Why would everybody be silent?

Kay Griggs was a Southern divorcee who rented a room to Marine Corps colonel George Griggs in the late 1980s. She was impressed by his clipped manner, his education, his good looks. Two months later she married him. What she found out about world affairs as George Griggs' wife was astounding.

Colonel Griggs was a Marine Corps Chief of Staff, as well as head of NATO's Psychological Operations. He was also, his wife realized, entirely mind-controlled. Kay became privy to the real workings of the United States military, leadership training, drug-running and weapons sales, and the secret worldwide camps that train professional assassins.

These interviews with Pastor Rick Strawcutter of Adrian, Michigan, were conducted in 1998, before September 11 and the installation of U.S. President George W. Bush. Kay Griggs' report of world events and the power elite paints a picture that begins to explain the hows and whys of our current global scenario.

[Part 1] [Part 2]

Kay Griggs is interviewed: [Listen] 58:45

The Truth - Secret Societies and the Military:
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]

This just in: Who Protected the Pervert Congressman?

The Great Conspiracy

The 911 news special you never saw, hosted by Barrie Zwicker.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8

US vs the People

Senate Approves Bush's Plan for Military Tribunals

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday approved President Bush's plan to question and try foreign terrorism suspects before military judges—without oversight by the federal courts. [Read more]

Aside from Arizona senators Jon Kyl and John McCain, what other enemies of the people, traitors every one, voted for this? [Look]

S.3930
Title: A bill to authorize trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes.

(1) UNLAWFUL ENEMY COMBATANT- (A) The term "unlawful enemy combatant" means--

(i) a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents who is not a lawful enemy combatant (including a person who is part of the Taliban, al Qaeda, or associated forces); or

(ii) a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense.

(B) CO-BELLIGERENT- In this paragraph, the term "co-belligerent", with respect to the United States, means any State or armed force joining and directly engaged with the United States in hostilities or directly supporting hostilities against a common enemy.
_____________________________

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. [Read more]

Why you can't pay your bills

Senate approves $70 billion more for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq

by Mark Yannone

That's bad enough, but the kicker is that the Senate approved that $70 billion of additional spending unanimously. Every member of the US Senate thought that was a real swell idea. No exceptions.

Want to see what just $10 billion looks like? Here it is in pennies. Can you see the accurately scaled man in the picture?

Here's another view of $10 billion: The federal government is going to spend 45 of these on military offense and defense in the next year. Or 25 of these, which look like this.

If experience is any guide, the year after that they'll spend even more.

Still wondering why you can't pay your bills?

Jim Marrs: 9/11 truth in 10 minutes

Under Siege

Jim Marrs quickly lays out every main point that demonstrates 9/11 was an inside job, planned and executed by the U.S. government. [Watch] 9:48

German experience. Americans have yet to learn.

Crude?

Yes, but the Bush administration's

KIDNAPPING
SLAVERY
RAPE
MURDER
and
TORTURE

are far worse.

Daily Show examines Bush's power to legalize torture

Close inspection of a compromise bill on detainee rights shows that only the President of the United States will have the ability to define which detainee interrogation techniques are legal.

In the following video report, Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, provides the logic behind this highly controversial decision. [Watch]

[It looks like the Bush administration has removed this video from the Web. If you find a link, please send it in a comment here.]


Bush Tries to Pardon Himself

To preserve the status quo that empowers them, the old media lie like government

Smearing Education Choice

by John Stossel

This month, papers all around America reported that according to the U.S. Department of Education, "children in public schools generally performed as well or better in reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools."

The New York Times put the study on its front page, along with a quote from teachers union president Reg Weaver, who claimed it showed "public schools were doing an outstanding job." [Read more]

[Was the New York Times being deceitful? Of course. As always. -MJY]

2006 election fraud hits Arizona

Libertarians File Suit to Find Lost Votes

PHOENIX, AZ – The Arizona Libertarian Party (AZLP) along with several individual candidates for office filed suit today in Arizona Superior Court, alleging that the Maricopa County Elections Department failed to accurately count and record a substantial number of write‑in votes following the primary election in September.

The effect of this alleged failure would be to exclude several Libertarian candidates from the ballot in the November general election. The candidates affected, and the plaintiffs in this lawsuit, are Dan Poland (candidate for state senate district 10), John Williams (candidate for state senate district 15), and Michael Kielsky (candidate for justice of the peace in Mesa). Defendants include Secretary of State Jan Brewer, Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell, and Maricopa County Director of Elections Karen Osborn.

Investigation by the Arizona Libertarian Party, in cooperation with the Maricopa County Elections Department, has uncovered approximately 70 precincts in which no write‑in votes were counted and recorded for any candidate of any party. Closer inspection of the ballots from some of these precincts has uncovered additional votes for the plaintiffs. AZLP and the plaintiffs contend that accurate counting of the write‑in ballots from these precincts will reveal sufficient additional votes to put these candidates on the November ballot. Michael Kielsky said, "Failure to accurately count the ballots effectively disenfranchises Libertarian and other voters by precluding their opportunity to vote for the candidates of their choice."

AZLP and the Libertarian candidates who have brought suit are asking the court to restrain the Maricopa County Elections Department from printing ballots that exclude these candidates until the ballots from the primary election can be accurately counted.

The Arizona Libertarian Party is Arizona’s third political party, and the third largest political party in the United States. Libertarians believe in individual freedom, personal financial responsibility, and strong national defense.

Contact: Michael Kielsky, Chairman of the Arizona Libertarian Party, 619-251-6875, michael@kielsky.com

The 14-cent solution, with a reward

Letters of Marque and Reprisal

by Fred E. Foldvary

Many people disapprove of the U.S. war against terror, or of how it is being conducted. But what is the alternative, other than changes in U.S. foreign policy?

One alternative to U.S. military action against terrorists who have attacked the U.S. and other countries, and are threatening further attacks, is to enact Letters of Marque and Reprisal. Article I, Section 8, paragraph 11 of the U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to "grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water." A "reprisal" means an action taken in return for some injury. A reprisal could be a seizing of property or guilty persons in retaliation for an attack and injury. It could include force used against the perpetrators for the redress of grievances. A reprisal could even involve killing a terrorist who is threatening further harm and cannot be captured.

"Marque" is related to "marching" and means crossing or marching across a border in order to do a reprisal. So a Letter of Marque and Reprisal would authorize a private person, not in the U.S. armed forces, to conduct reprisal operations outside the borders of the U.S.A.

Such Letters are grantable not just by the U.S. Constitution, but also by international law, which is why it was able to be included in the Constitution. The Letters are grantable whenever the citizens or subjects of one country are injured by those in another country and justice is denied by the government of that country, as happened with the attack by persons who were in Afghanistan.

In October 2001, Ron Paul, U.S. representative from Texas, introduced bills H.R. 3074, Air Piracy Reprisal and Capture Act of 2001, and H.R. 3076, September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001, to authorize the U.S. State Department to issue such Letters. Private U.S. citizens would then be able to hunt down, attack and collect assets from terrorists who have or are planning to commit hostile acts against the U.S. and its citizens. (See Ron Paul's Press Release.)

