone can be blamed. Massacres of peasants can be blamed on regime, too. It's all about the blame game.

Then comes the Reaction. Some of the indigenous Banana people will react. But, mostly, you want the international community and folks on the home front to react. And react they will. Constant images and reports of Godlessness, of anti-Apple Pieism...of the de facto imprisonment of a people yearning for Freedom...will create support for the Freedom Fighters. For the need to intervene. For the need to stop them there before they come here.

Civil war will come. Death Squads, summary executions, torture. people will die. But the deaths will only show how desperately they need us to intervene. Yes, people will die. But remember those omelets...those tasty omelets that we eat when we consume. Omelets, with a side of ripe bananas.

You see, the Solution is already there...just waiting for enough of a Reaction to make it look organic. To get the consent of enough of the masses to make it all...well...democratic-esque.

After a bit of a civil war, Banana Land gets some intervention from the Marines, the regime is topple and a few bases are built. For "stabilization." A large Embassy will do fine in the long run. The new rulers...democrats in word, but not deed...will be trained in he fine arts of suppression, armed with the fine weapons of defense contractors and paid the fine dollars of American taxpayers they need to do it all. And Bananas for Bonzo, Inc. will get access to cheap plantations and cheaper labor. A sweetheart deal for the company that just wants to lead Banana Land to the sort of free market economy that makes for free people.

Now, this sarcastic little yarn might seem far-fetched. Wars are generated? Can it all be so Machiavellian?

Problem, Reaction, Solution plays out more often that you'd think. Sometimes future enemies are supported...Noriegas, Saddams, Ho Chi Mihns and, yes, even Castro. Sometimes terrorists are organized and supported, through covert ops and allies...like Al Qaeda. It can be as banal as dressing up in your enemies' uniforms and attacking yourself, like the Nazis did in Poland or the Japanese did in Manchuria. Sometimes it's hard to pin down, like the bombing of the Maine...which gave us a nice little war with Spain and colonies in Cuba and the Philippines.

The banana story is real. Read Richard Barnet's Intervention and Revolution about the United Fruit Company. The Bush family was heavily invested in United Fruit, by the way. Something similar happened to Iran when Mossadeq wanted to nationalize Iran's oil fields.

Stephen Kinzer has revived some of Barnet in his new book, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. Kinzer exposes the sorry little truth about our American delusion...that we are not, and have not been, and imperial power. Even though he doesn't mention Hegel, take a look and see how we...or our Power Players...have used Hegel's formula to expand, expand, expand.

It happens. Problems are created. People React. Solutions are implemented. And we go on thinking that the hurly-burly of human events is organic. That wars just happen.

But they don't. Not as often as they are created.

Hegel set the tone for History. Yes, that's History with a capital H. The march of mankind. And he gave the Power Players their marching orders. Or gave them the formula for giving us our marching orders. Marching into other countries to take what the Power Players want, so they can feed us the omelets that keep us fat and happy. And Bonzo gets his bananas.

Zarqawi, We Hardly Know Ya

2006-04-19T08:49:00.001-04:00

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The highly pixilated face of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The webmaster of terror. The symbol of Iraq as ground zero in the war on Islamic evildoers.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The PsyOp.

A "one-day" story appeared last week in Post. Unfortunately, one-day stories give a glossy finish to the veneer of journalism. This one-dayer referred to Pentagon documents and interviews with personnel. This story exposed the Pentagon's Psychological Operation...to exaggerate the role of Zarqawi in Iraq.

Let's just think about this. The Pentagon has been running a PsyOp to exaggerate the role of Zarqawi.

Now, Zarqawi's rise has been a stunning one. First, he rose from the dead. That's right, the Pentagon had him listed as dead after a battle in Afghanistan. And he grew back a leg. Media outlets reported he'd lost a leg along the way.

Then he appeared. Alive, with a leg and in a mask...decapitating Nick Berg. That infamous video. The beginning of the Al-Qaeda-ization of Iraq. Of course, it was interesting to consider Zarqawi's power of regeneration and ability to stand up and cut off Nick Berg's head. Stranger things have happened, right? Like the oddity that Nick Berg had, according to then Atty General Ashcroft, shared his laptop and email account with two of the 9/11 hijackers. Or that he was in Iraq, jamming around the country on his own with a well-worn copy of the Koran. And working on the radio transmitter at Abu Ghraib. Right after the torture photos hit the media.

Oh, the odds. The odds that Zarqawi would be alive, leggy and capture a man who cavorted with two hijackers.

Then came the Al-Qaeda phase of Iraq. Iraq as Al-Qaeda battleground, not as sovereign nation with no Al-Qaeda ties under a brutal US occupation. An imperialistic story gave way to a great story about the struggle against evil. Raw meat for fearful Americans. Grist for the propaganda mill we call the White House.

As the ignored article states:

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Oh. Okay.

Frankly, there is good reason to believe that Zarqawi has been dead all along. Too many things had to happen to make him the face of evil. What little video we've seen has been so pixilated and distorted...to the point that this television producer must question it's veracity. It would be damn easy to take digital images and make them move that poorly, with that much distortion.

And then there are the statements, often transmitted over the internet. Has it ever occurred to you that all of those Al-Qaeda statements posted on "militant websites" can be traced? You know...by IP address? To the server? Like the NSA and Pentagon is doing to us domestically? Why can't the spysters in the Pentagon shut down these websites?

Maybe they don't want to shut them down.

Perhaps it's related to the PsyOp. Could be related to the push to the generate an evil Al Qaeda doppelganger for Bin Laden. Remember him? Another PsyOp? Well, one has to consider the possibility. One has to consider anything...everything propagandistic is, apparently, on the table.

Obviously, someone in the Pentagon is trying to put the brakes on the spin, because it's spinning out of control. Spinning us into Iran. There are many good people at the Pentagon and they are trying to tell us. This PsyOp info is, to anyone willing to pay attention, stunning. A stunning admission that what we are told is often manufactured. That the US is a target audience for PsyOp info...to cajole, to enrage, to manipulate. To generate consent.

Zarqawi. The Max Headroom of terror?

We have been living one complicated, expansive, multifaceted PsyOp since the 2000 Election. But here is a peek past the curtain. A scary, troubling peek into the edit room where reality is cut and animated and spliced and produced.

Zarqawi has been a PsyOp. And it begs the question...where does it end?

A Year of Living Selfishly

2006-03-28T10:40:00.000-05:00

Drama. Life unfolds in a dozen different ways, with a dozen different dramas. Life as a cable box, switching from one channel to the next, one a soap opera...another a news channel and another a sitcom. Some are melodramas, some comedies...and some are hugely important events that happen in real time, but seem strangely distant from the personalized soap operas we linger on.

It was over a year ago that I lingered on one channel--my personal soap opera channel.

Prior to the cliffhanger I've been hanging on to for the last 14 months, awaiting the denouement that will never come, I was a channel surfer extraordinaire. The sitcoms and the news were my favorite personal programs. But it was the news...the massive changes, the undeniable lies and the tidal currents of history, the events that affected me and the human future...that's where my attention span seemed endless.

It's who I was. Who everyone knew me as...the historian, the skeptic, the human drama king. My attention to detail and dedication to deciphering the sour notes in the cacophony of media voices kept me busy. Very busy.

Then I was distracted. No, I was obsessed. Consumed with a new drama...my personal melodrama. My life fell to pieces. I fell to pieces.

She may have done what she did partially because of my news-show couch potato lifestyle. Perhaps I should've been more focused on the other channels of my life. Perhaps I should've been watching my soap opera more, and I would've been surprised less. Or not surprised at all. The plot twist that felt more like a knife twisting in my heart...maybe it would not have happened.

But it did. And my laser-like gaze turned away from the news and from the unfolding of history and rested squarely on the details, the characters and the melodrama of my personal pain. I obsessed. Now all the details of that betrayal are...like the ins and outs of modern history, of fascist ideology, of the CIA and US foreign policy, and of 9/11 and the advance of American empire...accessible to my computer-like memory. What made me a formidable historian made me a pitiful person.

But I still was awake. Barely, at times, but still conscious of the news and the world. Yet, I stopped paying my full attention to our national truth debt. I left 9/11 alone. No more soliloquies. No more recitations. No more passionate pleas to people to just take a look. Just my pain.

Last week...a week of Charlie Sheen and V for Vendetta...I was hit with the larger context and a staggering amount of perspective. I was hit with my own wallowing selfishness. I lost some of the obsession with my personal melodrama because I faced, once again, the desperate human drama that trumps all else.

While I selfishly thought of myself over the course of a year, others were working hard. Working against their own self interest by taking risks...risking the sort of marginalization that ends careers, brings ridicule and dares the establishment to knock them down. Over the course of that year, the cable box of my life ran new productions...created new programs that go further than ever. Further in showing, with startling images, tireless investigations and bold veracity, the full extent of the lie that our national life and the world's geopolitical life continue to be based on.

But I wasn't watching. I ignored the full schedule of programming on the cable box of my life

Last week, Charlie Sheen came forward to put the lie of 9/11 to the test. To force the media to stop cowering. And I woke up. I got activated. All those facts and questions and anomalies came flooding back. So, I shifted my gaze and looked once again into the abyss. People have been doing amazing work. Compiling video, gathering the stray facts...demanding answers.

My melodrama seems, in light of their efforts, a bit melodramatic. My year of living selfishly must relent. At least a bit. That soap opera, with it's startling revelations and love and pain and hurt, will still be with me. It's still running on that channel. But I am surfing again. Or, I am just deferring the obsession with that pain for the less personal, but no less important, pain of being lied to as an American, of having tens of thousands of innocents killed in my name and seeing our Constitution and the well-being of our soldiers and the world put in jeopardy.

I still hurt. But there is more pain for me to feel. And that pain requires my attention. It requires my mind and my ability to collate data. I have to change the channel...at least long enough to see what else is happening.

Charlie Sheen Scores a Tipping Point

2006-03-25T10:01:00.000-05:00

Four years of waiting has come to an end.

Although millions of people, dozens of alternative media figures, a handful brave scholars and experts and few former government officials have labored away at the filling the gaping holes in the official conspiracy theory of 9/11...the mainstream media has ignored the questions that remain locked away in our collective unconscious. Nagging doubts. Strange coincidences.

All are verboten. Unpatriotic. UnAmerican.

The labels don't dissuade many who toil in anonymity or proclaim with mainstream-muzzled bullhorns. But those labels are an effective death sentence for anyone in the public eye.

Newsreaders, reporters, journalists, historians...entertainers. The leap they make is off a giant cliff...into the troubled waters of career death, of ridicule and marginalization. They might be consigned to the Grassy Knoll of history.

But it takes someone with visibility and titanium balls to break through. To force the media to face the toughest of questions. How could the laws of physics be abrogated? How could short-term smoldering fires do what dozens of long-term raging fires could not? Why did W just sit there? How could the BBC find hijackers alive and well years after the attacks?

How? Why?

Enter Charlie Sheen. Yeah, Charlie f'ing Sheen. An actor. Yes, he's successful. Likeable. Intelligent. Good genes. I mean, I wouldn't break up with Denise Richards. Look at her, for Christ's sake. That takes balls.

Charlie's got 'em.

This week he went of the Alex Jones Show and, in so doing, was the first person to put himself on the line to ask the question...Why doesn't the official conspiracy about 19 highjackers add up?

This may be the tipping point I've been waiting for.

CNN's Headline News has a show--Showbiz Tonight--and they've been all over it all week. Three nights in a row of coverage. Fair coverage, I might add. It's stunning to a self-hating media whore like myself. This is huge. HUGE! On Thursday and Friday, A.J. Hammer (another brave soul, I might add) led off the broadcast with the story and interviewed Alex Jones...twice! Jones might not be the palatable advocate to lefties...he's an unabashed Christian, he's for gun rights, he's against abortion...but he's squarely against this Administration and has compiled hundreds of articles, documents, interviews. He's the effective leader of the movement to re-open the 9/11 story and to find out what really happened. A.J. Hammer put his career on the line and let Jones say the unsayable. As a denizen of the mainstream media...please hear me...this is the bravest thing I've seen in two decades. Running the risk of drinking hemlock on camera...that's bravery.

But Charlie got it off the ground.

Sheen called Jones and said he wanted to go public. And he did. In our celebrity and fame driven culture, Sheen knew what this would do. And it did. CNN didn't cower. It didn't ignore. And it's started a firestorm on the internet. FOX News has even begun to trash Sheen and the sycophant bloggers are attacking Alex Jones as a liberal. Dude, listen to Jones...he's no liberal.

Jones, according to Sheen, has quite a following in Hollywood. People know. People all across the country...not just the "liberal elite" of Hollywood. This crosses party lines and ideology. I think we all know, somewhere in the back of our minds, that something stinks. That things just don't add up. And think of how the stink as risen to a wrenching stench since that fateful day.

Something's gone wrong in America.

But we all live in fear...fear of being labeled. I cannot peddle my litany of facts in my job. I can't propose stories about this. I simply can't...not if I want to eat.

We all have that pressure. Sheen does...but not so much. He could be opening the door for his fellow performers and people in the media to finally speak up. God knows, we need someone to speak up.

This could, though, be the tipping point. The domino that starts a chain reaction of media coverage, of more celebrities coming forward...of more media figures treading on the dangerous ground of career suicide.

As I look back at American history, I see so many times when a tipping point was passed by, and our country has mutated a little bit more with each missed opportunity. Our country is becoming unrecognizable.

This, though, may be it. Do some research, watch Loose Change...and ask the questions. Support Charlie's gambit and don't stop asking...force others in the media to ask...before we let what could be the final tipping point pass us by.

More End Times...Let's Get Raptured!

2006-03-23T12:10:00.000-05:00

I just want to point out Maureen Farrell's latest article to those who read my last posting.

It's stunning stuff.

If we could just convert Christians to Christianity, this would be a great place to live and a far more peaceful world. Alas, they seem to ignore the four Gospels in favor of the Old Testament, Paul and that bizarre afterthought called Revelations. Funny, though, you'd think the words of Jesus...you now...the red words...would take primacy over all others.

Revelations about the Whore of Babylon

2006-03-22T09:18:00.000-05:00

Revelations 17:13
These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast

It was 1976, and I was just seven years old. The Evangelical movement was taking flight and it was built on an apocalyptic foundation. The Book of Revelations was pure, predictive truth and the rise of the Beast--the Whore of Babylon--and ensuing the Second Coming wasn't a matter of if, but when. And "when" was soon.

That year a neighbor "witnessed" to my mother and she began taking us to Fairway Baptist Church. It was an all-encompassing experience. Sundays, Wednesdays, weekend retreats and a school I would attend for half of 3rd grade. I was paddled for not completing Bible verses. I was taught a glowing rendition of American history. I was not allowed to wear my Star Trek shirt or Star Wars socks---graven images, you see. It was quite an experience.

Our pastor--Pastor Paulson--was a charismatic former CIA agent. I'm not kidding. And we were fed the diet of the day: the Number of the Beast, Hal Lindsay's Late, Great Planet Earth, preparing our souls for Rapture, the evils of the United Nations, the role of the USSR in Armageddon.

On Wednesdays, the children would play Jesus-themed games and the adults would learn more about the ins and outs of the End Times. Occasionally, we'd all pile into the main church and watch a movie. Movies about the Last Days...about relatives and friends disappearing in the Rapture, the Mark of the Beast on foreheads and the bloody reign of the Beast. One image stands out...of those who refused the Mark being denied food, medicine and, eventually, their heads by the Beast's guillotine.

It was powerful stuff.

My mother bought a portrait of Jesus, 5 feet by 3 feet...with long, flowing sandy blond locks, a full beard...in profile...looking upwards. You know the image...Jesus as roadie for Lynyrd Skynyrd. It hung in the living room. It dominated the decor of our family room as only a Southern Fried Roadie of God could.

I deprogrammed myself slowly, over time. I asked about dinosaurs and how all those insects fit on Noah's Ark. The answers begged more questions. My questions led me to science and to history. Eventually it led me to philosophy. Although I was re-Baptized out of my Southern Italian Catholic beginnings in front of 500 people and wearing nothing but a white robe, I was not a believer. At least not for long. My rebellious temperament wouldn't permit it.

But I know. I was part of it. I get it. Which is why today, here in the Whore of Babylon, I find myself explaining all the craziness of the Red States and the Bush Administration and Evangelicals to those who just don't get it. To those who haven't had Revelations envelop them like a wet blanket. To those who've been Blue State thinkers and intellectuals and media-types. To those who don't know the Book of Revelations.

Revelations 17:18
And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of earth

The irony that I've come here to make my way and work in the media is...well...revelatory. This is my second time here. My own personal second coming, I guess. The first time I engaged the Whore, seeking out some of her riches. But all my passes led only to some dry humping. No penetration. Perhaps because I was quietly and subconsciously appalled by her. I didn't want in. This time? I'm trying in my own small ways to battle the Whore. And maybe I've found my "calling"--to explain the role of Revelations in all that is happening. To explain it to those who don't know.

The End Times provides the Administration with its base of support. Christian Zionists see the invasion of Iraq, the return of the Israelites to the Biblical boundaries of their God-given land and the destruction of the Al Aqsa mosque as keys to fulfillment of Prophecy. Evangelicals love that George talked to God to get the go-ahead to invade Iraq. The historical home of Babylon is key. The Whore of Babylon, to them, will come out of this toppling of Saddam. Muslims have taken the place of Godless Communists as the key player to set in motion Armageddon. The end of the Cold War and fall of communists was a downer since Evangelicals thought they were the "Great Bear" that would come out of the North to the great Battle to End History.

But this Administration, which meets with 30-40 Evangelical leaders every couple months to consult on Mid-East policy, knows how to use the language of the End Times. They know how important Revelations is to their base. Their base, which defaults to "George has a good heart" when faced with a litany of destructive policies...policies in contradiction to their own professed beliefs...cannot let go of the neck of history now that they've got a stranglehold on it. Now that Prophecy is finally coming true.

Here I am, in the middle of a hard-facts culmination of those things I was taught as a child. It's amazing, ironic and, somehow, symmetrical.

Enter Kevin Phillips. Phillips was the GOP strategist who helped the GOP begin to take the South in the late Sixties and early Seventies. He worked for Nixon. He was a scion of Republican strategists. Phillips has since emerged as our best political analyst and a great historian. The Cousins' Wars is the best American history book I've ever read. Ever. The Politics of Rich and Poor and American Dynasty are the two most important books on contemporary American politics I've ever read. And now he's done it again. In his latest, American Theocracy, Phillips dissects the intersection of Evangelicalism, End Times thinking, national debt and war. Phillips gets it. He's been following the role of religion in American politics for years. He understands the power of the Babylon-Iraq connection and the desire of so many Americans to see Biblical prophecy fulfilled.

So, I am not alone. Someone else gets "it." That violent, scary "it" that will chew up thousands of lives in the attempt to catalyze history and induce the End Times and the Second Coming. That "it" which drives the anti-gay voters and the pro-Bush sycophants. That "it" which does an end-run around the Democrats directly to the hearts of the Heartland, where churches teach Old Testament fire and brimstone and New Testament millenarianism. That "it" of Joshua and Paul...and not much of Jesus. That Heartland that believes America is God's instrument.

Revelations 18:3
For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies

But Phillips is a academic, a rational observer...a genius of political analysis. Far more than I could hope to be. There is one thing he, quite understandably, doesn't illustrate. That the Evangelicals are themselves aligned with the Whore of Babylon. That Evangelicals need only read and re-read their Revelations to see that, if Prophecy is true, then Bush and his team of Neo-Cons are false prophets. That the great city ruling over the world as a neo-Roman Empire is DC and that we are a great force for evil. They are so divorced from their Christianity that they ignore Jesus' teaching in Matthew. We kill innocents. We worship the money changers. We do not feed the hungry, or show mercy on the sinner. But we speak the name of Jesus and all is permitted in his name. But none of his admonitions about love and turning the other cheek or loving those who hate us...none are obeyed.

We kill indiscriminately in the service of a growing empire. A Romanesque empire, I might add. We are pushing RFID tags and forms of identification that could, to the reflective Christian, function very much like a Number of the Beast. We take other's lands, their resources and their lives. All the while, our leader speaks of peace and Jesus and God, takes away rights...God given rights...and does the opposite of what he proclaims.

The Whore of Babylon is here. The false prophet is here. The Beast is rising here.

The irony of this for me is that I don't care for Revelations. I don't care much for American Protestant Christianity. I don't embrace monotheism...or any theism for that matter. But I truly understand the power of these ideas and the bloodthirsty hope of some Christians to nudge history in the direction of Prophetic fulfillment. While many Blue State intellectuals marvel at the ineptitude and illogic of this Administration, I see the skill and logic of their propaganda. I see the meetings between Iran-Contra all-star Eliot Abrams and Evangelicals on Mid-East policy as logical. They have a base. They speak their language and manipulate their faith like a power tool to achieve their wholly un-Biblical aims. They've sent messages through Bob Woodward about George's war councils with God. They use unreflective support of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank as a prophetic, political tool. They have Revelations on their side.

They've been called Mayberry Machiavellis...by the first Faith-Based Initiative Czar...who left totally disillusioned by his experiences with the Administration. For them, these religious messages are tools...nothing more. As Leo Strauss, father of the Neo-Con philosophy, put it (I'm paraphrasing): Noble Lies must be told by the elites to the masses, for the masses cannot govern themselves...cannot make rational decisions. The most effective Noble Lies are those based on religion. Religion sways the masses like nothing else.

But intellectuals, media-types, Blue Staters and Democrats don't understand. They don't understand the power of Revelations and the End Times in the thinking of Evangelicals. So no one, save Phillips, sees this clearly. But I go further. For the Prophecies they embrace and the unfolding of history they crave are double-edged swords. Revelations, the New Rome, the Whore of Babylon...these things, according to their own Bibles, are manifest here.

In America. In Washington, D.C. In their own hearts. We've found the enemy...and it is us.

Pletka's PNAC Conspiracy Theory

2006-03-20T08:24:00.000-05:00

The great dismissive of our times is the term "conspiracy theory."

It closes off debate. It paints anyone who doesn't buy the propaganda, questions the anomalies of official cover stories...anyone who connects the unconnected dots...as crazy, paranoid cranks cavorting with Oliver Stone on the grassy knoll of history.

Enter Danielle Pletka. As VP of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies for the Neo-Convicted American Enterprise Institute, she's a high-level propaganda hack for American empire. Moments ago she drew the conspiracy theory sword and cut off the truth at the knees. Appearing on C-SPAN's call-in show, Washington Journal, she fielded a call about PNAC's founding document, "Rebuilding America's Defenses." The caller asked her about the document's plan for the Middle East and call for a "New Pearl Harbor" to set in motion the massive increase in defense spending that we've actually seen since the ascent of Bush the Second. PNAC's founders are at the highest levels of the White House, the Defense and State Departments, the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations...and even at the American Enterprise Institute.

The caller's question was, in Ms. Pletka's world, part of a conspiracy theory. She said that the PNAC document was "thoughtful," and that any mention of the "Pearl Harbor" reference was itself a "conspiracy theory." She said that there was no mention of Pearl Harbor in the document.

And there is the conspiracy. A conspiracy of silence about the game-plan for empire that led to Iraq, to the pre-emptive strike doctrine...to the radical turn in world events we've seen since all those PNAC signatories took over the executive branch. No major news organization has told the people about it. And now, Ms. Pletka gets away with denying what is in black and white. It's a conspiracy theory to refer to words that are, even today, posted on the PNAC website! And because her counterpoint on the show, some typical jerk-off from the Center from American Progress, probably hasn't read the document...or is another cowering critic who fears the conspiracy theorist moniker...the truth did not come out. That poor caller is now a conspiracy theorist, too. Even though he was grounded in the facts.

So, let's look at that "conspiracy theory" in action. Let's look at the highpoints of that piece of work, so to speak. It was written in 1998-1999.

PAGE 4:
Likewise, the Clinton Administration has continued the fiction that the operations of American forces in the Persian Gulf are merely temporary duties. Nearly a decade after the Gulf War, U.S. air, ground and naval forces continue to protect enduring American interests in the region.

PAGE 14:
In the Persian Gulf region, the presence of American forces, along with British and French units, has become a semi-permanent fact of life. Though the immediate mission of those forces is to enforce the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, they represent the long-term commitment of the United States and its major allies to a region of vital importance. Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

PAGE 17:
Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has. And even should U.S.-Iranian relations improve, retaining forward-based forces in the region would still be an essential element in U.S. security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region.

PAGE 19:
As a supplement to forces stationed abroad under long-term basing arrangements, the United States should seek to establish a network of “deployment bases” or “forward operating bases” to increase the reach of current and future forces. Not only will such an approach improve the ability to project force to outlying regions, it will help circumvent the political, practical and financial constraints on expanding the network of American bases overseas.

PAGE 51:
Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions.

PAGE 60:
Space itself will become a theater of war, as nations gain access to space capabilities and come to rely on them; further, the distinction between military and commercial space systems – combatants and noncombatants – will become blurred. Information systems will become an important focus of attack, particularly for U.S. enemies seeking to short-circuit sophisticated American forces. And advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.

The real conspiracy is the conspiracy of silence about this and the other glaringly obvious dots that remain unconnected. Pletka is a propagandist of the first order, using lies and subterfuge to hide the agenda she and her cohorts are implementing every day all around the world. There are conspiracies, my friends, and some are in full pubic view.

Saddam was Better

2006-03-14T11:13:00.000-05:00

It's time. The criticism of our invasion and occupation of Iraq has been tempered by the caveat: "But the world is better off with Saddam gone."

It's bullshit.

The evidence overwhelmingly shows the opposite. Iraqis were better off with Saddam. Saddam's neighbors were better off with Saddam. The world was better off with Saddam. And the US and our national security? Better off with Saddam.

Let's take the Iraqis. Over 100,000 dead. More dying everyday from bombings...by us and by the particulars in the civil war we unleashed. Up to 30 Iraqis per day are kidnapped, their families extorted for ransom. We've incarcerated thousands of Iraqis, most without charges and many have been tortured...some tortured to death. We've even used Saddam's most infamous prison camp for his political enemies--Abu Ghraib. Their economy is in shambles. And we've privatized much of it...even selling off their farming sector to US multinationals. So, what remains of their economy is not even their own. Oil production and revenues are down, way down, from the highly regulated Oil for Food period.

We've used a vicious chemical weapon--white phosphorous--to incinerate insurgents and innocents alike. We've spread even more depleted uranium around that ravaged country. The decade of birth defects that we left behind after the first Gulf War will only grow and persist. We've bombed the infrastructure into rubble. Yes, a great opportunity for Bechtel and Halliburton, but a day to day struggle for electricity and water. The rights of women, so strong under Saddam's anti-Shia reign, is in full reverse, particularly in the south..where women are being forced to wear veils.

Saddam killed his own people. We've done that.
Saddam jailed and tortured his own people. We've done that.
Saddam used chemical weapons on his own people. We've done that.
Saddam lorded over one of the most Westernized states in the Middle East, with a thriving, educated middle-class population...friendly to the US and willing to buy large amounts of weaponry from US defense companies...and willing to attack Iran at our behest. We haven't done that.

Now Iran is all over Iraq, with a thriving Shia political movement in the South. A ready-made ally. We enabled that. Saddam's Iraq had been a bulwark against the influence of Iran. No more. Saddam's animus toward Iran was almost as great as his animus towards Al Qaeda and the Saudi Wahhabis who helped to make it. Iraq was a terrorist-free zone for decades. Okay, he harbored a couple Palestinian terrorists...paid a few suicide bombers' families. But so did Saudi Arabia. The Saudis did more, paid more, than Saddam ever did. The plight of the Palestinians is a part of every Arab nation's thinking. But not Al Qaeda...which was the special friend of the Saudis and the Pakistanis. Not Saddam.

Saddam's place in the center of the Middle East...fully contained, WMD-poor, militarily neutered, unfriendly to Al Qaeda...was a lynch-pin of stability for the region and the world. Like containment during the Cold War, but better. Saddam's lack of power to affect the region was complete. We had him in a national prison, and his oil was flowing out. The day to day lives of Iraqis were far better. They had water, electricity...and no car bombs. The imprisonment and executions of his regime are found in most of our Arab allies. Saddam's crimes were no greater than those of our sycophants. No surprising, since he was Poppy's sycophant for years, the CIA's friend when he came to power...and our ally against Iran.

So, the America people are caught up in a war against "terror."

Afghanistan was the incubator, thanks to the Pakis and the Saudis and our own CIA. Now, we've created a new incubator. With Saddam gone, Iraq has become the new Afghanistan. If you are worried about "Them," you should be outraged that we turned Iraq from a bulwark to an incubator. And then there is the oil. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has gamed the oil market, driving up prices and hitting the average American in the wallet.

Sure, Saddam was tyrant.

And the Saudi Royal family? Or the military dictatorship of Pakistan. Or the dysfunctional democracy cum authoritarian regime called Egypt? How about our new friend Libya? Or the Central Asian "Stans" we've got bases in?

The argument that Saddam was a dictator and therefore had to go and, therefore, the world is better off...Iraqis are better off...is utter and complete bullshit.

But the facile Democrats don't say it. Pundits don't say it. Why? They are afraid. They are afraid of "cozying up to a dictator," to advocating Saddam. You mean, like the Reagan and Bush the First Administrations did? C'mon people, wake up!

Wake up and see the reality that the Iraqis face...the death squads and the poverty and the criminality and the civil war and the torture and the radiation. And look at the geopolitics. Look, and say it.

There, I've said it.

Here I sit, waiting for the bolt of lighting...the recriminations...or the FBI.

Fun and Games and War

2006-03-09T11:58:00.000-05:00

War! Good God ya'll, what is it good for?

Profits. Domestic political control. Distraction. Artificial scarcity in the oil market. Shaping a New World Order.

Many reasons, really. It just depends on your perspective and goals.