The Founders of the U.S. Constitution included Marque and Reprisal in addition to authorizing Congress to declare war, so that in some cases, the U.S. government would not have to engage the military and have a costly war. The risk would then be concentrated on those who chose to engage in the reprisal. This empowers private citizens to protect themselves and other Americans.

The Letters combined with high rewards for the capture of terrorists would create an incentive for Americans to conduct these operations. It would supplement U.S. government activity such as seeking out and eliminating the financial networks that terrorists use.

There has been little discussion in the mass media about Letters of Marque and Reprisal. Since these are authorized by the U.S. Constitution, introduced in a bill in Congress, and provide a possible alternative or supplement to U.S. military action, there should be more discussion and then action taken on this possibility. The terrorist threat seems to me to be a good example of the attacks that the Founders of the U.S. Constitution thought would be remedied by such Letters.

It's good that at least one member of the U.S. House of Representatives is familiar with the U.S. Constitution and has taken action to implement this dormant power against attacks on the U.S. Why have other members of Congress not joined Paul to pass his bill on Letters of Marque and Reprisal?

[Source]

Newsweek’s latest cover, by geographical region

Newsweek Cover for Dummies

by Mark Yannone

Newsweek knows its markets --how to meet the demand and how to manipulate the reader.

[Source]

The Devil Is in the House: The Secret Evil of 9-11

[Watch]

Iran Attack--Crisis Is Upon Us

by Paul Craig Roberts

A number of experts have concluded that despite the Bush administration’s desire to attack Iran, the aggression would be too rash and the consequences too dire even for the irrational Bush administration.

Military experts point out that at a time when generals are calling for more troops for Afghanistan and Iraq, it would be ill-advised for Bush to add Iran to the war theater. Experts note that Iran is well armed with missiles capable of attacking US ships and oil facilities throughout the Middle East and that Iran can direct its Shiite allies in Iraq to assault US troops there and set in motion terrorist actions throughout the Middle East.

Diplomatic experts point out that the US is isolated in its desire for war with Iran and has no ally except Israel, thus validating Muslim claims that the US is Israel’s instrument against Muslims in the Middle East. Experts note that military aggression is a war crime and that US violations of international law isolate the US and destroy the soft power on which US leadership has been based. An attack on Iran could be the last straw for Muslims chaffing under the rule of US puppet governments in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Economic experts point out that the impact on the price of oil would be severe and the economic consequences detrimental. With the US housing bubble deflating, now is not the time for an oil shock.

It is difficult to take exception to this expert analysis. Nevertheless, the Bush administration continues to send war signals. Credible news organizations have reported that US naval attack groups have been given “prepare to deploy orders” that would put them on station off Iran by October 21.

How can Bush administration war plans be reconciled with expert opinion that the consequences would be too dire for the US?

Perhaps the answer is that what appears as irrationality to experts is rationality to neoconservatives. Neocons seek maximum chaos and instability in the Middle East in order to justify long-term US occupation of the region. Following this line of thought, neocons would regard the loss of a US aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf as a way to solidify public support for the war. US public anger at the Iranians could even result in US public support for a military draft in order to win “the war on terror.”

The Bush administration could bring Congress around by announcing a “Gulf of Tonkin” incident or by orchestrating a “terrorist attack.” However, this is unnecessary as Bush has prepared the ground for bypassing Congress with his propagandistic allegations that Iran, by arming Iraqi insurgents, sponsoring terrorism, and building nuclear weapons, is the major part of the ongoing “war against terrorism.” Now that Iran is blamed for rising violence in Iraq, an attack on Iran follows as a matter of course. All Bush has to do is to continue with his lies in order to bring the American public to a new war hysteria.

Bush’s attorney general has demonstrated that he has no qualms about validating any and all extra-legal powers that the White House requires for violating the US Constitution and international law. The congressional attempts to block illegal wiretapping and torture have failed. The Senate has refused to authorize torture, but the Senate has not prevented the administration from torturing detainees. The compromise leaves it to the White House to decide whether its interrogation practices are objectionable. In an editorial (September 22, 2006), the Washington Post concluded that “the abuse can continue.”

Polls show that Bush administration propaganda has convinced a majority of inattentive Americans that Iran is making nuclear weapons. Polls show that a majority support an attack on Iran under this circumstance. The neoconservatives and their media allies have succeeded in causing the public to confuse Iran’s legal nuclear energy program with a weapons program.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors pour over Iran’s nuclear energy program for signs of a weapons program, recently denounced a House Intelligence Committee report as “outrageous and dishonest.” Written by the Republican neocon staff, the Republican report falsely alleges that Iran had enriched uranium to weapons grade last April and that the IAEA had removed a senior safeguards inspector to keep the alleged breach of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Pact secret.

Once again neoconservatives have shown that they will tell any and every lie to achieve their goal of attacking Iran. Jingoistic anti-UN Bush supporters will automatically believe the neocon lie and will swallow right-wing talk radio claims that the UN is protecting Iran’s nuclear weapons program. As we learned from the Iraq hysteria, facts and experts are no impediment to the Bush administration’s lies.

Rumsfeld’s neocon Pentagon has rewritten US war doctrine to permit preemptive nuclear attack on non-nuclear countries. As the US paid a huge public relations cost in terms of world opinion and distrust of the US by endorsing the first use of nuclear weapons, the revision of US war doctrine must have a purpose.

Neocons claim that tactical nuclear weapons are necessary to destroy Iran’s underground facilities. However, the real reason for using nukes against Iran is to intimidate Iran from retaliating and to threaten the entire Muslim world with genocide unless Muslims bend to the neocons’ will and accept US hegemony over their part of the world.

In his speech to the United Nations, Hugo Chavez might not have been too deep into hyperbole when he described Bush as an example of demonic evil.

Noxious notes on a nation of nitwits

What's Fred Smoking?

An Essay In Cultural Psychiatry

by Fred Reed

Letters pour in from desperate readers (or would if they did) saying, “Fred, explain America today. Say something tendentious and irritating about what is going on in this curious country. Why do we do what we do? Sock it to us.”

All right.

The United States is an uneasy, frightened country, yet aggressive, truculent, and looking for trouble—which it finds. Fear: Terrorists are everywhere, like cockroaches and governmental cameras. Citizens should watch each other on the subway and rat out suspicious behavior, such as speaking a language other than English. People need to go through metal detectors in county courthouses, because the government is scared of them, and get spied on by the government to protect them against the ever-present danger of…of, well, the unspeakable and unspoken angst of existence. And so, in the customary manner of large scared bullies, the country lashes out, at Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Afghanistan, Venezuela, wherever.