Rebuilding America's Defenses, by the Project for a New American Century, lays it all out in easy-to-read type.

But how do you go to war with an enemy that poses no risk, doesn't attack you or an ally...one that is neutered, contained and unable to mount a real challenge? Kinda like mugging a hobo, or robbing an invalid...it's hard to justify.

The evidence is clear...the Bush Administration tried within hours to pin the 9-11 attacks on Saddam Hussein. We have confirmation of that from multiple sources, including Donny Rumsfeld's own handwritten notes. We saw and heard the speeches that pounded out a drumbeat of Saddam-Osama-9-11, a repetitive tempo that sounded like the shrillest Euro-techno. Over 60% of Americans believed in the never-proven connection. Currently, up to 90% of our troops in Iraq believe it. As Dick Clark would say, "It's got a nice beat, and you can dance to it." Yeah, dance on the graves of over 100,000 innocent Iraqis. Innocent of 9-11, that is.

But even with all that, the Bushies couldn't convince the world or the UN. They knew there was no connection. Most knew that there were no WMDs, and that Saddam was not threat.

So what to do?

It's called "Fun and Games."

Have fun with negative intelligence assets. Play games with the truth. Put both together to goad your enemy du jour into attacking you, or trying to attack you, even if it is really just self defense. Fun and games means you can spin whatever events transpire from the fun and games to your advantage. You know the facts, the media is co-opted and controled...the people are at your mercy. Like the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Push...goad...manage...spin, and get your war.

Then comes this.

The British law professor who broke the Downing Street memo just broke a new memo. Because there are still good people in the power structure, he was given...leaked...the new memo which he calls the "White House Memo."

This memo comes from notes taken during a meeting, about five days before Colin Powell's completely debunked speech before the UN, about Iraq. In that meeting Bush told Blair that they had a date to begin invasion penciled in. Support from the UN, if not forthcoming from the bullshit Powell would shovel in less than a week, would come from a special plan to paint a U2 spyplane in UN colors and fly it over Iraq until Saddam fired on it. Once he fired on it, Bush would have his invasion cue.

Think about that for a minute. And think about the fact that you haven't heard that in our mainstream media.

Sorry, folks...but that's how it works. Vietnam, the first Gulf War and April Glaspie and the illegal arming of Iraq by Bush the First. And more. Much more. But there is only so much we can process at any one time. I do, however, direct you to Operation Northwoods...a plan in 1962 to fake a shoot-down of a plane full of students and engineer terrorist bombings in Miami and DC to create support for an invasion of Cuba.

This is not theory. This is fact. In black and white. The rules for fun and games and war. Rules that most don't know or understand or are even willing to consider. It's hard to explain, I guess. Some have tried. But the gamemasters know...and our ignorance is their bread and butter.

Fun and games, my friend. Fun and games.

Let's Get a Few Things Straight

2006-03-07T11:24:00.000-05:00

Today's America is a confusing America. The world is even more confusing. It's hard to know what's acceptable in our Imperial State and our world-spanning empire.

It's not acceptable to write a letter to a local newspaper's editorial page calling for the end of the Bush Administration. A Veteran's Administration nurse did that. After dealing with casualties from Iraq and watching the horror of Katrina, she wrote a letter. Then the FBI showed up, confiscated her computer and told her she was under investigation for sedition.

It's not acceptable to pay off your credit card debt. A retiring couple in Texas paid of a JC Penny's card and they were investigated under Dept. of Homeland Security guidelines.

It's not acceptable to read a book on the rise of radical Islamic movements. Henry Rollins did that on a plane ride to Australia and he was questioned by authorities.

It's not acceptable to write and sing anti-war or anti-government songs, no matter how metaphorical those songs might be. Morrissey did that, and he was brought in for questioning.

But...

You can cavort with an organization linked to a spying scandal in the Pentagon. Our US representative to the UN John Bolton did that. He just gave a speech at AIPAC laced with threats to Iran and a warning that strategic bombing is both fun and easy to do. AIPAC--the American-Israeli Political Action Committee--had a mole in the highest levels of the Pentagon. Their man--Larry Franklin--was investigated, charged and sentenced to 12 years for passing secrets to AIPAC. No one from AIPAC will serve jail time.

So, just to re-cap...the Empire is a capricious place where anyone can be investigated to doing seemingly trivial things. But, if you are on board with Empire and actively working to spreadit or stop those expressing discomfort with said empire...knock yourself out. Spy, bomb, lie...go for it. You might have some legal trouble, but we are only two years away from the end of Bush's second term...so those pardons are just around the corner.

The Peacemaker and the Media

2006-02-28T20:30:00.000-05:00

Today, in an exclusive interview with high-gloss newsreader Elizabeth Vargas, President Gas told her and America that he hopes history jugdes his Presidency as one of "peace."

Yup. Peace.

Vargas, in typical Ameican supine media fashion, didn't immediately ask him the obvious. Jesus H. Christ! It's comical.

But let me tell you...the Bushes are basically untouchable when it comes to the media. Yeah, I know there has been bad news. However, it is dwarfed by what doesn't get reported in the mainstream media. Volumes on shady dealings, Nazi fundings, CIA connections, Bay of Pigs evidence, cocaine use, drunk driving, money from Reverend Moon...and on and on.

I worked at the most respected hour of news in TV back when W got the nomination in 2000. I prepared a briefing book for an interview. The previous week Gore got hammered in his interview. I watched Mr Respectability toss one softball after another to W. Nothing on pollution in Texas. On the failure of his education reform. On his shady time in the National Guard. And on and on. Nothing. I watched the "newsman" orally copulate W via satellite while my briefing book was ignored.

I made some comments in the newsroom. I never got a recommendation when I left.

Consider this. Ron and Nancy Reagan are the royal family of Republicanism...the demigods of the GOP. But Kitty Kelley can write a book pointing out that they used a psychics to make decisions. Ouch! Kitty was all over Larry King, the talk shows, the morning news shows...everywhere. It was true, Nancy admitted.

Now...how many of you know about Kitty's book on the Bushes? "The Family" is an assiduously researched, legally combed over tome that shows the true darkness of the Bush clan. It's a troubling look at the most powerful family in America. And they have been since the end of World War II. Kitty shows it. And how awful a human being Barbara is...how cunning and up-to-his ears in covert fun and games Poppy is...how totally craven the family has been during their long ride on the oil-military money train.

Larry King cancelled her appearance and refused to bring her on. The night before going on the Today Show, they cancelled. No one would touch her. Nothing.

You can piss on the Reagans all you want...but don't touch the Bushes.

There is this great video out there....of W...before he became Prezzie...on a satellite feed waiting for an interview. I've seen the video a couple times. Not on the news, of course.

Why?

Because he does this:

Now, what would all those "President Bush has a good heart" Christians who march lockstep behind their Jesus-lovin' leader have thought had they seen it before the 2000 election? And what if there was video of Gore doing that? Or anyone else, for that matter?

Yup...non-stop replay. Like the Howard Dean scream. W gets a pass, though.

The truth is out there...but it's not "out there" in broad daylight.

Bush says his presidency is all about peace while Iraq is churning out the casualties...and Vargas was so well-vetted for that "interview" that she didn't even need Astroglide.

In Case You Missed It

2006-02-27T11:55:00.000-05:00

You might have missed it. It's easy to do. We're moving rapidly into territory once reserved for totalitarian regimes. Spying, prison camps, aggressive wars and invasions.

That's our America. The new, improved America!

Not that everyone's cooperating. Congress heard about this funny little program called Total information Awareness. Run by former Iran-Contra badguy John Poindexter, the TIA quickly came into being after 9-11. It was designed to monitor all communications and gather copious information domestically to help the Pentagon do...something. Websites visited, purchases made, divorce records, driving records, parking tickets...everything. Collated and cross-referenced...your life at their disposal.

So, those backwards thinkers in Congress who were not quite comfortable with that sort of thing decided to pull the plug. Nixed the funding. Caused a minor, if widely unreported, uproar. But don't worry...the Executive branch is on the job.

The TIA lived on beyond Congressional reach. The program was renamed Basketball, moved around to other agencies...and the sub-programs also renamed. You see? TIA was ended. There is no TIA. Only Basketball. It's so bouncy, now. It's a game!

And that's what it is. A game. If the Congress outlaws it...start playing games. They had a black budget...secret and without scrutiny. So they kept it going. Funded and finding...out...about us all.

It's like Bush announcing in the State of the Union that he wants America to reduce use of foreign oil by 75%. Hooray! Well, two days later his chief economic advisor and Treasury Sec'y John Snow both said that W didn't mean that "literally." No, it was a metaphor. There were no plans or intentions to reduce our foreign oil consumption by 75%.

See? It's so clear.

The there is a troublesome little blogger who filed a Freedom of Information Act query and, viola!, he got notes from Rummy immediately after 9-11. And it was reported in Britain...not here, of course.

Now we have a paper trial that shows Rummy wanting to connect 9-11 to Saddam immediately. Whether or not it was warranted.

The handwritten scrawls say, among other things:

"Hard to get good case. Need to move swiftly."

"Near term target needs - go massive - sweep it all up, things related and not."

"Best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit SH at same time - not only UBL [Pentagon shorthand for Usama/Osama bin Laden]."

"Tasks. Jim Haynes [Pentagon lawyer] to talk with PW [probably Paul Wolfowitz, then Mr Rumsfeld's deputy] for additional support ... connection with UBL."

But there was no link. We know that now and some of us knew that then. They knew that. Richard Clarke knew that. Wrote about it. And was eviscerated for saying so.

Perhaps Rummy was speaking metaphorically. Like last week when he assured the press that the Pentagon wasn't paying Lincoln Group to spread propaganda around Iraq, but then was contradicted by the facts the next day.

But wait...there's more. The new, improved America is taking that great prison camp idea...once known as a gulag or concentration camp and now known as Guantanimo and Abu Ghraib...and bringing home where it belongs.

Under something the administration calls "New Programs," the US is beginning to build holding camps. You know...in case we need to put up large numbers of citizens should there be an "emergency." A sorta HoJo for those who cannot be out there on their own.

It almost funny that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root got the $385 million contract to build these detention centers at undisclosed locations around the US. Hey...they built Camp X-Ray at Gunatanimo. They know how to do this sort of thing.

Don't worry, though. This is all part of the new freedom we will enjoy more and more as the old freedoms go the way of the paper ballot.

This is the new, improved America, my friend. A place where the Presidency is all-powerful, what he says is exactly the opposite of what you get...and where a few of us can decry the morphing of our politics into something almost fascist...and we can rest assured that our minders at TIA and the NSA are fully aware of the arguments we're making in emails, hone calls and blogs like this.

Oh yeah...not the TIA...our friends who like to play Basketball.

Beware of the Hive Mind

2006-02-23T16:34:00.000-05:00

Harboring Doubts

2006-02-22T12:54:00.000-05:00

Blowback. When an action, policy or strategy causes unintended, unforeseen and unwelcomed consequences. Chalmers Johnson, historian and policy analyst extraordinaire, literally wrote the book on it. Titled "Blowback, Johnson writes convincingly about the consequences of our de facto, world-spanning empire, our history of covert fun and games and the hatred, resentment and complications those hijinx have caused. Well, also that it will cause...because he was ahead of the curve when he published "Blowback" in 2000.

Now the Bush Administration, the source of blowback abroad, is facing some blowback here at home. Their base of right wingers have been fed a steady diet of culture clash, fear of Islamics, terror tales and they've adopted the thoroughgoing belief in the need check for terror around every corner and under every turban. Now, they are venting their well-stoked rage at the Bush Administration for selling off our ports to crazy Arab Islamics. The talk shows, the righty papers and Fox News--the backbone of Rove's consent manufacturing base--can't stop hammering their beloved leader for compromising our security.

Welcome to the world of blowback, my friends.

Okay...they are not my friends, but it sounded good.

This is their Dr. Frankenstein moment. They've created a monster and now it's turned on it's master. These right-wing nuts can't get enough of the neo-fascist struggle of "US" against "Them," and it certainly has served the good doctor thus far. But the monster has ignored all of the evidence that they're being manipulated, that facts show their master is in bed with the most virulent of terror-mongers in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and let's not forget the mountain of evidence that Team Bush cut off all those investigations, refused to heed all warnings and erased any lines connecting those troublesome dots on their terrorism map before 9-11. They--"the right-wing monster"--doesn't care much about the undeniable war profiteering...the $6-8 billions per month being transferred from their paychecks to Bush cronies via Iraq.

But they do know fear and outrage. They "get" the fear and outrage subtext...that the Islamic world is out to get us because we are free, because we are good and because they are evil. Now there is no way for the doctor to strap this monster to the table.

The question is whether or not the monster will see that there is a bigger story. A story of crony capitalism. That people and companies enmeshed in this administration stand to gain from the dubious deal with Dubai Ports. There are billions being floated into and out of this port deal. Now, there is preliminary information that W's daddy and his financial octopus--The Carlyle Group--has made some big profits off of the chain of sales that led to the port deal.

Unfortunately, the story is focusing on security. Security of our ports is an important issue. But it's not as important as our porous borders. So far, reports about port security show that there is a fairly good paper trail and a fairly vigilant watch at our ports. The one silver lining in this cloud of blowback is that the monster is still fuming about Arabs, not about yet another instance of crony profiteering. I hold little hope that the torch-wielding villagers in this B-Movie we call America--the media--will take this chance to take the focus off of the fear and put it's torch to the tower of profiteering that grows daily on Pennsylvania Avenue.

If the villagers do their job, they might be able to show the monster that every time it votes for Team Bush and it's GOP sycophants that it's voting against it's own self-interest. That they are being drained, the country is being drained, to fill the off-shore bank accounts of the oligarchy that parades itself as democratic crusaders. The dots, the lines...all there. Critics of this B-Movie called America will sit back and wonder if the long-awaited plot turn will finally happen...if this is the climactic moment when realizations will set off a chain reaction leading to a resolution of this twisted plot.

Has the blowback finally hit Team Bush where it hurts...at it's base? Chances are that the fear of Arab evildoers will overcome the reality of crony capitalism gone wild. Honestly, I do feel a bit of sympathy for the monster. I just hope it kills the doctor before the villagers burn it all down.

Re-Secrets and Damn Lies

2006-02-21T13:09:00.000-05:00

Can you keep a secret? It's an important part of relationships...between friends, between lovers, between military commanders, between political operatives and in the spooky world of covert operations.

Secret identities, secret plans, secret lovers, secret peccadilloes. We all have our secrets. Revealing personal secrets can get you fired, divorced and ostracized.

Revealing state secrets can get you killed, get someone else killed, put you in jail and put national security in jeopardy. You know, like revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative, or passing secrets from the Pentagon to AIPAC.

Okay, once you've let a secret out can you take it back...re-secret it? As we all know, it's not possible to put a cat back in the bag once it runs freely in the full light of day. But that's our world. It's also Valerie Plame's world. But, apparently, it's not the National Security State's world. They believe in "re-secreting" and they've been doing it for the last five-plus years.