A friend says, “Fred, gringos want to be controlled. They love this police-state stuff. It gives them meaning. They lead miserable lives in boring suburbs. The husband is a mouth-breathing oaf with his retinas sewed to the football machine. His wife is a pucker-faced shrew with cellulite like the dark side of the Moon and his kids are whining dopers who gawp at the box and gurgle over stupid video games. The guy has no control over anything in his life. He’s scared of the boss and the pissed-off middle-aged man-hating divorcee with thick ankles in Human Resources who would love to outsource his job to Mumbai. He knows he’ll get raped if he splits from the wife. So he wants to kill something. He doesn’t care what, and anyway finding out might require reading a book, which god knows he isn’t going to do.”

This may be harsh. It also may be true of more people than one would like. The United States does not look real happy just now. It is a lower-middle-class country with an upper-middle-class income, except the credit cards are maxed out and people are in debt up to their gills. They don’t read much. The cultural center of gravity is the black ghetto with its irremediable anger. Americans tend to equate social class with income, but Archie Bunker in a call-me-Arnold SUV is still Archie Bunker. And his job, no matter how air-conditioned the office, is probably as rewarding as screwing lug-nuts on cars passing on the assembly line.

It is a purely consumer society. There is not much to life out there except buying things. Granted, a medieval serf would have regarded this as a problem much to be desired, but it leads to a certain bleakness today. You don’t buy a house because you love it, because of the lush vegetation thereabout and ancient trees and an enchanting air of calm and antiquity. No. You buy a “starter house” with the intention of unloading it when you make partner. Then you buy a shoddy McMansion, exactly like three hundred others surrounding it. Then it’s home theater and granite counter-tops and more-complex iPods and, just maybe, one day, a Hummer, that most thunderous of motorized codpieces. A suspicion dawns that something somehow isn’t right. Yep.

Other uneases brood over the landscape. Women dominate domestic politics and so we have the Fear State. With them security security security trumps liberty or taking chances of any sort, and so we must ban pocket knives. They are afraid of guns, want kids to wear helmets on bikes, and think tag is a violent and dangerous game. Yes, there are exceptions, but fewer day by day. We must fill in the deep ends of swimming pools and fear second-hand smoke and things that go bump in the night. I suspect a lot of this vague anxiety stems from the lack of a settled and satisfying place in society.

Men run foreign policy, and do it with the ardor and brainless territoriality of retarded pit bulls. We must confront The Threat—this threat, that threat, any threat in a storm. After the Soviets punked out on us, we adopted Terr, Terrace, and Tersm as interim threats until China comes online. We must Fight, we must Show Them, we must Draw the Line. All across America men with grade-school minds and beachball paunches growl that we gotta gettem before they get us, if we don’t stoppem there, they’ll land on the beaches of Peoria.

Women are limited creatures. They couldn’t be this stupid if you wired the entire sex in series.

Anyhow, this division of irresponsibility leads to contradictions. In school, low-IQ teachers try to make little boys into girls and expel them if they play soldier and say Bang. Then the Pentagon recruits these transvestite artifacts and sends them off to shoot people they’ve barely heard of. What a plan. What clarity of vision. What consistency.

A thing about society now is that nobody knows the rules any longer, if there are rules. In the past, from about the lower middle class and up, women behaved as ladies and men as gentlemen, concepts now identified with oppression. Even the lower classes were usually courteous after their fashion. The arrangement had its uses. When general agreement enforces consideration of others, life is better. You can go for days without wanting to strangle anybody.

Today, many people are civil, but many aren’t. You don’t know what to expect. Do you respond to abuse by being abusive in return? Or get walked over? That is the question. We now have Road Rage. In the streets you find people pushing onto the subway like piglets looking to suckle, and throwing the finger. Women are worse, apparently confusing ill-bred pugnacity with virility. (Men are careful how they treat each other, as there are consequences. Women do not suffer consequences. It must be nice.)

Further, the ghetto rules everywhere, seeps in, or threatens. Americans are not social climbers, but social descenders, rappelling deliberately into the grubby depths. On the radio one hears regularly such lyrical confections as “Muthahfucka, muthafucka, she a ho, shit.” Ah, but the chief rule of discourse today is that one must never offend the offensive. You must never suggest that they straighten up and mind their manners, mouth, grammar, and work ethic.

The pervasive overregulation adds to the national edginess. The government decides what and whether your children will learn in school, and makes it nearly impossible to flee. Getting on an airplane requires a strip-search by federal dimwits. You can’t hire people without proving that you have enough of this race and that sex and don’t discriminate against left-handed Pomeranian sadomasochists with Hispanic grandmothers. Rules, laws, regulations, paperwork. A sense arises of being trapped. Many hate it.

Add it up. A frightened people over-controlled, having no communal roots, blocked by government from raising their children as they see fit, parlously indebted, sexually confused, and lacking a sense of permanence or of a connection with the natural world, both of which have since time immemorial mitigated a certain emptiness in human affairs. Like a dog tormented by evil children, the country is ready to bite. And it does.

I hope that was adequately irritating. I can do no worse.

Buy Fred's splendid new book of reprehensible curmudgeonry!
Collected columns. Guaranteed offensive!

A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be

"Solid, authoritative, makes an excellent door stop." The American Builder

"Constantly useful. You can mash bugs with it." Field & Stream

"Never heard of it." Gloria Steinem

Chavez: Bush won't kill me for calling him the devil

On Wednesday at the U.N., Chavez held up Chomsky's book and urged Americans to read it "instead of watching Superman movies," saying it would teach them the truth about the abuses of the U.S. government.

Minutes later, he referred to Bush, who had spoken at the U.N. the previous day, saying the "devil" had left the odor of sulfur lingering in the chamber. Chavez then made the sign of the cross and brought his hands together as if in prayer.

Continuing in the same vein Saturday, Chavez said that he had had to wash Chomsky's book after placing it on the podium where Bush had stood.

"I had to clean it afterward because it smelled like sulfur. I had to sprinkle it with holy water," he said as the audience laughed. [Read more]

Video - [ English ] [ Spanish ]

Bonus: Chavez at subsequent U.N. press conference - 68 minutes

Bush's insanity escalates wildly

War Signals?

by Dave Lindorff

As reports circulate of a sharp debate within the White House over possible US military action against Iran and its nuclear enrichment facilities, The Nation has learned that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have moved up the deployment of a major "strike group" of ships, including the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower as well as a cruiser, destroyer, frigate, submarine escort and supply ship, to head for the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's western coast. This information follows a report in the current issue of Time magazine, both online and in print, that a group of ships capable of mining harbors has received orders to be ready to sail for the Persian Gulf by October 1.

As Time writes in its cover story, "What Would War Look Like?," evidence of the forward deployment of minesweepers and word that the chief of naval operations had asked for a reworking of old plans for mining Iranian harbors "suggest that a much discussed--but until now largely theoretical--prospect has become real: that the U.S. may be preparing for war with Iran."