Our government is re-classifying previously de-classified documents. Okay, let's try that again...they are taking files and documents, some nearly fifty-years old, and making them secret again. The National Security Agency's historian, Matthew Aid, is perplexed by this...but he shouldn't be. The NSA and the Administration blocked the disclosure of the truth behind the Gulf of Tonkin incident a couple months ago...and Aid had a front row seat for that "re-secreting." The rub is that secrets often go hand in hand with lies. And the "re-secreting" he's trying to expose threatens the damn lies that our government, our empire, is based on.

This is something we all know from our personal lives. Secrets are fed and sustained by a diet of lies. This is the problem with secrecy. When we see it in our partners, whether professionally or personally, we suspect the worst. When we uncover lies, secrets unravel. Then we look to our "democracy" and our representative leaders and find secrets...and have to suspect their lies are covering something they don't want us to know. Something analogous to an illicit affair, some sort of embezzling...some abrogation of the implicit or explicit arrangement we've entered into.

But the stakes are much greater at the governmental level. We are not talking divorce. We are talking about the Constitution, perhaps tens of thousands of lives...perhaps billions of dollars.

Lies lead us into Vietnam. That's what many historians have deduced and what came out of the declassification of key documents. Lies are suspected about the assassination of JFK...why else are there so many documents still classified all these years later? Lies swirl around the Reagan-Bush years. Whether it's the October Surprise, of which there is a great deal of evidence now available, the Iran-Contra Affair, the illegal arming of Iraq...we can assume quite fairly that there are still things some of our leaders don't want us to know. And Alberto Gonzales made a point of stopping the de-classification of documents from the Reagan-Bush and Bush-Qualye Administration as soon as he became White House Counsel back in 2001.

Although it seems to evade most of my media colleagues, the people involved in those two administrations...involved in the October Surprise, Iran-Contra, Iraqgate and more...just so happen to be in this current administration. Or their progeny. Or associates. Hell, they're all on the same team...a team that has been operating since Allen Dulles formed the CIA. A core of power players that keeps on keeping on. It's a shadow government that depends on, is predicated on...is fed and sustained by...secrecy. And they know how important it is to keep secrets. They know how important it is to cover their tracks.

Their problem is that history can be studied. Documents, no matter how old or seemingly innocuous, can be put into context. Eventually, a good historian will find patterns. That's why the Gulf of Tonkin was such a problem...why it needed to be "re-secreted." It's illustrative of a pattern. A pattern of deception that leads to war. Of manipulated intelligence. Of a war for the sake of war. Eventually...of war profiteering and huge casualties and a country left in shambles.

The need to re-classify is fueled by the need to sustain today's lies, to cover up the patterns of the past...patterns that show clearly what is happening now. This current drive to cover up tracks began in the final year of Clinton...but now that we've heard a Bushie say Bill is "like one of the family" will anyone argue with my claim that they are on the same team? But, according to today's report "it accelerated" after 9-11. Of course it did, because we've been living a damn big lie ever since. There is one document--Operation Northwoods--that shows a pattern, a precedent. It's far too late to re-secret that one. But the damn lies of our current situation cry out for more secrecy, plead for the obfuscation of the past.

Our personal worlds do not allow for the re-secreting of our sins. Their world, the one that bends reality and manipulates information in the service of their Machiavellian machinations, re-secrets potentially enlightening documents, shuts the door on the past and places possible patterns into the same vault that holds those still-secret documents about Lee Harvey Oswald, about Ronnie and Poppy...about how we got here.

Why the GWOT is so WoB...

2006-02-20T11:53:00.000-05:00

DC, a.k.a. the Whore of Babylon(WoB), is a city of acronyms. POTUS, SCOTUS, CIA, FBI, DOJ...and the Pentagon is a sea of acronyms. GWOT is the acronym du jour. Global War on Terror. Not on "Terrorism." Although I find "Terror" to be too open ended, it does serve the POTUS (President of the United States) better than "terrorism." Terrorism is precise...a conflict against specific actions and actors that can be defined and applied.

Terror, on the other hand, implies evil and fear and a state of mind...not specific actions. A war on "terror"? Does that mean we'll be attacking video stores that carry Hitchcock films, the collected works of John Carpenter and the first two Friday the 13th films? The first day of school, a blind date, speaking in front of a huge crowd...all terrifying. And then there are all those phobias....

Anyway, I digress.

It's the imprecision of "terror" over "terrorism" that is so telling. The attack on Afghanistan was justifiable. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda were there. Osama was there. There was a direct connection. Iraq? It was an Al-Qaeda-free zone. Tapes released this week have Saddam--over a decade ago--talking to his underlings about the threat of terrorism on the US...of nuke-car bombs in DC, bio-terror...and how he's warned the US of this impending doom and, he said, it wouldn't be coming from Iraq. Yeah, he said that. You might recall that he was a key ally of the Reagan-Bush Admin and remained so until about a month before he invaded Kuwait. In fact, we have incontrovertible evidence that Bush the First was illegally arming Saddam right up to the invasion. He stamped out Islamic fundamentalism. He attacked our Iranian enemies upon our request. He got WMDs from us beginning in 1983.

Oh, digressions.

But we attacked Iraq and part of the case was he was a terrorism threat armed with WMDs. No evidence there. But perceptions will do when we are simply talking about terror, and not terrorism. The Administration did create Iraq into a terror threat. Like a Hitchcock movie...they wrote the script, told the story and convinced the American people to be terrified of Iraq. And they convinced the Congress to be terrified of voting against the invasion...for fear of losing in the next election.

So, Iraq was part of the war on terror...if not on terrorism.

You see, if the war was about terrorism we would've invaded Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. If it was about WMDs we certainly would've gone into Pakistan, where the ISI covered up A.Q. Khan's nuclear technology distribution network for years. You know...the guy who gave North Korea the means to build it's bomb. Precision would've dictated that Al-Qaeda, to be cut off at it's roots, needed to be severed from it's Saudi funders and Pakistani trainers. A quick look at history shows that Al-Qaeda was created by the Saudis, the Pakistani ISI and the CIA. Long after the CIA cut it's public ties, the other two kept on keeping on. The Taliban would not have been...had it not been for Saudi money, religious Wahhabism and Pakistani training and support through it's system of madrassas. The support was direct and significant. Hell, the Saudis even provided most of the actual hijackers.

So, now that some Senators are up in arms about the United Arab Emirates buying into the US seaport system and the Administration okaying it...well...remember that those are concerns about terrorism...not terror. There is no terror threat regarding the UAE. Even though they offered some financial support to Osama and even tossed in one 9-11 hijacker... the Administration has not identified the UAE as a terror threat. They may be a terrorism threat, but this is the GWOT...the Global War on TERROR.

Be terrified of terror. The Whore of Babylon loves fighting amorphous things like terror. Fear is good for business. Terror is good for politics. And, given human nature, there will always be something or someone to be terrified of. But if you take a close look at the history of the 20th century I think you'll find that those who want to protect you from some amorphous terror are likely to be those you should be most terrified of in the first place.

Axis of Feeble

2006-02-15T12:06:00.000-05:00

One down, two to go.

That's how President W could've summed up the Axis of Evil strategy from that oh-so-long ago State of the Union speech in his most recent installment. The basic objectives for Iraq have been achieved: that it not have autonomy over it's own oil, the introduction of artificial scarcity in the oil market, the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers to the military contractors his administration represents, and the transformation of Iraq from an Al-Qaeda-free zone to a hotbed of terrorism and imperial backlash.

First and foremost, Saddam is not in control of a newly certified WMD-free Iraq with the world second largest oil reserves at his disposal. He can not make good on his promise to switch all oil transactions from dollars to euros. He can drive down the price of oil by opening a no longer sanction-impaired spigot. I know, it was about WMDs. Whatever...if you believe that then there is nothing I can do for you.

Just look at another Axis country...North Korea. The Administration has done little on that problem. Kim Jung-Il is thought of as the craziest of dictators, his country is a shambles of starvation, poor infrastructure and a non-existent economy. They have no resources to speak of...in particular...no oil. And we know for a fact they have WMDs. So far...nothing. Not even an investigation of Rumsfeld's part in selling uranium to North Korea in the late 90s...perchance to dream.

But then there is Iran. A massive oil reserve. A young, vibrant population. Lots of expertise, lots of other resources. And they are flirting with WMDs, dancing around nuclear weapons. They are much further along than Iraq was. But not yet. Perhaps they look at Iraq--which had nothing, and North Korea--which has something significant, and they realize that having nukes is an insurance policy against invasion. Iraq was invaded because they DIDN'T have nukes. They had nothing to bargain with, no weapon that would inflict an immediate and costly price for invasion.

So Iran is in a race. But stepping back from the WMD question there is another key factor here. Just like Saddam threatened in the year before the invasion, Iran is less than a year from switching all of it's oil transactions from dollars to euros. This is huge. That's a ton of money. That's a ton of money not cycling through American interests...banks and companies and the US Treasury. That's a power shift toward Europe. That's a no-no.

Just think of Iraq...newly freed from sanctions and flooding the market with oil. They drive down the profit margins of US oil companies as they drive down the per barrel price. Conversely, invasion has "de-stabilized" the oil market and driven oil companies into record profits. And then add to that the power of Iraq to use their massive oil reserves to move value to the euro...adding instability to the dollar. IF you are looking for a reason beyond WMDs, look no further. Because Clinton forced out the UN Inspection team, just like W did, by attacking Iraq and claiming they were not cooperating just as they were entering the inspections endgame. Former Marine Scott Ritter...head of the US-led team...has tried to tell us that Iraq was close to certification. Iraq was probably two years from being stamped WMD-free...but Clinton forced the inspections to end in 1998. Oh yeah...notice how cozy Bill is with the Bush clan now?

Iraq was invaded because they didn't have WMDs...not because it was thought that they did. The evidence of intelligence failures is, as the story keeps on piling up, evidence that any contrary evidence about WMDs was ignored, brushed aside and buried. Why?

We know why...because Iraq had massive leverage on the oil market just sitting there, waiting to be used. And Saddam had leverage against the dollar by trading oil in euros.

Now we are replaying the Iraq scenario with Iran. Sure their President is making it easy for us by shooting off his mouth like a aging quail hunter. But the key factor is the shift to euros, coupled with the lack of nuclear capability. But don't look for an invasion. Seymour Hersh reported two years ago that we have been infiltrating Iran with CIA operatives. Look for strategic bombing and an internal coup...sorta Mossadeq reprise, with Ukrainian-like demostrations in the street. If it succeeds, the Shiites in Iraq will have a pro-American Shiite government in Iran to align with. The Sunnis in central Iraq will be surrounded on three sides by hostile neighbors. And a whole helluva lot of oil will be "destabilized" and certain to be traded in dollars for decades to come.

Can't you just smell the profits now?

Bush, Osama and a bit more on timing

2006-01-26T07:33:00.000-05:00

From the Herald Sun:
(An Australian paper)

Domestic spying necessary: Bush
From correspondents in Washington
26jan06

US President George W. Bush said today that a controversial domestic spying program that some critics say is illegal was necessary in light of new threats on an audiotape from Osama bin Laden.

"I'll continue to reauthorise this program for so long as our country faces a continuing threat from al-Qaeda and related groups," Mr Bush said during a visit to the National Security Agency (NSA), which runs the surveillance initiative.
"Listen to the words of Osama bin Laden and take him seriously. When he says he's going to hurt the American people again, or try to, he means it," he said.

"I take it seriously. And the people of NSA take it seriously. And most of the American people take it seriously as well."

Wow...isn't it great of Osama to come through with the tape just as the Administration impliments it's plan to spin the illegal NSA spying mess into a "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and, as Karl said, a drive to victory in the 2006 elections. Osama..."Oops, You did it again!"

Osama says, "Timing is everything"

2006-01-24T12:45:00.000-05:00

Osama is there when we need him. Okay, when Team Bush needs him

On the eve of the 2004 election, polls showing a race too close to call, and he was there to remind the American people that the face of evil is still out there, sending us some cryptic political analysis and reacquainting us with the type of fear that makes W acceptable to half of America.

What great timing that was.

And now, after a botched attack in Pakistan, a growing domestic spying scandal that includes monitoring Quakers, checking your internet searches, tapping your phone calls and generally keeping tabs on as much as they can...comes Osama to the rescue.

As if on cue.

With Abramoff looming over the GOP for the upcoming 2006 Congressional election and the Congress ready to start hearings on the NSA, Rove announces that the GOP will win with a strategy of national security. On the post-9-11 mentality. On fear.

So, Osama's bizarre message--bereft of expected Islamic hues and calls to Allah, but rather filled with odd request for a truce, the rebuilding of Afghanistan and Iraq and an Oprah-like book club recommendation--comes just as the White House and Rove make there push to frame the debate. Rove makes his big speech about the fear-security campaign strategy. Cheney, Bush and Gonzales start selling illegal wiretapping as a terrorist monitoring program. Dan Bartlett says Osama can still plot attacks...and the White House continues to benefit from the occasional appearance of Osama in our news cycle.

Now, that's if you believe Osama keeps on churning out recordings. Although the CIA "verified" it, no major news organization has checked it out for themselves, asked about the methodology used to verify the tape or even turned those experts who question the authenticity of the tape. Well, ABC did consult one expert at Duke University who thought it was a fake, But it was one web article. It did not make it into the news cycle.

Many of Osama's previous tapes have been called into question. At least, top analysts in Europe have done so. Not here, of course.

Think about how useful an alive and kicking Osama is to the Administration. We never caught him...and we have sworn depositions from Air Force personnel that they evacuated nearly 100 Taliban and Al Qaeda "leaders" from the battle of Tora Bora...flying them on C-130s to Pakistan. They were pissed.

But the lawsuit for which they gave those depositions was frozen by John Ashcroft because of national security.

Osama may be dead. But it doesn't matter. Our government is paying hundreds of millions of dollars to place propaganda around the world. Look up the Lincoln Group, among others. That's what they do. And John Rendon of the Rendon Group talks openly about placing news articles in foreign sources so they will cycle into the US press and, therefore, sell the idea of war to the American people He did so in the lead up to the first Gulf War. And has done so ever since.

Osama and others seem to be alive, using websites and making tapes. They "leak" them, I guess, to Al Jazeera and we cannot seem to trace them back to the source. Can't we at least take out the websites? Knock out the servers? I guess not.

So, Osama keeps on coming through, on time and with a Jason-like resilience. And the fear that has blinded so many of us may just blind enough of us to keep all the amazing scandals that spin like a hundred tops around the White House and the GOP from hitting them in 2006. They all may topple first, as Osama and Rove spin their own magic. Right on cue.

With Enemies Like This...

2006-01-12T15:20:00.000-05:00

Guess what? Iran got plans for nuclear weapons from....the CIA!

Yup! I'm not making this up. We handed over those plans in a "botched" intelligence operation.

Isn't that funny?!

It reminds me of the time Donald Rumsfeld was on the board of a company that sold uranium to North Korea. Back in 1999, that was. Or the time the Bush administration decided, through executive order, to keep on funding the organization that was meant to transfer "peaceful nuclear technology" to North Korea, but actually lead to Kim Jong Il's first nuclear weapon. Yeah, that was during his first term! Cool, eh?

But then there is nothing like the international distribution network of A.Q. Khan...the world's leading nuclear terrorist who spread nuclear weapons technologies and expertise to a variety of rogue nations. Funny, but although he was Pakistani and working right under the nose of the Pakistani ISI, the sefl-same ISI that helped to fund and create the Taliban and Al Qaeda, somehow the Pakistanis and A.Q. got off scot-free. What a lucky break!

You see, after the Soviets couldn't hold up their end of the bargain and the Cold War suddenly came to a screeching halt, America's mighty military-industrial complex found itself in a tough spot. Not much of a enemy left. Not much of a reason to spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined. Not much need for the growth of our expensive nuclear arsenal.

So, the nineties were a "downtime" for the Beltway Bandits...those defense contactors who ride the death and destruction gravy train all the way to their nice, cozy bank accounts in Zurich.

Then came terrorism. And swarthy Arab infidels. And WMDs...of which, we are the world biggest producer. And the rise of the "Rogue State." That nation with little military might, posing very little risk, but...if given the right cocktail of nuclear know-how and demonization...could justify the expansion of the US military and the contracts of beleaguered military moneymakers. Yeah, during the lean Clinton years defense spending dropped all the way down to 1960 levels...during that "lull" in the Cold War! It was what the Project for a New American Century tried to figure out in 2000...how to convince the American people to spend more on defense. They said we needed a "New Pearl Harbor." Now that's funny...considering what we now know about that! Oh, I love declassified documents, don't you?!

So... they'd seen just what the taxpayers could do for them during Reagan... when he Soviet threat was ginned up and sold to the American people. When manipulated intelligence estimates done by Wolfowitz and Perle during Poppy's tenure at the CIA came to cash-laden fruition with method-actor Ronnie leading the anti-Commie charge. We got scared of the Soviets again. The rest was money in the bank.

So here we are again. We created Al-Qaeda with the Saudis and the Pakistanis, we fund and equip North Korea, we hand over plans to Iran and don't seem to give a damn about Uncle A.Q.'s International Nuclear Superstore. And then there is the history of Saddam, the CIA and the Bush team. The love affair was moving, but the breakup was nasty, wasn't it? And I thought April Glaspie did her best to give Saddam some lovin...but Poppy sure turned on his "bottom."

I guess Poppy always been a "top."

Isn't it funny how these things happen? How totally "inept" our CIA is supposed to be? How many friends become enemies and how often we support those who we eventual attack? Isn't it funny how much we find that propaganda is being generated by tax dollars and used to convince us of X and Y?

During the ultra-secret Manhattan Project, the Soviets had a spy working on it. A known communist, he made weekly trips to a Santa Fe train station to pass along his secrets to a Soviet agent. We knew. But he kept on doing it. Why?

Mack White knows. Check this out: Operation Northwoods.

This is all historically sound, historically based. And you can read the Northwoods document yourself...at the National Security Archive. Look it up. You'll see that power needs enemies, military moneymakers need enemies.

Just like W said during his latest "Iraq is a good little war" speech. He pointed out that "the terrorists" wanted to use Iraq as a base. He then told us "That he isn't making this up." Whew...good thing...'cuz it's so hard to tell anymore.

Believe me and Mack White...'cuz you can't make this shit up!

Feeling a bit left out

2006-01-05T17:45:00.001-05:00

I would like to announce that I am returning money from Jack Abramoff. Unfortunately, I cannot. I'm here and working, but I'm outta the loop on this one.

Perchance to dream....

Or maybe I should start a support group for those legislators who didn't get money from Abramoff...a sorta lonely hearts club for congressional ne'er do wells.

The Abramoff Lobbying Mafia will dwarf the combined corruption of the Teapot dome, ABSCAM and the Capitol Post Office scandals. Today we heard it could involve up to 60 legislators and staffers. One White House official is indicted. Karl Rove and Tom Delay pop up more than those annoying plastic gophers at a kiddie arcade. We are collectively traveling into the Heart of Darkness. We are seeing exactly why this town is The Whore of Babylon.

Whores offer services for money. And that's what this town is all about. Legalized bribery abounds, and it's hard to take seriously the shock of Sen. Conrad Burns, among others, at the revelation that Abramoff and his team of former Delay staffers duped him into a massive bribery scandal. Campaign contributions of any size come sealed with the wax of implied reciprocation. Junkets and PACs and non-profit front groups process payment for services rendered.

Yes, I know...it's always been that way. Sure. But not like this. Not this thoroughgoing, pernicious and with the intention of gaming the system to enrich a bevy of political functionaries. And no, this is not different from the Enron scandal, what the big pharma companies get out of the close ties between the Bushies and Eli Lilly or the other, massive scandal that still hasn't fully aroused the media--Halliburton.

You see, good ol' Reagan Revolutionaries--Abramoff worked for Reagan's campaigns--talk about cutting taxes, but they realize that taxpayer dollars are a golden stream that will never stop flowing. Particularly during a national security build-up. Money flows when there is a enemy to bloat up through gamed intelligence, managed perceptions and dire warnings from the Bully-shit Pulpit. Abramoff came of age during Reagan's war on Central America. He worked to place stories and gin-up support for the Contras. Yes, that's right...he was part of Iran-Contra.

Jesus Christ, people...do you realize how many of the current power whores feeding off of 9-11 were part of Iran-Contra? And don't get me started about Michael Ledeen (an apologist for Fascist Italy, evidence indicated that he probably placed the false Niger-Uranium document in Italy)!

Anyway...back to the Whore of Babylon....

Although this mess rightly inspires outrage and there is some hope that a few heads will tumble down the Capitol steps...let's be honest. We've had all the evidence we've needed to conclude that this democracy is a sham, that we're in the midst of a corporate-fascist oligarchy and that our government truly is a whore bought out by the highest bidder. Government power in the form of military might is whored out to protect and abscond resources--see Operation Iraqi Liberation, to lease off at cut-rate prices our nation's dwindling resources, to fund the military-industrial complex that does the dirty work of protecting globalization's investments, to control the public debate and media...to suck up tax dollars from the working and middle classes and dole them out to the oligarchs. Abramoff is merely one, high-falutin' pimp who got caught driving his purple Cadillac between K Street and Pennsylvania avenue.

The really big pimps...those who make money off of war and military hardware, will happily see Abramoff sacrificed on the altar of collective justice to appease the gods of an American ideal that no longer exists. This pimp will be off the streets, and many will say justice is done and it's time for reform. But the Whore will keep on spreading her tax-funded legs to those who come calling. I fear that Jack will be the next Martha. Yes, there is no comparison in terms of scale...Martha was truly a little fish...but the effect could be the same. Nail Jack and keep the damage down to a minimum.

You can see it already in the lack of attention being paid to Delay's fingerprints. Or Jack's ties to Rove and Interior Secretary Gale Norton...barely being discussed.

Okay, I'm rambling a bit....

There may be a backlash in the upcoming election...but corporate cronies at Diebold have enough paperless voting machines in place to keep me paranoid about the outcome of an outrage-fueled voter revolt. I don't see the post-Watergate dynamic being allowed to repeat itself.

What's really sticking in my craw is that Abramoff had former Mossad assassin on retainer, funded a Israeli sniper school in the West Bank and was part of a Mafia hit on a business partner who got in the way of is SunCruz deal. He was part of Iran-Contra, so that "style" of politics was very familiar to him. And it's the style of politics we've had since JFK was gunned down. Please look a little harder at the dynamic. The government is a front for racketeering on so many levels, in so many ways. And we are, like those Indian Tribes Jack marked, in a perpetual shakedown.

A Few Things that Piss Me Off

2005-12-21T16:31:00.000-05:00

News is often debate masquerading as information. Debate is not, in and of itself, information. Although some prefer information and facts, we have been treated to an ever-increasing diet of blathering on, posturing around and obfuscating of the story of the day. A document is revealed, two sides debate its contents. It pisses me off. News outlets can say definitively what the document says. There are some things about which debate is merely a way of hiding from the obvious...a delay tactic...a PR move designed to obscure the only logical conclusion.

The news should not primarily be about debating a story...it should be about news gathering and story telling. It should be informational, not a persuasive attack.

That's the first thing that pisses me off.

The following have also been nagging at me for some time, a few are more recent annoyances.

1. The invasion and occupation of Iraq is...about OIL! How can there be any debate on this? Iraq had the second largest oil reserves in the world, Cheney's Energy Commission pored over oil maps of Iraq, the Saudis have a huge interest in that oil not flooding the market and, thus, keeping their profits high...as do the big oil companies who, not coincidentally, have had nothing but record profits since the invasion. When White House mouthpiece Ari Fleischer held the first post-invasion press conference he announced that "Operation Iraq Liberation had begun"...get it? O.I.L. You can't make this shit up...I've seen the videotape. These guys love acronyms. Remember George warning Iraqis against attacking the oil infrastructure? Remember the oil fields being guarded right off the bat? See, the problem is that the oil is not flowing out of Iraq. If it's about oil, why isn't it flowing, right? Because of artificial scarcity. Oil prices have been inflated by the invasion, ensuing chaos and the end of the Oil for Food program. Two primary beneficiaries are the Saudis and oil companies...and boy have they made bank off this. And one final note...had Saddam been certified WMD-free, as we now know he essentially was, he would've been able to open his oil fields, drive down prices and profits for you know who, might have made good on his threat to trade oil in euros instead of dollars and the privatization of Iraq oil fields--which has quietly been going on since Paul Bremer went it---wouldn't have happened. That oil will be hitting the market...all in good time.

2. We are never leaving Iraq. Never. Get used to it. All this crap about exit strategies, handing over Iraq once it' a democracy...all utter bullshit. Has anyone read "Rebuilding America's Defenses" by the Project for a New American Century? C'mon you jerks...read it. They write that regime is a pretext for establishing a permanent military presence in Iraq. We are building permanent bases around the country, and ominously on the border with Iran. This Administration doesn't have an exit strategy...not out of incompetence...but because they never planned to leave. Wake up!

3. And on this whole incompetence theory...they are not incompetent. The incompetence was mostly in the news media and the Congress for buying the obvious BS of being welcomed with flowers, of only costing the US $1.5 billion, of WMD's and nuclear programs and Saddam's connection to 9/11. I didn't buy it. Many in the alternative media...those who read and investigated and read overseas sources...they didn't buy it. These guys knew there were no WMDs...which is why they had such a hard-on for invasion...they had to invade before Saddam could get the sanctions lifted and begin pumping his oil at full capacity. Plus, Saddam would remain in power and his oil fields would remain a nationalized asset...not privatized into the hands of President Gas' supporters. They sold us all a pack of lies. Admit it.

4. Rumsfeld and Cheney knew it was torture, they authorized it...documents have been a fairly clear paper trail...even though the documents in question only got mentioned during one news cycle last year. It is torture.

5. They are spying on Americans, collecting data and tracking potential enemies...and I'm not talking about Infidel Arabs who wants to kill us because we are free. First, it was the Total Information Awareness Network under Iran-Contra criminal John Poindexter. That got changed, privatized and handed over, in part, to Florida election voter purger Choice Point. Now we have the NSA wiretapping. And the FBI announces that PETA and other groups are being tracked. And, like a shooting star, was a one-day story last week about the Pentagon's TALON program, which was tracking anti-war activists, among others, and collecting information like license plate numbers, automobile model and type info...and generally tracking those Americans who oppose the Administration's war policies. They went to anti-recruiting meetings, small citizens' meetings...and the story got pushed off the page by the NSA thing. I think TALON is a bigger scandal...which is perhaps why it disappeared.

6. Hey...didya hear? We were tracking Mohammed Atta a year-plus before 9-11 and we suspected he was a terrorist cell leader. Oh...sorry, I guess that's not really the sort of thing that'd start a Goddamn scandal, or anything. Or the FBI living with two other hijackers in San Diego...naw...forget about it.

7. No broadcast story about Avian Flu and Tamiflu ever mentions that Don Rumsfeld was chair of Gilead Sciences--the patent holder--when they came up with the drug, a drug that had been a huge bust financially. Now taxpayers are buying millions of doses and stockholder Rummy is going to make bank. Oh, Rummy was chair of Searle when they got the FDA to certify aspartame...funny how this guy is so big into pharmaceuticals.

8. I'm sick and tired the incompetence thing...I know, I mentioned it already...but let's get over it. They are spending $100s of millions on propaganda/psychological warfare operations in Iraq and around the world. I know...I'm working on that story right now. And they used the same techniques here--buying Armstrong Williams, and others to write pieces, creating fake news stories about their Medicare reform and prescription drug plan, selling us a war on intelligence that people with the CIA, the FBI and the Dept. Energy knew and said was crap...but they were ignored and, in some cases, ordered to keep their mouths shut. The only intelligence failure is on the part of the media and the American people.

Whew...thank you. Good night, and good luck.

Perceptions Managed

2005-12-16T14:05:00.000-05:00

Everything happens for a reason.

It's funny, but I hear that all the time about my own personal situation, the disintegration of my big relationship, the deceptions and lies that lead to that...and the overall mess I seem to be in.

But when it comes to our country's situation, the disintegration of Iraq, the deceptions and lies that lead to that...and the overall mess of our "democracy"...I keep hearing that life is random, filled with mere coincidences and not a result of an agenda.

It's just incompetence.

Bullshit.

It is bullshit in my personal life, and it's bullshit writ large for the state of the world. I had my perceptions managed by my Ex. She got what she wanted and I embraced denial. She profited. Mightily.

So, now I am working on a story about the role of perception management in our government and their policies. How they sell occupation to the Iraqis with bogus news stories. That whole "soldiers writing news" thing that came and went about a week ago. Three companies are making $100 million each to sell this crap to the hapless, increasingly insurgent Iraq people.

I won't be able to go there, but this has been going on for fifty years. In Iran and Guatemala in the 1950's, domestically and internationally in the 1960s...curtailed by revelations of CIA hijinx in the 1970's, but reinstituted by a presidential directive in 1983. It lead to our mess in Central America and Iran-Contra. The news, my friends, is a code that has to be deciphered. It's filled planted news designed to sell us enemies, to gin up wars and, therefore, create new markets for military-industrial products.

We have the Lincoln Group doing it in Iraq. And we have the Rendon Group doing it here. They've been creating the perception of necessary wars since we invaded Panama. John Rendon recently bragged about it in Rolling Stone.

Folks, everything happens for a reason. Syriana tries to let us in on it a bit. Not as much as I'd like, but perhaps that's too much for our delicate stomachs. We have a hard truth to swallow. Our perceptions are being managed on a daily basis. It went into overdrive during the 2000 election recount, and it hasn't stopped. It's not that the information isn't out there. You just have to work to find it. Read multiple sources...news from outside the bubble. You have to trace the money and see who benefits from what. You need to think about motivations and holes in stories...and why those holes never get plugged.