According to Lieut. Mike Kafka, a spokesman at the headquarters of the Second Fleet, based in Norfolk, Virginia, the Eisenhower Strike Group, bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles, has received orders to depart the United States in a little over a week. Other official sources in the public affairs office of the Navy Department at the Pentagon confirm that this powerful armada is scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran on or around October 21.

The Eisenhower had been in port at the Naval Station Norfolk for several years for refurbishing and refueling of its nuclear reactor; it had not been scheduled to depart for a new duty station until at least a month later, and possibly not till next spring. Family members, before the orders, had moved into the area and had until then expected to be with their sailor-spouses and parents in Virginia for some time yet. First word of the early dispatch of the "Ike Strike" group to the Persian Gulf region came from several angry officers on the ships involved, who contacted antiwar critics like retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner and complained that they were being sent to attack Iran without any order from the Congress.

"This is very serious," said Ray McGovern, a former CIA threat-assessment analyst who got early word of the Navy officers' complaints about the sudden deployment orders. (McGovern, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the CIA, resigned in 2002 in protest over what he said were Bush Administration pressures to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq. He and other intelligence agency critics have formed a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.)

Colonel Gardiner, who has taught military strategy at the National War College, says that the carrier deployment and a scheduled Persian Gulf arrival date of October 21 is "very important evidence" of war planning. He says, "I know that some naval forces have already received 'prepare to deploy orders' [PTDOs], which have set the date for being ready to go as October 1. Given that it would take about from October 2 to October 21 to get those forces to the Gulf region, that looks about like the date" of any possible military action against Iran. (A PTDO means that all crews should be at their stations, and ships and planes should be ready to go, by a certain date--in this case, reportedly, October 1.) Gardiner notes, "You cannot issue a PTDO and then stay ready for very long. It's a very significant order, and it's not done as a training exercise." This point was also made in the Time article.

So what is the White House planning?

On Monday President Bush addressed the UN General Assembly at its opening session, and while studiously avoiding even physically meeting Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was also addressing the body, he offered a two-pronged message. Bush told the "people of Iran" that "we're working toward a diplomatic solution to this crisis" and that he looked forward "to the day when you can live in freedom." But he also warned that Iran's leaders were using the nation's resources "to fund terrorism and fuel extremism and pursue nuclear weapons." Given the President's assertion that the nation is fighting a "global war on terror" and that he is Commander in Chief of that "war," his prominent linking of the Iran regime with terror has to be seen as a deliberate effort to claim his right to carry the fight there. Bush has repeatedly insisted that the 2001 Congressional Authorization for the Use of Force that preceded the invasion of Afghanistan was also an authorization for an unending "war on terror."

Even as Bush was making not-so-veiled threats at the UN, his former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, a sharp critic of any unilateral US attack on Iran, was in Norfolk, not far from the Eisenhower, advocating further diplomatic efforts to deal with Iran's nuclear program--itself tantalizing evidence of the policy struggle over whether to go to war, and that those favoring an attack may be winning that struggle.

"I think the plan's been picked: bomb the nuclear sites in Iran," says Gardiner. "It's a terrible idea, it's against US law and it's against international law, but I think they've decided to do it." Gardiner says that while the United States has the capability to hit those sites with its cruise missiles, "the Iranians have many more options than we do: They can activate Hezbollah; they can organize riots all over the Islamic world, including Pakistan, which could bring down the Musharraf government, putting nuclear weapons into terrorist hands; they can encourage the Shia militias in Iraq to attack US troops; they can blow up oil pipelines and shut the Persian Gulf." Most of the major oil-producing states in the Middle East have substantial Shiite populations, which has long been a concern of their own Sunni leaders and of Washington policy-makers, given the sometimes close connection of Shiite populations to Iran's religious rulers.

Of course, Gardiner agrees, recent ship movements and other signs of military preparedness could be simply a bluff designed to show toughness in the bargaining with Iran over its nuclear program. But with the Iranian coast reportedly armed to the teeth with Chinese Silkworm antiship missiles, and possibly even more sophisticated Russian antiship weapons, against which the Navy has little reliable defenses, it seems unlikely the Navy would risk high-value assets like aircraft carriers or cruisers with such a tactic. Nor has bluffing been a Bush MO to date.

Commentators and analysts across the political spectrum are focusing on Bush's talk about dialogue, with many claiming that he is climbing down from confrontation. On the right, David Frum, writing on September 20 in his National Review blog, argues that the lack of any attempt to win a UN resolution supporting military action, and rumors of "hushed back doors" being opened in Washington, lead him to expect a diplomatic deal, not a unilateral attack. Writing in the center, Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler saw in Bush's UN speech evidence that "war is no longer a viable option" in Iran. Even on the left, where confidence in the Bush Administration's judgment is abysmally low, commentators like Noam Chomsky and Nation contributor Robert Dreyfuss are skeptical that an attack is being planned. Chomsky has long argued that Washington's leaders aren't crazy, and would not take such a step--though more recently, he has seemed less sanguine about Administration sanity and has suggested that leaks about war plans may be an effort by military leaders--who are almost universally opposed to widening the Mideast war--to arouse opposition to such a move by Bush and war advocates like Cheney. Dreyfuss, meanwhile, in an article for the online journal TomPaine.com, focuses on the talk of diplomacy in Bush's Monday UN speech, not on his threats, and concludes that it means "the realists have won" and that there will be no Iran attack.

But all these war skeptics may be whistling past the graveyard. After all, it must be recalled that Bush also talked about seeking diplomatic solutions the whole time he was dead-set on invading Iraq, and the current situation is increasingly looking like a cheap Hollywood sequel. The United States, according to Gardiner and others, already reportedly has special forces operating in Iran, and now major ship movements are looking ominous.

Representative Maurice Hinchey, a leading Democratic critic of the Iraq War, informed about the Navy PTDOs and about the orders for the full Eisenhower Strike Group to head out to sea, said, "For some time there has been speculation that there could be an attack on Iran prior to November 7, in order to exacerbate the culture of fear that the Administration has cultivated now for over five or six years. But if they attack Iran it will be a very bad mistake, for the Middle East and for the US. It would only make worse the antagonism and fear people feel towards our country. I hope this Administration is not so foolish and irresponsible." He adds, "Military people are deeply concerned about the overtaxing of the military already."

Calls for comment from the White House on Iran war plans and on the order for the Eisenhower Strike Group to deploy were referred to the National Security Council press office, which declined to return this reporter's phone calls.

McGovern, who had first told a group of anti-Iraq War activists Sunday on the National Mall in Washington, DC, during an ongoing action called "Camp Democracy," about his being alerted to the strike group deployment, warned, "We have about seven weeks to try and stop this next war from happening."

One solid indication that the dispatch of the Eisenhower is part of a force buildup would be if the carrier Enterprise--currently in the Arabian Sea, where it has been launching bombing runs against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and which is at the end of its normal six-month sea tour--is kept on station instead of sent back to the United States. Arguing against simple rotation of tours is the fact that the Eisenhower's refurbishing and its dispatch were rushed forward by at least a month. A report from the Enterprise on the Navy's official website referred to its ongoing role in the Afghanistan fighting, and gave no indication of plans to head back to port. The Navy itself has no comment on the ship's future orders.