The Pentagon is spying on us, they've spent $100s of millions to build the case for invading Iraq, for managing the news once we got there...and for placing stories throughout the media. Guys like Bob Woodward get access for a reason. No coincidence. It was no coincidence his book told all those Red State voters that W talked to God about invading Iraq and God said, "Don't worry...I'll sort 'em out later." That helped him with Evangelicals in the election. It scared Blue Staters...but Rove said, "Who cares...we ain't gonna win those states anyway." Woodward is no better than Judy Miller.

Judy Miller was working with John Rendon, by the way, helping to push faked intelligence as gospel to the New York Times. It was a PsyOp...a psychological warfare operation. Most of what we see as news is now a PsyOp. Read and read and read...study how the CIA conducted itself throughout the Cold War and you'll see the pattern, compile the evidence. Investigate Team B during the 70s and how they rewrote the intelligence estimate of the USSR. Overnight, it went from a collapsing power to a virulent menace on the march. George H.W. Bush was head of CIA and he put Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle on the case...the case for viewing the Soviets as the world's leading sponsor of terrorism, a powerful enemy...a power that required a massive upsurge in military spending. CIA analysts disagreed, but the fix was in. They saw a waning threat, so they were left out of the process.

Good old Team B...sounds a bit familiar, eh? Perceptions were managed and it became the Reagan anti-communist agenda. But the USSR was dying...and Reagan's "victory" was going to come no matter what he did. That's why Congress asked in 1990 how the CIA failed to predict the fall of the USSR. Because they rewrote the intelligence! Rinse, repeat.

It happens over and over again. Embedded journalists, terrorism scares, anthrax attacks we can't figure out, a Bin Laden we can't find...and on and on. We are through the looking glass, people.

The real problem is denial...once again. I had to accept that I was in denial, that everything happened for a reason. So should we all. Let's stop clinging to fairy tales about democracy and incompetence and look at the course of events, the flow of money and who benefits from what's been going on.

Our perceptions can only be managed if we want to managed. Believe me, I know.

Syriana...More than a Movie

2005-12-11T10:35:00.000-05:00

The denizens here in the Whore of Babylon came out in droves to see Clooney's latest shot across our collective bow...Syriana.

Although I didn't see anything there that hadn't been known before, I suspect that audiences here in this denial-driven city came away frantically dismissive or quietly disturbed. Syriana doesn't go far enough, to my mind, in showing the CIA-Saudi-Pakistan triad's role in what we call "Al Qaeda," or broadly refer to as "the evildoers."

But it does show the role of petro-politics, of gaming markets and assassination, of the real source of decision-making in this country and our government. It shows quite accurately why we find ourselves in the mess in Iraq.

It shows us that chaos on the Middle East is good for business.

Clooney's got that kinda clout and money and, thus, the platform to do what those few of us who actually work in the news media and have done the research on the triad behind Al Qaeda, on the history of US involvement in the region...who have actually followed the money over the last three decades...only dream of doing. Syriana bursts the news bubble we live in here in the US.

It's tempting to pile on fact after fact, to take the case the movie makes and expand the database, buttress the premise with information.. available to those willing to look and stop averting their eyes...and to drive home the glaringly obvious connection between our governing family, the Saudis, the Persian Gulf, the CIA, petrobanking, and on and on.

I will not. I've tried over and over tell those who should be receptive, but can't accept that things happen for a reason. Here in the WoB, it's a particularly hard sell...everyone is so invested in this place and they cling to the platitudes of democracy and patriotism and the self-importance it implies. Or they just don't want to embrace the fundamental truth that our system is itself a propaganda machine, one rolling PsyOp that keeps us quibbling over left versus right, sighing at "incompetence," and lamenting the stupidity of others while the powers that be do those things we think unthinkable. Some just don't want to lose hope.

Hopefully, a few Congressional staffers, a smattering of low-level lobbyists, a handful of bureaucrats and one or two cowered journalists will see this film and think. Just think for one moment about CIA fun and games, the covert nature of our system and the money and power that propels it.

The most dangerous words in a democracy are: "They wouldn't do that."

Well, they do...have done and will continue to do so as long as we collective refuse to come out of denial and accept the reality of lying, our well-documented history of covert policy and our blatant use of murder and military power to enrich the elite collective who care little for Americans...for anyone but their own, in fact.

The rest of the world knows and has known this for half a century. In Latin America, the Middle East, parts of Africa and in Southeast Asia. Many Europeans and Canadians know. Watch Syriana and decide if you are willing to know...and to find out more. Because there is more. And it ain't pretty.

Bush's Business Plan for Iraq

2005-12-01T12:19:00.000-05:00

Okay, so we've got a nice booklet and another posturing speech outlining the "Plan for Victory" in Iraq. Fair enough. We've heard these arguments before...many times. Now that Rep. Murtha has opened up the debate, the airwaves are bristling with electronic chatter about the mission, if and how we win, and if and how we get out. But is that the issue?

No, not really.

Since the lead up to war, since Chief of Staff Andrew Card talked about the war as a "new product being rolled out" before the marketing campaign began, the misdirection and miscalculation have kept us all spinning in the quagmire of a muddied military campaign. The broken promises of easy victory, of liberating heroes freeing the Iraqi people, of limited needs for personnel and taxpayer funds and of keeping Saddam's WMDs out of the hands of evildoers...these things confounded and confused a 9/11-weary public and fed a patriotism-obsessed media just looking for a reason to wave the flag.

Now we all look back and, given the CIA-Leak scandal, wonder if we were sold a bill of goods, basket of lies...a bag of tricks.

And we were...sort of.

The plan for military victory, which seems to have been totally inadequate, was really a long-term business plan for success. It's hard to accept it, but what if military failure in the short-term translated into business success in the long-term? What if the promises of swift and decisive action were hollow, but provided a cover for the business and money-making opportunities that came from the ensuing chaos of post-statue Baghdad?

Think if it. What if we'd been greeted as liberators, had the Iraqis transitioned into a post-Saddam democracy and taken control of their land, their lives and their oil? Would we be allowed to build permanent bases there? Would we have been allowed to force our agribusiness interests on their farmers, our oil contracts and infrastructure rebuilding contracts down their throats? Perhaps. Perhaps now. The Iraqis don't want us there. They never have. Had they taken control of their country, would the world's second largest oil reserves be flowing freely, funding the rebirth of their nation and driving world oil prices down in a sea of over-production?

When President Clinton ordered the UN inspection team to leave in 1998, Iraq was on the verge of being certified WMD free. Not immediately, but they'd done a great job of finding most everything. The Oil-for-Food program was gearing up and Iraq was selling far more oil then than it is now. Still, it was a small portion of what they could put out on the world market. Halliburton was rebuilding capacity through that program. And then Saddam started making noises about switching from dollars to euros for all oil transactions. Big mistake. That's a lot of money lost to US banks and oil companies. And had Iraq finally come into compliance on WMDs...been certified...the oil spigot would open wide, flooding the world's oil supply and driving down prices...and profits.

The Saudis would've taken a bit hit. Iraq's reserves were the primary challenge to their domination of the market. And the big oil companies would not have been hitting record profits quarter and after quarter...as they've done since we marched into Iraq. Artificial scarcity is an oft-ignored part of our capitalistic system. The Saudis wanted it. Oil companies wanted it. They got it. Perhaps that's why the Saudis are the number one funder of terrorism and send, by far, the most suicide bombers to Iraq. Iraq's oil is languishing there...but a ton of money is being made by keeping it off the market.

And then there is Halliburton. They made a ton of money off of their support and logistical roles during the invasion. They make money everyday off of the occupation--building bases, serving food, trucking water and fuel around. It's a huge stream of revenue. Huge. They are rebuilding oil infrastructure...on contracts they might not have gotten from a petulant Saddam after he was found to be in compliance with the UN's resolutions on WMDs. They are building permanent bases. And the longer we are there...the more money they make.

A quick victory was not part of the business plan for Iraq.

Then there is terrorism. Insurgency, perhaps. But the fact is that we have a Vietnam situation brewing...nationalism, hatred of occupation and internal struggle between two factions...sounds familiar, right? Vietnam was not going to end with our involvement. We couldn't stop the war with our might or presence. The same is true here. But the chaos is a self-perpetuating machine...the chaos means we cannot cut and run...the chaos is caused by our presence. The end of chaos means we can leave...but the plan is to stay...indefinitely. Chaos is good for business and ensures our prolonged presence.

The rosy assessments were just a sales pitch. Wolfowitz, Cheney...they all knew it would unleash hell for us to go in. But it also unleashed billions of tax-payer dollars directly into the coffers of the people they represent...the military industry, the energy industry, the major construction industry. All this talk about victory is a moot point. Bush's speech and little book are for our consumption, while the profits from an enduring chaos are for theirs.

Finally, it was obvious after Afghanistan that the international network of terrorists was overblown. It was not that big. And Iraq was basically free of those cells that did exist. But the chaos invited a whole generation of Muslims to take up the cause, to become those terrorists the Administration needed to justify it's larger, geopolitical strategy. It's larger oil-centric strategy. It's not about getting all the oil so they can sell it. It's about keeping too much oil from hitting the market and driving down profits. It's about finally putting the oil in the hands of cooperative cronies...like the Saudis have been for decades.

Saddam was not going to cooperate. Not after Bush the First betrayed him and withdrew his patronage...a relationship built during the 80's...one that started the Iran-Iraq War, and kept the problematic Kurds at bay. That was another business plan...but that's another blog.

Follow the money. Think about the money lost had we won in Iraq. Think about the money made since the fall of the statue. Think about the money that will be made...the enduring rationale for staying "until the job is done," a job anyone who studies history knows will never be done...and think about the daily reminders of terrorism that keep us looking over our shoulders...keep us thinking there is global war on terrorism that will never end.

We had the Commies for half a century, and fear of them fed the military-industrial beast trillions of dollars. This latest beast is even better. It will never go away. Particularly if we keep on keeping on in Iraq. The perpetual machine is real...not for your car or to heat your home...but to keep your money going upwards and outwards into the offshore accounts of those who really make the plans. The business plans...for us all.

White Phosphorous Bubble

2005-11-15T13:36:00.000-05:00

There is the "news" we get here in the bubble, and then there is the news that the rest of the world gets. We wonder "why they hate us," we ponder the resistance of "Old Europe" to our foreign policies and we wallow in the half-truths and take solace in the hidden from view implications of our American Empire.

We, as a people, just don't know.

The assessment of Americans by the rest of the world usually puts us into one of two types.

One is that we are hypocrites, vulgar in our tastes and appetites, willing to kill and consume indiscriminately, preaching love of the Lord and democracy while breaking all of the Commandments and political principles we espouse. We are selfish, self-important and self-serving. Ultimately, we say whatever it takes to get whatever we want.

Two is the forever smiling bumpkin...unreflective, childish in our tastes and appetites, unaware of the killing that goes on in our name. Our undereducated, simplistic minds cannot process the complexities of the world. We preach backwards religious principles that put us squarely in the 14th Century. We reject science and philosophy, wallow in anti-intellectualism, revel in adolescent sex and violence. Ultimately, we are kinda stupid. Fat, happy and stupid, that is.

Of course, we can find Americans who fit either category. But the truth is more pernicious. Americans are simply not told. Not told the truth...the truth about most everything. Those who know really have to work at...seek it out...read the foreign press and watch foreign news. They have to understand "psychological operations," and how news is created in editorial meetings. They have to study American history and read book after book. They cannot rely on public education to equip them...not anymore. They have to look beyond the bubble.

That bubble is being pressed upon by an Italian documentary on the use of a chemical weapon in the massacre of Fallujah. We used new, improved napalm--white phosphorous. Called "Willy Pete" by soldiers, it disperses a fiery, deadly cloud...burning everyone it touches, cannot be extinguished by water due to it's acidic, chemical composition and blisters the lungs. It melts flesh. It asphyxiates those who simply breath it's toxic cloud. It was used in the attack on Fallujah.

Now, this is news to most Americans...that is, if they see the footage now circulating on the web--not on any US media outlet, of course. And that's the problem. Americans who don't seek it out will never see this footage...of women and children burned by the chemical agent used throughout the Fallujah "campaign." They will not see the charred flesh, the unburned clothing. It often burns flesh, but not fibers. They will not see the dead animals...choked by the clouds of Willy Pete that never burned them. They don't know about the civilian causalities. They do not know that it is a chemical weapon at all. They don't know.

The world knows. Iraqis know.

Now, it was reported at the time...mostly by Dahr Jamail...an independent American reporter who has done the best, unembedded work coming out of embedded Iraq. Only those who turned to alternative media knew it when it happened. Now the facts are out there...swirling around Europe and the world. Still, the mainstream media will not show the footage and the horrific consequences of our invasion of Iraq. Causalities are hidden. Civilian death numbers are under-reported...but, then again, the Pentagon ordered Iraqis to stop counting civilian deaths long ago. We can't see the returning coffins, or any real footage of the daily battles, the wounded and killed that pile up every night.

How would a good, God-fearing Midwesterner react to this footage? We will never know, because the media is complicit. It is mostly useless, even after the steroid injection of Katrina. Since the end of Vietnam, the media has slowly morphed into a propaganda arm of the military-industrial complex, of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, of the prison-industrial complex. This invasion had a non-permeable membrane around it. The bubble was completed during the 2000 Election, and the truth doesn't seep into the mainstream bubble anymore. The world knows about the 2000 Election. About the oil pipeline in Afghanistan. And on, and on, and on.

Americans are basically good people. I've traveled enough to know that. But they just don't know. They are not given the facts or the awful truth about the outcomes of their consumption, their votes and their leaders' decisions. They don't know how their own political system works. They just don't know. The people who should be telling them don't. Mainstream journalists have access to the same information the alternative media does, but they ignore it. They rely on political leaders to set the story, to make the news agenda. They follow. They wave the flag. And the bubble grows.

If you know, and you are an American...please tell someone who doesn't. It's all we have...to tell each other, to send links and make copies. The bubble will not be popped by a dozen Italian documentaries. It has to be compromised from within. Watch the footage...send it to someone who wouldn't even know it exists. Let's pop this damn bubble.

The Memorial to End All Memorials?

2005-11-14T16:54:00.000-05:00

The Wall. The Vietnam War memorial. Whenever I go down to The Mall that long, angled epitaph to a tragic war calls me, and brings me to tears. To my mind, it's the only monument worth visiting over and over again. It never fails to cause reflection...whether is my face on the shiny black surface, or my mind pondering the sad, almost criminal, history of American warmaking since the end of World War II.

I'm not too old, but I do recall the controversy surrounding the design of the monument...a stark, simple construction that did not celebrate the war. Nor did it judge it. A design by a young Asian American woman--Maya Lin. A design that attracts scores of visitors. A memorial that invites them to pull the name of a fallen loved one off the wall with a piece of paper and a pencil. A memorial that invites reflection.

The most striking feature of the monument is the descent...from the high point of the walkway downwards, deeper and deeper against an ever-towering list of names. Eventually, the names dwarf you. You feel small against the backdrop...a roll call of lives lost in a war that had no victory, a conflict that was never declared...a fight we didn't have to pick. A war that was started by a Texan, based on bogus claims of dangerous attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin. Of jingoism about a decades-long war against evil communists who wanted to end our way of life. A war that made military contractors rich...like his buddy's company, Bell Helicopter. A war that eviscerated a generation.

This latest visit came two days after Veteran's Day. Flowers and wreaths abounded. The pall was palpable. And I cannot help but well-up each time I see someone searching for a name...finding it...and beginning the process of taking back the simple reminder of who they were...taking a copy of their name off the wall. But the tears flow more when I think about the names not on that wall. The names of the 1.5 million Vietnamese who died. Of the women and children, of the Christmas Day Bombing and Rolling Thunder. Or the "Strategic Hamlets" that had to be "destroyed so they could be saved."

I am an American. I mourn the loss of fellow Americans. I mourn the loss of the 2000-plus who've died in another lie-driven, profiteering adventure...this time in Iraq. But I think, too, of the 100,000 Iraqis who've died. The radiation they'll have to live with from depleted uranium ammunition, and the generations who will never forget the use of white phosphorous weapons.

We got lucky with the Vietnamese. They have centuries of practice fighting off invaders. They are forgiving given the circumstances. But we were a passing fad compared to centuries of dealing with the Chinese. Somehow, I think our luck has run out. I cannot forgive our "leaders" for sending our countrymen to die, and I don't expect the Iraqis will forgive us anytime soon for demolishing their country, their lives and torturing their brothers and fathers and sons.

The Wall calls me every time. This time, it sank in that we refuse to look at this memorial for what it is...a caution...a warning...a marker that will stand as a testament to the repetitive cycle of a history unexamined.

Coincidences, Conspiracy Theories and You

2005-11-08T13:10:00.000-05:00

Conspiracy Theory. It's the epithet par excellance of our modern political environment. It's crushes debate, walls off the truth into an intellectual ghetto and undermines any collection of facts that point to nefarious decision-making by those in power.

Funny, though, that every day people are charged with criminal conspiracy in courthouses across America. When two or more people plan to rob a bank, hold up a liquor store or defraud a government agency they are charged with conspiracy. But, somehow, when we talk of this sort of planning at higher levels--among politicians, military types, policy-makers...the word conspiracy is code for crackpot delusion.

Why?

Perhaps because it defuses, obfuscates and hides the fact that most things happen for a reason. Yes, I know...chaos theory...but decisions do get made, plans do get concocted and those choices are often implemented. Here in the WoB, I've found the utmost resistance to any implication that events might be part of plans, plots and power plays that transcend mere incompetence, belie stupidity or foolhardiness. People are so invested in this city, it's importance and the rhetoric of democracy that they cannot imagine that people entrusted with protecting us, caring for us and leading us might actually care little about deaths, looting the treasury and the ill-effects of their devious ways. People are invested. They cling to denial. They can't handle the truth.

That's why I am not a conspiracy theorist. I'm a coincidence theorist. I like to look at facts and odds-busting coincidences, tell anyone I can and let them draw their own conclusions. I could give big picture tie-ins. Patterns are there...and have been for decades. The same thing seems to happen over and over again. Dots can be connected.

But let's discard the conspiracy theory epithet. Remember W saying immediately after 9-11 that we need to stop spreading "dangerous conspiracy theories?" Wow, wasn't that a bit excessive?

No.

By putting that label out there, those who see one flaw after another in the official conspiracy theory...that 19 foreigners were able to pull off 9-11...puts them on the Grassy Knoll with Oliver Stone pointing in a different direction based on where they heard the shots coming from. They are kooks, now.

So, let's deal in coincidences. Let's just look at facts and see what they tell us. Here's an example of a coincidence theory. The Taliban was in negotiations to build a pipeline for the Caspian Sea oil and gas reserves in 1999-2000. They went to Houston. Shortly thereafter, the deal fell through, the Taliban pulled out. Chevron and Unocal were the big players in that venture. Condi Rice was on the board of Chevron and their Central Asian expert. Afghan President Hamid Karzai was a special consultant to Unocal. So was our special envoy to Afghanistan after the Taliban fell, Zalmay Khalilzhad. Both paid by Unocal. Almost immediately, Unocal started building a pipeline in Afghanistan that would go through Pakistan and out to the Indian Ocean. Our troops protected the route...troops that could've been hunting down Osama. The British press exposed this. Unocal stopped, but restarted under an offshore subsidiary. Wow, what a set of coincidences.

Or the coincidence that the guy--John O'Neill--who was the FBI's point man on Al-Qaeda, broke open the USS Cole bombing and had developed a flow chart of names and plans that pin-pointed the next attack to lower Manhattan, to the World Trade Center, was pushed out of the FBI and offered almost immediately therafter the chief security job by the WTC. Frustrated by his inability to get someone to pay attention to his warnings and railroaded by his beloved FBI, he took the big payday at WTC. He knew what was coming. He knew quite a bit. His body was found in the rubble of the WTC. Not demolished into tiny bits. They found his body. And it's also interesting that the company in charge of security for the WTC was partially owned by Marvin Bush. Wow, more coincidences.

I could go on, and on, and on.

But I leave it to you to look for yourselves. Look for coincidences. For facts that defy odds. Like the odds that the first death from the anthrax attack was the guy at American Media who made the decision to run a photo of the drunken Bush twins on the cover of the National Enquirer. Wow, what are the odds?

Many people know something strange is happening. The CIA-Leak scandal shows some conspiring in the Veep's office, right? The conspiracy to commit torture seems obvious now, right? But keep your eye on coincidences. Look for facts and draw your own conclusions.

Julius Caesar may have said, "E Tu Brute." Perhaps it was the first conspiracy theory. But it wasn't the last. Still, let's not fall for the easy write-off, the language of denial. Let's connect a few dots. It'll actually make more sense than the official conspiracy theories we are fed everyday.

NSA's History Lesson

2005-11-04T12:52:00.000-05:00

Those of you who think the last century proves humanity to be a stinking genepool of war and violence, that we're warlike, trigger-happy beasts itching for carnage...take heart! It may not be so. I advocate studying history...the history of the 20th Century's wars and our current adventure in Iraq. That is, if you can find the history, the facts and the story of the machinations that generate conflicts.

If you rely on the National Security Agency to come clean about such things, you might be disappointed. This week it was revealed that the NSA blocked an NSA historian from releasing key information about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and the "comedy of errors" that convinced Congress and the American people to follow LBJ into that tragic, if profitable, war in Indochina. Of course, this important story faded quicker than an Anthrax investigation, and the "trusty NY Times" buried the lead. But, now you know.

Why, you might ask, would the NSA be concerned with covering up this "ancient history"? It's axiomatic that Americans care little about the past, know little of our own history and, sporting the attention span of a gnat, move onto the next celebrity scandal du jour with simple ease. Or the ease of a simpleton.

What danger is there in letting out a bit more evidence that the Gulf on Tonkin was mere pretext for a foregone conclusion...the war in Vietnam?

Oh yeah, repeat that line.

What danger is there in letting out a bit more evidence that the Gulf on Tonkin was mere pretext for a foregone conclusion...the war in Vietnam?

Get it? Whether one looks at the Downing Street Memo, or the Project for a New American Century. Or the Cheney Energy Commission. Or, back in 2002, Andrew Card talking about "not rolling out a new product in August," when asked why they waited until September to make the case for the invasion of Iraq. Or, after month after month after month of ignoring it, what is finally all over the media...the falsified, jury-rigged intelligence about WMD in Iraq. What you'll see is that this current war was a product, a scheme...a long-hatched plan to make it happen, regardless of any threat posed by Saddam or the findings of the UN. It was manufactured, like any other product sold to American consumers.

The problem the NSA astutely identified was that the Gulf of Tonkin offers a sort of blueprint for a war case based on lies or faulty evidence (you'll have to decide that for yourself) and the war lust of those entrusted by the military-industrial complex to create new markets for their products. Or those seeking natural resources to sell back to us. Or both. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "market forces." The White House even had a group--the White House Iraq Group--designed to sell the war to us all.

The NSA's desire to stop the release of their own historian's findings--which really take the soft interpretation of the Tonkin Incident as more folly than foul play--illustrates the overarching control of information that this Administration relies on to steer clear of culpability, and to steer us as they see fit.

Historians, fighting the national security culture of national security secrets, have to reverse engineer these cover-ups to get at the truth. In other words, we have to look at rationale for secrecy, not just the secrets themselves. We need to explore motivations. We need to make sense of it all.

If we do, if we truly examine some of the forces that lead to wars, we will find a pattern. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, wars have--by and large--been manufactured. We are basically agreed about the Manchurian Incident in China (1932), the Nazi invasion of Poland and there is a troubling consensus emerging around Pearl Harbor. The Burning of the Reichstag was damn fishy, wasn't it? Jury still out on the true source of that one. The Nazi sure made out on that deal, didn't they?

There is, of course, the Spanish-American War. Yes, late 19th Century...but "Remember the Maine?!" Oh yeah, historians agree...it wasn't bombed by Spanish/Cuban enemies. Shall I go on? There are a dozen little hot wars during the Cold War that have flakey causes.

Then, we goaded Saddam into attacking Iran...after arming him and secretly arming Iran. A two-fer! We goaded Saddam into invading Kuwait...practically invited him...thanks to April Glaspie and the illegal arming of Iraq by Bush the First. Then came the Gulf War and false claims of Iraq troops massing on the Saudi border, babies being unplugged by incubators and a litany of "Saddam is the Son of Hitler" articles by...drum-roll please...Judith Miller!

There is secrecy to penetrate. And there are lessons to be learned by studying not only the facts of history, but the motivations for secrecy. The motivations, for instance, around Bush the Second clamping down on the release of records from Reagan-Bush, Bush-Quayle and even from Clinton-Gore. Iran-Contra still has untold stories...at least untold by mainstream media. Keeping a lid on new records, or historical findings...keeps us in that axiomatically American place--a collective ignorance of history. It keeps the "them" in power. It obfuscates patterns to all but the most tenacious, perhaps even paranoid, of researchers. It keeps the media from revisitng the past.

But why not be paranoid? We see over and over again that "they" are trying to hide something.

I'll keep reverse engineering. I have to. It's my heartily-embraced lot in life. It sustains my idealism about mankind to know that we have to be guided into wars by special interests, by interested parties, by war-profiteers and by inhuman leaders.

Next up? Why did the CIA try to keep hidden millions of documents about Nazis being imported into America under the guidance of Allen Dulles? The Congress passed a law finally forcing the release of those millions of documents.

Ah, finally some light, bedtime reading! Auf Wiedersehen!

Scami-Flu

2005-11-02T07:57:00.001-05:00

Okay everybody, let's get scared!

Buy Tami-flu...the bird flu is coming, the bird flu is coming.

And, by the way, the patent for Tami-flu is held by Gilead Sciences. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was chairman of Gilead before he became Chief Operating Officer of War Profits Inc., a.k.a. the Pentagon. He still has millions of dollars in stock holdings in Gilead. Gilead is going to make bank off the bird flu scare and the billions in tax dollars our President proposed spending yesterday.

Ain't it beautiful?

So, how many times have you heard this connection mentioned over the last few weeks? Exactly.

But the bird flu story has been non-stop for a month. And that with only a couple hundred people dying because they cavorted with infected birds in the close-quarters conditions of Southeast Asia--where tomorrow's dinner is often found walking around your front door today. Yes, many birds are being culled. Yes, it's popping up around the world. No, it hasn't been transmitted from human to human. Yes, it has to mutate to be dangerous. Any questions?

Now, let's stop and think about this for a minute. Remember when the flu was just a really bad cold? When people stayed in bed, drank gallons of orange juice, popped aspirin and then got better? Before flu shots...shots loaded with mercury-laden Thimerosol. Thimerosol is made by Eli Lilly, and Ken Lay is on the board of that company. Past Lilly luminaries include Poppy Bush, Dan Quayle, Mitchell Daniels. Thimerosol will be used to preserve all the vaccines that we build up to deal with bird flu, if we come up with a vaccine for bird flu. There's a lot of money is sickness.

Or the fear of sickness.

And it's that fear factor this Administration has used over and over again to stoke profits for one corporate contributor after another. Fear of a collapsing energy market, stoked by outages in California--bullshit outages created by Enron!--led to huge corporate gifts from American taxpayers. Duct tape and plastic sheeting for Home Depot. Hundred of billions of dollars for the Military-Industrial Complex out of the fears from 9-11, of false WMD claims for Iraq, of false 9-11 claims about Saddam. Billions in profits from fears in the oil market. Take a minute and think about that one---profits rise to record levels every quarter since going into Iraq---at that time, home of the second largest oil reserves in the world. What?

And then there's Social Security, and bogus claims of SUV safety and on and on.

Fears about the flu are the latest scam. So, go out and stock up on Tami-flu. Donnie-boy needs a golden parachute once he's done irradiating Iraq and our troops, torturing people in former Soviet-style gulags in Eastern Europe, creating profit center after profit center for Dickie-boy's Halliburton. His time at Gilead will have been a mutually beneficial relationship should we forgo reality and keep marching to the drum-beat of fear...a fear my cohorts in the media love of play on...and on, and on.

No matter what happens over the next few years, everyone in this Administration will come out golden. Some may need pardons, but all will need Swiss bank accounts. And we all may take a healthy dose of mercury in a flu vaccine should the miracle of evolution mutate bird flu into a real threat. Or by the miracle of "Intelligent Design" for our Evangelical Republican friends.

However, the golden parachute crowd doesn't need that mutation...they've already caused the primary mutation behind all of this. They've inspired us as a nation to evolve into scared lab rats, stuck in a maze, searching for some cheese and directed along the path they set out for us. Our grand experiment in democracy has evolved into mere experimentation.

Master Racing

2005-10-31T15:35:00.000-05:00

A NASCAR race is a loud, vaguely violent affair filled with anticipation, excitement, thrills and spills...and it's real loud. Did I mention that it's loud?

Oh yeah, sorry.

Considering my roots, my background and general outlook, a NASCAR race is not my can of gas. I never got it. Why would people spend hours watching cars spinning around an oval, over and over again...to the tune of 500 miles? Crashes, right? No, there is that...but it's more. It's power, strategy, technology and personalities. There is more than a bit of that. The WWF built an empire on personalities...the no-so-subtle soap opera story lines that inspired love and hate among their fans. Racers have some of that. Not scripted, but real. Of the 100,000-plus fans I saw, most aligned themselves with a driver...sporting their colors, their images and waving their flags. Feuds between drivers get played up, and people boo or cheer at cars as they blur by them, leaving only the overwhelming sound of insanely explosive engines echoing in their heads.

The power of the engines dominates you as you watch them propel the cars around the track, sometimes inches away from one another. Many fans listen in on radio communication between drivers and their crews as they jockey for position. There is an intellectual, strategic appeal. The violence of the sport is latent...not as overt as the chariots of Rome...but anticipated at every turn. The violence of flames and flying tires can erupt at any second. It's gripping in every sense. The fans have a blast. They're all on the same page. They drink copious amounts of beer. They whoop it up. Many stay for an entire weekend in a vast field of RVs, campers and tents. It's an event.

It's also very White.

Very White.