Jim Webb, Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration and currently a Democratic candidate for Senate in Virginia, expressed some caution about reports of the carrier deployment, saying, "Remember, carrier groups regularly rotate in and out of that region." But he added, "I do not believe that there should be any elective military action taken against Iran without a separate authorization vote by the Congress. In my view, the 2002 authorization which was used for the invasion of Iraq should not extend to Iran."

_______________________

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and a regular columnist for CounterPunch. He is the author (most recently) of This Can’t Be Happening: Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy (Common Courage Press) and The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office, coauthored with Barbara Olshansky (St. Martin’s Press). His writings can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

The new USA: Unlimited Security Administration

Lost in a Bermuda Triangle of Injustice

The Facts on the Ground

Mini-Gulags, Hired Guns, Lobbyists, and a Reality Built on Fear

by Tom Engelhardt

This August, a site of shame, shared by Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush, was emptied. Abu Ghraib prison is the place where Saddam's functionaries tortured (and sometimes killed) many enemies of his regime, and where Bush's functionaries, as a series of notorious digital photos revealed, committed what the U.S. press still likes to refer to as "prisoner abuse." Now, there are no prisoners to abuse and the prison itself is to be turned over to the Iraqi government, perhaps to become a museum, perhaps to remain a jail for another regime whose handling of prisoners is grim indeed. The emptying was clearly meant as a redemptive moment or, as Nancy A. Youssef of the McClatchy Newspapers put it, "a milestone" for the huge structure. After all the bad media and the hit American "prestige" took around the world, Abu Ghraib was finally over.

Of course, its prisoners who remained generally uncharged and without access to Iraqi courts, weren't just released to the winds. Quite the opposite, over 3,000 of them were redistributed to two other U.S. prisons, Camp Bucca in Iraq's south and Camp Cropper at the huge U.S. base adjoining Baghdad International Airport, once dedicated to the holding of "high-value" detainees like Saddam Hussein and top officials of his regime.

Camp Cropper itself turns out to be an interesting story, but one with a problem: While the emptying of Abu Ghraib made the news everywhere, the filling of Camp Cropper made no news at all. And yet it turns out that Camp Cropper, which started out as a bunch of tents, has now become a $60 million "state-of-the-art" prison. The upgrade, on the drawing boards since 2004, was just completed and hardly a word has been written about it. We really have no idea what it consists of or what it looks like, even though it's in one of the few places in Iraq that an American reporter could safely visit, being on a vast American military base constructed, like the prison, with taxpayer dollars.

Had anyone paid the slightest attention--other than the Pentagon, the Bush administration, and whatever company or companies had the contract to construct the facility--it would still have been taken for granted that Camp Cropper wasn't the business of ordinary Americans (or even their representatives in Congress). Despite the fact that the $60 million dollars, which made the camp "state of the art," was surely ours, no one in the United States debated or discussed the upgrade and there was no serious consideration of it in Congress before the money was anted up--any more than Congress or the American people are in any way involved in the constant upgrading of our military bases in Iraq.

While Iraq and future Iraq policy are constantly in the news, almost all the American facts-on-the-ground in that country--of which Camp Bucca is one--have come into being without consultation with the American people or, in any serious way, Congress (or testing in the courts).

Camp Bucca is a story you can't read anywhere--and yet it may, in a sense, be the most important American story in Iraq right now. While arguments spin endlessly here at home about the nature of withdrawal "timetables," and who's cutting and running from what, and how many troops we will or won't have in-country in 2007, 2008, or 2009, on the ground a process continues that makes mockery of the debate in Washington and in the country. While the "reconstruction" of Iraq has come to look ever more like the deconstruction of Iraq, the construction of an ever more permanent-looking American landscape in that country has proceeded apace and with reasonable efficiency.

First, we had those huge military bases that officials were careful never to label "permanent." (For a while, they were given the charming name of "enduring camps" by the Pentagon.) Just about no one in the mainstream bothered to write about them for a couple of years as quite literally billions of dollars were poured into them and they morphed into the size of American towns with their own bus routes, sports facilities, Pizza Huts, Subways, Burger Kings, and mini-golf courses. Huge as they now are, elaborate as they now are, they are still continually being upgraded. Now, it seems that on one of them we have $60 million worth of the first "permanent U.S. prison" in Iraq. Meanwhile, in the heart of Baghdad, the Bush administration is building what's probably the largest, best fortified "embassy" in the solar system with its own elaborate apartment complexes and entertainment facilities, meant for a staff of 3,500.

If, for a moment, you stop listening to the arguments about, or even the news about, Iraq here at home and just concentrate on the ignored reality of those facts-on-the-ground, you're likely to assess our world somewhat differently. After all, those facts being made on the ground--essentially policy-put-into-action without the trappings of debate, democracy, media coverage, or checks and balances of any sort--are unlikely to be altered or halted in any foreseeable future by debate or opinion polls in our country. All that is likely to alter them is other facts on the ground--a growing insurgency, the deaths of Americans and Iraqis in ever greater numbers, a region increasingly thrown into turmoil, and maybe, one of these days, a full-scale, in-the-streets reaction by the Shiites of Iraq to the occupation of their country by a foreign power intent on going nowhere anytime soon.

A Bermuda Triangle of Injustice

Recently, speaking of the Bush administration's urge to publicly redefine and so abrogate the Geneva Conventions, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "If you just look at how we are perceived in the world and the kind of criticism we have taken over Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and renditions, whether we believe it or not, people are now starting to question whether we're following our own high standards."

It's a comment not atypical of the present debate in Washington and possibly of feelings in the country. The media plays up the courageous stands of Republican Senators McCain, Graham, and Warner in bringing us back to those "high standards." In the process, the details of how much of what we can use in questioning whomever and what modest protections prisoners might or might not receive in our offshore prison system are hashed out. But no matter what is decided on any of these matters, in the real, on-the-ground world our "high standards" are quite beside the point--the point being the globally outsourced penal system being created.

For example, the President recently announced that the United States was emptying other prisons as well--previously officially unacknowledged "secret prisons" around the globe--of 14 "high value" al-Qaeda detainees. "There are now no terrorists in the CIA program," he said, though that is unlikely to be the actual case.

Looked at another way, however, that secret CIA detention system, which seems to consist of makeshift or shared or borrowed facilities around the world, sits in place, ever ready for use. It's not going anywhere and in the most basic sense it probably cannot be shut down. Nor it seems are the almost 14,000 prisoners we hold in Iraq, the 500 (or more) in Afghanistan, and the nearly 500 in Guantanamo going anywhere. Even with Abu Ghraib empty and the secret prison system officially emptied, nearly 15,000 prisoners are being held by the U.S. essentially incommunicado, most beyond the eyes of any system of justice, beyond the reach of any judges or juries. In many cases, as in the case of Bilal Hussein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Iraqi photojournalist, who has been held, probably at Camp Cropper, without charge or trial "on suspicion of collaborating with insurgents" for the last five months, even that most basic right--to know exactly why you are being held, what the charges are against you--is lacking.

Whatever arguments may be going on in Washington over which "tools" or "interrogation techniques" the CIA is to be allowed to use or over exactly how the 14 al-Qaeda detainees just transferred to Guantanamo will be tried, this set of facts-on-the-ground adds up to our own global Bermuda Triangle of Injustice into which untold numbers of human beings can simply disappear. The "crown jewel" of our mini-gulag is, of course, Guantanamo. And again, whatever the fierce arguments here may be about Guantanamo "methods" or what kinds of commissions or tribunals (if any) may finally be chosen for the run-of-the-mill prisoners there, one fact-on-the-ground points us toward the actual lay of the land. A little publicized $30-million maximum-security wing at Guantanamo is now being completed by the U.S. Navy, just as at the American prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, there has been an upgrade.

In all-too-real worlds beyond our reach, everything tends toward permanency. Whatever the discussion may be, whatever issues may seem to be gripping Washington or the nation, whatever you're watching on TV or reading in the papers, elsewhere the continual constructing, enlarging, expanding, entrenching of a new global system of imprisonment, which bears no relation to any system of imprisonment Americans have previously imagined, continues non-stop, unchecked and unbalanced by Congress or the courts, unaffected by the Republic, but very distinctly under the flag "for which it stands."

Contractors and Mercenaries

And don't imagine that this is an anomaly, applicable only to imprisonment abroad. Almost anywhere you look, the facts on the ground tell a story at odds with what's important, what's real as we Americans imagine it. Let's take, for instance, what's now referred to as the Intelligence Community or IC, a collection of at least 16 agencies, ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency and the NSA to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Consider then just one recent piece about the IC by Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times, headlined Spy Agencies Outsourcing to Fill Key Jobs.

As Miller points out, the overall intelligence budget has gone up about $10 billion a year in recent years and for that we've got an upgrading (or at least upsizing) of almost every one of those 16 agencies plus a whole new, sprawling layer of intelligence bureaucracy headed by John Negroponte, our intelligence tsar, who runs the new Office of the Director of National Intelligence (not even included in the count above). Miller reports another interesting fact-on-the-ground as well: Enormous numbers of private contractors are flooding into the IC.

"At the National Counterterrorism Center--the agency created two years ago to prevent another attack like September 11--more than half of the employees are not U.S. government analysts or terrorism experts. Instead, they are outside contractors. At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., senior officials say it is routine for career officers to look around the table during meetings on secret operations and be surrounded by so-called green-badgers--nonagency employees who carry special-colored IDs."

At some clandestine CIA overseas posts like Islamabad and Baghdad, Miller reports, private contractors can make up as many as three-quarters of the employees, while at home private contractors at the CIA, now also outnumber its estimated 17,500 employees. He concludes:

"Senior U.S. intelligence officials said that the reliance on contractors was so deep that agencies couldn't function without them. ‘If you took away the contractor support, they'd have to put yellow tape around the building and close it down,' said a former senior CIA official who was responsible for overseeing contracts before leaving the agency earlier this year."

The same could, of course, be said of the military which is quite literally incapable of existing today without its private contractors like Halliburton's KBR, nor could its wars be carried on without the proliferation of hired guns-- mercenaries--that are now a given in any such situation. This transformation of the military into first an all-volunteer, then an increasingly privatized as well as outsourced, and now an increasingly mercenary institution is another fact-on-the-ground, another building block to our future.

A Reality Built on Fear

Around all such "facts," of course, ever more entrenched and ever more expansive sets of interests arise: companies to organize the private contractees, or to deal with the outsourcing, or to handle contracts and construction work, not to speak of whole worlds of consultants, specialists, and lobbyists. This is a reality which no future administration, nor any better empowered Congress, would be likely to reverse, no less erase any time soon. No matter how the details of the argument about NSA spying turn out, for example, it's essentially a given that the National Security Agency will continue to grow and make itself ever more available in ever more ingenious ways, trolling ever more extensively in communications of every sort. These are the facts being established on the ground, while in Washington they argue over the (sometimes significant) details and the media focuses its main attention on all of this as the essence of the news of the day.

Take for example the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), yet another sprawling, ill-organized, inefficient bureaucracy established after 9/11 and not likely to do anything but grow in our lifetimes. Around it has sprung into existence an anti-terrorism homeland-security industry (thank you, Osama bin Laden!) of staggering proportions. "Seven years ago," writes Paul Harris of the British Guardian, "there were nine companies with federal homeland security contracts. By 2003 it was 3,512. Now there are 33,890."

Think about that. They are there to divide a terrorism/security pie that has, since 2000, resulted in about $130 billion in contracts and now, according to USA Today, is a $59 billion a year business globally--one based on that surefire bestseller, fear, whose single major customer is, of course, the DHS.

Not surprisingly, around those 33,000 companies, has sprung up a whole network of Washington-based lobbyists (including the lobbying firm of our previous attorney general, the Ashcroft Group), a plethora of security conferences and trade magazines; in short, the full panoply of a thriving business world. Already at least 90 officials have left the Homeland Security Department to become lobbyists or consultants in the business that surrounds it, including Tom Ridge, the first head of the department. After only five years, the homeland-security business, according to USA Today, has already eclipsed "mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue."

These are truly facts on the ground and no discussion in Washington of homeland security is likely to shake them much. An industry tracker, Homeland Security Research, points the way to one possible future on which Americans are never likely to vote. "A major attack in the United States, Europe or Japan could increase the global market in 2015 to $730 billion, more than a twelvefold increase."

Or consider the Pentagon's Northcom--United States Northern Command, now responsible for "the continental United States, Alaska, Canada, Mexico and the surrounding water out to approximately 500 nautical miles," including the Gulf of Mexico and the Straits of Florida. Before October 1, 2002, there was no Northern Command. Less than four short years later, it's not only up and running but has multiple missions. It's preparing for the next hurricane (since we already know FEMA can't do the job), deploying forces to battle wildfires in the west, and getting ready for an avian flu pandemic. And don't think for a moment that where an institution springs up (especially one with a budget like the Pentagon's behind it), a world of on-the-ground realities doesn't arise as well. Just as it will when, in the near future, the Pentagon redivides its imperial domains by creating a new Africacom or United States Africa Command, supposedly to "anchor US forces on the African continent"--a decision that will be sold around town based on "terrorism security threats," but will essentially be about energy flows and oil. Each new structure like this, each decision, will result in new facts on the ground, new flows of money, and new sets of private contractors.

These are increasingly the crucial realities of our world--and it's not the world of a republic. It's not a world of checks and balances. It's not a world where even a change of ownership in one or both houses of Congress in November would prove a determining factor. It's not a world where people out there are just "starting to question whether we're following our own high standards." It's distinctly not the world as we Americans like to imagine it, but it is the world we are, regrettably enough, lost in. It's the world created not just by a commander-in-chief presidency, but by a Pentagon-in-chief-dominated government, and by a corporation-in-chief style of imperial rule.