The theory I've had for a few years is that it mirrors the rise of "new country." Both took off in the 90s...during the Clinton years and when Black music and Black athletes took over the marketplace. Latinos started to poke through, too. J Lo and the Macarena.

Enter New country and NASCAR, two cultural rest stops on the road to the "urbanization" of all off our entertainment. Two white oases in the midst of a multicultural desert of hip-hop, basketball, salsa dancing...etc.

White suburban kids flocked to the "urban," and their angry White male fathers felt like an endangered species. They took over the political scene in 1994. Remember the Contract with America? They went to Promise Keeper's in the late 90s. Now, they are NASCAR Dads. They support the war and Toby Keith. The are mostly blue collar, suburban and rural. They like cars, and really like trucks. They fish. They voted for Bush...twice.

They are a powerful demographic the GOP has targeted quite successfully...the culmination of years of strategy that started with the Reagan Democrats. These are the guys Dean talked about...the guys with gun racks in their trucks...that the Democrats have simply lost.

At the beginning of the race, after the national anthem was sung...a massive bomber flew over the stadium...low and loudly. People cheered. A prayer..supporting the racers and our military was said. This is the America those of us clinging to the coasts just don't get. And many of us fear.

As for NASCAR...it is a valid sport...an interesting test of man and machine. It's fun to watch...for a while, at least. And there is no overt racism there. There are a few Black spectators, and they were not singled out. But it is as White a crowd as I've ever seen. And they are all one, together and of a mind. And they feel comfortable there, knowing that they are all in it together. They look around and see themselves...a sea of themselves. And it may be a bit enticing for them to think that some people just don't get...and to feel different from the type of people who "don't get it." They probably like that. It differentiates them from society while simultaneously joining them with a distinct, large group identity within it. Let's not start on identity politics, though. Another blog, another time.

It's said that you either get NASCAR or you don't. There is a clean divide between those two camps. Sounds like our red state/blue state country. NASCAR is very red...very white...and it made me feel a little blue.

And Jesus...it was loud!

Harriet Tells All

2005-10-27T13:09:00.000-04:00

"As you know, members of the Senate have indicated their intention to seek documents about my service in the White House in order to judge whether to support me. I have been informed repeatedly that in lieu of records, I would be expected to testify about my service in the White House to demonstrate my experience and judicial philosophy. While I believe that my lengthy career provides sufficient evidence for consideration of my nomination, I am convinced the efforts to obtain Executive Branch materials and information will continue."--Harriet Miers' Withdrawal Letter

Yes, conservatives were unhappy with Harriet. Yes, they wanted more evidence of Scalia-esque dogmatism. But the real problem was in the Senate, and the issue there was, as Harriet said, access to documents.

The Bush Administration protects corporations, dividends, cronies...but, more than anything else, they protect information. One of the first things Albert Gonzales...another White House Counsel...did was lock up records from the Reagan-Bush White House. Documents due to be released. And, in so doing, they also locked up documents from Poppy's White House and Bill's Brothel.

What are they hiding?

In the case of Harriet Miers, she was privy to all the big stuff: the famous Presidential Daily Briefing--"Bin Laden determined to attack," the legal gymnastics employed by the White House's Torquemada torture team, the various legal issues around the case for war, the CIA leak scandal and the general traffic of legal justifications that this Presidency is built upon.

She is a fixer...has been since her time in Texas, and those documents she wrote of in her letter cannot be released, period. It could unfix four years of fixing. It could set the bad precedent of actually releasing documents pertaining to Executive decision-making. We can't have information like that flying around a functioning democracy.

It's all part of a pattern...from the Cheney Energy Commission to Judge Roberts' work on Iran-Contra. A panoply of Reagan-Bush people and Bush-Qualyle people were resurrected in this administration--even guys like Poindexter and McFarlane--and one of the benefits of returning to power is that you can use Executive Privilege to mask, obfuscate and, dare I say, cover up your past actions. Your past crimes.

The Bushies even put a lock on the documents relating Clinton's pardons! Remember Mark Rich, the "financier" who, evidence indicates, laundered drug money. Oh, that's why he needed a pardon. Rep. Dan Burton tried to investigate, but the Administration stopped it. Now they've locked up those documents. Why? A "quid pro quo" between golfing buddies?

It all comes down to information, who controls it and what we are allowed to know. We're all on a need to know basis...and, mostly, we don't need to know. Whether it's forged uranium documents or what Poppy knew and did during Iran-Contra, they have some red-hot information and we are not allowed to see it. Our elected representatives are not allowed to see it.

So, Senators looked for Harriet's paper trail, a trail that led back to the highest level of the White House. It's a trail laced with red herrings--stinking fish like Executive Privilege that stymies us as we track down the perps. Harriet saw that she wasn't going to be able to do her job...protecting her teen idol crush W.

Now she's done her job. And we will not see what she's seen. And the media has it's red herring...fish anyone?

Californianistas!

2005-10-24T17:49:00.000-04:00

There are plenty of reasons to feel alone here in the WoB. A lone crusader feeling, the "I know things they don't know, or don't want to know" feeling, the "country's problems are so big and I'm so small" feeling, the "so what if I didn't go to an Ivy League school or join a frat" feeling, the "there's a lot of evil in the world" feeling.

Mostly, these are indulgent.

I indulge in them all. Christ, does that make me an alonaholic? Whatever.

The one source of truly oppressive loneliness comes from the mood and temper of the town, the style--or lack thereof--of the social fabric, the repressed mimicry that coats this oh-so-important of cities. Perhaps it's a function of power, or the pursuit of it. Likely it's money, which seems to pursue power like a stalker on meth.

Or maybe it's the transplanted populace, all begging for cues from the core of natives who've been here from day one and have grown used to the social strata, reserved elitism and lamprey economy.

It's not my homeland. In fact, this place makes me feel less like an American than any place I've been.

I'm a Californianista.

Yes, California has it's faults. It's too expensive, a bit too image conscious (I'm from NoCal, not SoCal), too car-oriented. But it's free. Liberated. Open. Anyone can go to California and fit in. Anyone. If they want. Social fluidity--an acceptance of differences and that "laid-back" style that means you are welcome to stay.

There are few places like that in this transcontinental behemoth. Certainly not here. Perhaps I haven't tried hard enough...here, that is. But that's the point. Why should I try?

A fellow Calfornianista seconded my claims. What an oasis. Saying "dude," freely, Saying "whatever" whenever you want. Looking askance at the stuffiness, and being skeptical of anything related to power. You see, the Reagan Revolution's roots come out of a typically Californian, and broadly Western, mindset of individualism, distrust of power and the government and an unrepentant libertarianism.

It has spawned these disparate movements:
The Direct Democracy movement
Early 20th Century Progressives
Berkeley Free Speech Movement
The Tax Revolt (see Reagan)
Skate Punks
Open Homosexuality
Land Rights

Yeah, we have conservatives...but they are not generally Evangelicals. They want the "government off their backs." So do gays who want to marry. They want freedom from interference.

We get along because we have space...we have boundaries. We are united by the space between us. We have fences, we have refugees from the East who were tired of everyone on the block knowing their business, or from the Midwest where small towns post the name of everyone you've slept with in the local diner. I've heard the stories. They came to get away, to re-invent...to get some breathing room. Sure, the air is not so clean...but at least they can breath it freely. Actually, that's LA. LA...well...I'm not from LA.

Whatever!

I've not met many people from home. When I do, which has happened a couple times, there is this thing...a sort of ease and relaxation...that frees me to really be free. To use all the different inflections of "dude" and "whatever." Each word has a number of different meanings. It's great to be able to use them. My brother by choice teaches back in CA...and he assured me he praises his students for using the native tongue. He's helping to keep our language alive.

If there is a lingo here, I haven't found it. Or been introduced to it. Or maybe I'm just not looking. Because this is a place of transients, hostages, jailers and those in transition. I've certainly been three of the four. But now I know I will never be "in" here. Only "out" here...as in temporarily. Last time it was four years. This time?

We'll see.

I do want to get back to my land, my people...my way of life. This time, though, not a retreat from defeat, but as a choice born of desire. And, until then, I will seek out others like me. Perhaps forming a little band of us to roam about, drawing stares from those who find "dude" to be so prol, so gauche...so unsophisticated.

Fair enough.

Californianistas unite! You have nothing to lose but the rest of this country.

Why We Fight

2005-10-23T20:14:00.000-04:00

Why we fight. It's an old argument, made time and again, to explain why nations must go to war. Throughout the 20th Century, those in war-making positions have had to do their best to create the circumstances conducive to war, or have extolled the virtues of war, or Cold War, to the washed and unwashed masses they lead. My operating principle on human nature is that we are essentially peaceful, at least collectively.

Individually? Yes, we are often powder kegs looking for a match...or simply stuck in the moment...unreflective, denial-ridden and full of intent. Crimes of passion, right? But it's a different thing to organize a whole population into blind fury and unreflective violence. It takes something big. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler called it the "Big Lie," and he held forth on the effectiveness of that power ploy to mobilize mass society. We, too, as a people are seeing the fruits of lies and the wars they beget. It's why we've spent so much time--finally--on the CIA Leak Probe. We keep reading that it's spread to the case for war. It's always been the central issue...that we bought into the big lie.

We, as Americans, found ourselves in a highly unreflective mood when the case for war was being made. 9-11 will do that. Much like the burning of the Reichstag did in 1930s Germany when it echoed forth a fear of communism and disintegration that led many Germans into the security of Nazi certainties. 9-11 gave us a "them " who hate us--religious zealots and suicidal maniacs. We got Homeland Security and war to assauge or fear. Back then, they got the Fatherland and freedom from Bolshevism.

Here and now, the simple inclusion of Saddam and 9-11 in the same sentence left us wanting...for retribution, for the satiation of unconnected bloodlust and unchanneled vengeance...for an object for our unreflective anger. Perhaps it's time that leads to the sort of reflectiveness that begets a growing investigation, a fall in poll numbers and the disarray many of us now revel in watching. Although many of us are also reflective about the "too little, to late" nature of it all. Alas, we take what we can get.

What will not come out of this is that we had a willingness to believe, to believe the rhetoric of revenge, of anger, of unattributed inadequacies. We lashed out at Iraq because they symbolized something wrong within ourselves. We assisted Saddam all along the way, we invested in him financially, with a host of weaponry, with intelligence. Saddam was Saddam. But Saddam was the Saddam we attacked because of our problems, our deficiencies. But most of us don't reflect on the outcomes of our foreign policy and the way others see us...and he can be made into "the next Hitler" with a little nudge from some amateurish propaganda. He was a great object for unreflective violence. And he had something we wanted. C'mon, we all wanted his oil...even if we needed to console ourselves with songs of freedom and democracy.

And Osama gets away. We never seem to mind to much that the real object goes by, hides away in a cave somewhere. That we keep on missing the point.

But that is the problem we face. We may get to the bottom of this story, but not to the roots causes that will allow it to happen again. Until we look at our denial-based society...a Wal-Mart of cheaply manufactured collective neuroses, pregnant with future possibilities for war-makers and policy-benders...we teeter on the brink of unreflective violence. We could be--collectively--a people at rest, at peace. But we can't depend on the individuals in charge to be reflective, not that way. They are individuals, and there is a good chance they know what they are doing. It's up to us as a people to look at ourselves. Where's the Special Proscecutor for that?

Media Cries Wolf

2005-10-20T13:02:00.000-04:00

"Fool me once...shame...shame on...you. A fool me can't be fooled again."
-President George W. Bush

Our media. Can't live with it, can't live without it. Now that they are starting to do their job they're gripped by the impetus to whitewash their complicity in all that's happened since that fateful election night in 2000.

Plamegate's exploding into a full-on scandal about the bogus case for invading Iraq. The poll numbers help. We've just crossed the "more than half of Americans think the war was wrong" threshold. Patrick Fitzgerald's tenacity adds more chum to the water. Iraq is a mess, and it looks like the constitutional vote was jury-rigged. The media cannot avoid looking at the obvious--the Bush Administration misled us into one tragic disaster after another. We've been "manipulated."

"We" being the media.

Aw, poor babies.

Kudos go out to the media for this new focus on the message management, the control of the media, the falsehoods peddled as intelligence, and the overall tendency of this administration to "create" realities that they impose on us and world. Newsweek has a huge piece on "White House manipulation of the media."

Bullshit.

Our media has bent over time and again, beginning with the 2000 vote in Florida. Greg Palast, working for the BBC, found documented evidence of the manipulation of the vote before the fact. Voter rolls were purged of Blacks. Vote counting machines in Black and Democrat districts rejected votes at an astronomically higher rate than predominantly White, Republican areas. He took the story to CBS, they bought he rights...and refused to run it. From that point forward our media has been a willing participant in it's own manipulation.

They turned a blind eye to the link between the Cheney Energy Commission and the California Energy Crisis and, later, the invasion of Iraq.

They turned a blind eye to a laundry list of 9-11 facts. They forgot the "put options," for example.

They gave up on the Anthrax investigation.

They ignored the attempted coup in Venezuela.

They stopped investigating the fall of Aristide in Haiti.

They let the Administration control the torture story...perhaps the most egregious of our recent crimes.

They dropped the Bush/AWOL story, never looked into his DUI--which, it turns out, Harriet Miers fixed-up for him.

They swallowed the Iraq war rationale like a talented hooker. Unlike Monica, they didn't leave anything behind on the dress.

And what about the irradiation of Iraq and our soldiers by the use of Depleted Uranium ammo? Haven't heard much about that, eh?

What makes this "we've been manipulated" plea so Goddamn disgusting is that some of us knew the Iraq case was bogus from day one. The information was out there. But our anchors, reporters, editors and pundits all read from the same script...a script written by the White House, their friends in think tanks and by Fox News. Contrary views and information was out there.

And this is the media that bought into W's scripted press conferences, covered unreflectively W's starring role in the "Mission Accomplished" B-Movie, refused to pursue the fake rescue of Jessica Lynch, and participated in every managed, staged event this White House has concocted. Willingly. Gladly. Like the high-paid sluts they are. And they don't have a childhood of abuse to explain it.

As they look back, they see that they've been scooped...big-time. By Democracy Now, Pacifica Radio, much of the European press...and a horde of alternative news outlets on the internet. They missed the story. In fact, they turned their heads.

Now we have fake conferences with soldiers, a faked Al-Qaeda letter, the faked uranium document...faked, faked, faked. It's simply gotten to the point that they cannot ignore it. Imagine what else has been faked and put through the 24-hour news cycle...littler things, domestic policy things.

But it may be too little, too late. It certainly is for thousands of Iraqis, tortured Afghan farmers, dead American soldiers and, economically, the middle class. Oh, forget about the working and lower classes. Everyone else has.

Because the media let themselves get "fooled" over and over again, the American people and the world will be paying for decades. This vanity-driven focus on "how we've been manipulated," the scoop on how they got scooped, only highlights the problem with our Fourth Estate. Now, it's the "big house" and our media came in from the fields years ago.

That being said...we have to have it and I guess we should just be glad it's happening now. As an historian, I'd at least like to see the judgment of history ascertain that these crypto-fascist bastards were thugs and criminals. That may come out of this scandal.

Better late than never, right?