It is a world striving for permanence, which doesn't faintly mean that it's permanent--not in Iraq and not here. But it might be helpful if we began to register more fully not just the latest flurry of whatever passes for news, but the facts-on-the-ground that are, every minute, every hour, every day, transforming our lives and our planet.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The Last Days of Publishing, a novel, and in the fall, Mission Unaccomplished (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.

Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt

[Source]

The people's response to Bush's annual UN address

by Mark Yannone

Seeking to maintain the grossly unbalanced power in the Middle East, Bush addressed the United Nations last night, claiming falsely, "We don't want a war with Islam."

Apparently thinking that no one had noticed his illegal invasion and occupation of the Islamic country of Iraq, the three and a half years of murdering, terrorizing, and torturing of innocent Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, and countless torture chambers around the world, George W. Bush lied to his audience again with the words "my country desires peace."

Mr. Bush, you asked the Islamic world to "bring it on." Well, now you've got it. Soon you will stand before a court of law and we Americans will "bring it on" as we hold you and your accomplices personally responsible for your crimes against humanity.

Mr. George W. Bush
President of the United States
Video - [ English ]

Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Video - [ English ] [ Arabic ]

Bonus: Dr. Ahmadinejad at subsequent U.N. press conference - 61 minutes

Pastor Becky's sacrilegious bible camp, evangelical mind rape center, and child abuse circus

Film Shows Youths Training to Fight "for Jesus"

[WARNING! This article and the accompanying video are products of the mainstream media, hence they are likely to be filled with misinformation.]

An in-your-face documentary out this weekend is raising eyebrows, raising hackles and raising questions about evangelizing to young people.

Speaking in tongues, weeping for salvation, praying for an end to abortion, and worshipping a picture of President Bush—these are some of the activities at Pastor Becky Fischer's Bible camp in North Dakota, "Kids on Fire," subject of the provocative new documentary, "Jesus Camp."

"I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are in Palestine, Pakistan and all those different places," Fisher said. "Because, excuse me, we have the truth."

"A lot of people die for God," one camper said, "and they're not afraid."

"We're kinda being trained to be warriors," said another, "only in a funner way."

[Full story]

A Nation Down the Drain (Jesus Camp) Parts 1 and 2

How elected representatives become enemies of the people

"Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience." - John Locke, 1690

How George W. Bush, impostor, liar, murderer, terrorist, torturer, and doper, endangers the world

Pressures mount on Bush to bomb Iran

by Patrick Seale

President George W Bush is coming under enormous pressure from Israel--and from Israel's neoconservative friends inside and outside the US administration--to harden still further his stance toward Iran. They want the American president to commit himself to bombing Iran if it does not give up its program of uranium enrichment--and to issue a clear ultimatum to Tehran that he is prepared to do so. They argue that mere rhetoric--such as Bush's recent diatribe, in which he compared Iran to al-Qaeda--is not enough, and might even be counter-productive, as it might encourage the Iranians to think that America's bark is worse than its bite.

Hard-liners in Israel and the United States believe that only military action, or the credible threat of it, will now prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, with all that this would mean in terms of Israel's security and the balance of power in the strategically vital Middle East.

Fears that Bush might succumb to this Israeli and neoconservative pressure is beginning to cause serious alarm in Moscow, Beijing, Berlin, Paris, Rome and other world capitals where, as if to urge caution on Washington, political leaders are increasingly speaking out in favor of dialogue with Tehran and against the use of military force. [Full story]

[It's up to Congress and the American people to rein in this White House lunatic before he kills again. -MJY]

Fooled Again - America Outsmarted by George W. Bush

Mark Crispin Miller's provocative book, Fooled Again, explores election fraud tactics employed by Republicans in the 2004 election and warns that a repeat performance is planned for the 2008 election. [Watch]

The futility of a grass roots battle against illegal immigration

by Mark Yannone

In stemming the tide of illegal immigration in the United States, the primary hurdle is the will of the governments on each side of the Mexican border. Neither side is inclined to limit illegal immigration into the US. Governments on both sides actually encourage illegal immigration, as we have clearly seen here in Arizona.

The Mexican government authored, printed, and distributed "comic book" instructions to teach Mexican refugees how to enter the United States without getting caught and how to survive once they get here. The US federal government looked the other way and even instructed local law enforcement to release those they had captured. Federal, state, and local governments extended welfare and education benefits to illegal immigrants regardless of their immigration status. The lack of employment opportunities and the encouragement of the Mexican government pushed Mexicans northward, and the lack of law enforcement and the encouragement of the American governments pulled Mexicans across the border, into the United States.

Now American citizens want to spend an estimated $2.2 billion to build a 700-mile wall on the border? Forget it. Save your money. Focus instead on the causes of the mass exodus of Mexican refugees and not on the phoney "solutions." (What you discover may surprise you.)

To those who are ready to spit hateful replies: I love Mexicans. Son muy amable. I've never met a Mexican I didn't like.

How Diebold touchscreen machines can steal votes

In a paper published on the Web today, a group of Princeton computer scientists said they created demonstration vote-stealing software that can be installed within a minute on a common electronic voting machine. The software can fraudulently change vote counts without being detected. [Read more and watch video]

A portrait of willful ignorance

by Mark Yannone

Behold the words of a bigot, a hypocrite, a willfully ignorant man who spreads hatred and lies as he callously drags the name of Thomas Jefferson through his muck. To set the record straight before you subject yourself to this hillbilly's panic attack, Iran is not our enemy, Mohammad Khatami is not our enemy, and we are not at war with Iran or any other country in the Middle East.

Furthermore, our right to speak freely--like all rights--is inherent. Americans know that that human right exists in all mankind, throughout the world, and we Americans acknowledge that right in word, in deed, and in our Constitution. Our Declaration of Independence spells it out succinctly: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." All men are created equal. Not just American citizens, but all men. We embrace and revere that philosophy, and we live by it.

Lastly, the president of the United States and his administration lied repeatedly to the American people and to the entire world about Iraq and launched an illegal invasion against a sovereign nation that was no threat to us. Instead of continuing the illegal occupation of Iraq, the United States must withdraw immediately. The murder, torture, and terrorizing of Iraqi innocents and the senseless sacrifice of America's military and other precious resources must end today, not tomorrow.

Here now is a pitiful portrait of willful ignorance and spite.

_______________________

Ruckersville, VA (PRWEB) September 15, 2006 -- On September 7, 2006, former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami spoke at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. The following is a response from Robert "Bo" Short, President of the American Leadership Foundation:

"The organizers of this event and the leadership of the University have brought shame upon a great institution. Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University, penned words that have helped guide our moral compass as Americans when he wrote, ‘For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor.’ It saddens me that the leadership of his beloved University has broken faith with Mr. Jefferson."

"I was also stunned that American citizens were reportedly asked to wait for hours before entering Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson. Their wait came about because Khatami was given a private tour of this American treasure. I would suggest he be the one required to wait."

"I understand that many consider Khatami to be a political moderate. However, I deem him an enemy of our country. Instead of rolling out the red carpet I would have rather seen him arrested as he entered the borders of America. I agree that we must dialog with our enemies, but those particular conversations need to take place in a diplomatic setting, not from a stage in which tyrannical representatives are invited to spew their rhetoric unchallenged."

"I was not surprised that Harvard University invited Khatami to speak. Harvard has long been considered a far-left institution among American colleges and universities. However, when UVA offered this invitation I was stunned. Young patriotic men and women of America are risking their lives defending our freedoms and the very Declaration of Independence that Thomas Jefferson was instrumental in creating. I can only imagine what despair they must feel about Khatami’s political ‘dog and pony show’ as they dig their foxholes and remain vigilant in this war we are waging against the likes of Iran. These young courageous patriots, who wear the uniform of the United States of America deserve better than this from us."

"I heard someone say that he (Khatami) has a right to speak openly in America. I would strongly disagree. He has no rights in America. I find it offensive that the far-left in this country are so eager to bestow American privileges and rights upon people that are not citizens of the United States, many of whom, have sworn to kill us."

"I loathe war. Risking the lives of our soldiers is horrible. Unfortunately, it is necessary when we know that there are evil people in this world that want to destroy us. Most Americans will defend this Nation and their families in any way to protect them from such a threat. Whether or not you agree with the actions of entering into a war in Iraq . . . we are there. By doing so we have uncovered an evil that places the future of this Nation at risk. Radical Islamic fascism is a snake that is winding itself toward our borders. The ‘head of this snake’ is Iran. Inviting their leaders here and giving them aid and comfort should be something that every American proclaims to be abhorrent."

"We must never forget the words of Thomas Jefferson when he wrote, ‘The arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance, employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die free rather than live as slaves . . . Thomas Jefferson, 1775’"

"I encourage each of you to be heard. Stand up and speak. Do not allow actions that are detrimental to the health and very existence of this Republic to take place. You must find a voice from that part of your character that says, ‘that is enough.’ As an American citizen you must . . . It is your Sacred Honor."

[Source]

The Republicans break the law, and the Democratic candidates promise not to enforce it.

For several weeks now, The Arizona Republic Editorial Board has been entertaining congressional candidates. Many of the Arizona Democrats chasing open or Republican-held seats told us that "impeachment" hearings would be bad. But most added that they would welcome formal hearings into various Bush transgressions. It is a distinction without a difference.

"There is no doubt in my mind the president is impeachable," said Democrat Herb Paine, who hopes to unseat Rep. John Shadegg, R-District 3. "But impeachment hearings would be very divisive." Paine insisted the nation shouldn't go down that road.

But regarding more generic "hearings"? Oh, that's different, Paine said. Yes, by all means, let's have hearings. And lots of them. Let's just not call them "impeachment hearings." [Source]

Does it surprise you that a Democrat would promise to violate his oath of office and refuse to uphold the Constitution? Is there any doubt in your mind about the principled position of a Libertarian congressional candidate?

Meanwhile, the Arizona Republic maintains its status as the sorriest excuse for a newspaper this state has ever seen. The story from which the above was excerpted bore a headline that read

Desire is strong in Dems to impeach

followed two lines later by

"Should Democrats reassume control of the House of Representatives this fall, an increasingly likely event, they will not convene hearings focused on the possible impeachment of President Bush."

Got that?

Defending against terrorism

"The war on terror cannot be won. It is not our will that is being tested, but our understanding of reality. The strength of an open society lies in its ability to recognize and correct its mistakes. This is the test that confronts us."
George Soros, Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2006



"There is no military answer to terrorism."
Randi Rhodes, The Randi Rhodes Show, September 13, 2006



"There is no defense against terrorism. The best we can do is remove the motivation for it."
Mark Yannone, 2006 candidate for US House of Representatives, September 11, 2001

Caught in the Crossfire (video)

The Untold Story of Falluja

"I have suggested, however, that resentment and the lack of hope create the breeding grounds for terrorists who are willing to use suiciders to kill, to achieve an objective. I have made that case. And one way to defeat that—you know, defeat resentment—is with hope. And the best way to do hope is through a form of government." -George W. Bush, explaining why the United States invaded and still occupies and terrorizes Iraq.

The American attack on Falluja and the subsequent costs to the people there have been a humanitarian, social, moral, and ethical disaster; yet the American government and media have largely ignored the plight of the innocent victims. The refugees of Falluja risked their lives in order to tell their story to the world through the groundbreaking new documentary film, Caught in the Crossfire. [Watch]

"Americans would never accept this in their lives." -Iraqi woman

The Real Link Between 9/11 and Iraq (Finally) Revealed

by Tom Engelhardt

You've heard the President and Vice President say it over and over in various ways: There was a connection between the events of September 11, 2001 and Iraq. Let's take this seriously and consider some of the links between the two.

Numbers and comparisons

* At least 3,438 Iraqis died by violent means during July (roughly similar numbers died in June and August), significantly more than the 2,973 people who died in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

* 1,536 Iraqis died in Baghdad alone in August, according to revised figures from the Baghdad morgue. That's over half the 9/11 casualties in one city in one increasingly typical month. According to the Washington Post, this figure does not include suicide-bombing victims and others taken to the city's hospitals, nor does it include deaths in towns near the capital.

* By the beginning of September, 2,974 U.S. military service members had died in Iraq and in the Bush administration's Global War on Terror, more than died in the attacks of 9/11. (Twenty-two more American soldiers died in Iraq in the first 9 days of September; at least 3 in Afghanistan.)

* Five years later, according to Emily Gosden and David Randall of the British newspaper, the Independent, the Bush administration's Global War on Terror has resulted in, at a minimum, 20 times the deaths of 9/11; at a maximum, 60 times. It has "directly killed a minimum of 62,006 people, created 4.5 million refugees and cost the US more than the sum needed to pay off the debts of every poor nation on earth. If estimates of other, unquantified, deaths--of insurgents, the Iraq military during the 2003 invasion, those not recorded individually by Western media, and those dying from wounds--are included, then the toll could reach as high as 180,000." According to Australian journalist Paul McGeough, Iraqi officials (and others) estimate that that country's death toll since 2003 "stands at 50,000 or more--the proportional equivalent of about 570,000 Americans."

* Last week, the U.S. Senate agreed to appropriate another $63 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where costs have been averaging $10 billion a month so far this year. This brings the (taxpayer) cost for Bush's wars so far to about $469 billion and climbing. That's the equivalent of 469 Ground Zero memorials at full cost-overrun estimates, double that if the memorial comes in at the recently revised budget of $500 million. (Keep in mind that the estimated cost of these two wars doesn't include various perfectly real future payouts like those for the care of veterans and could rise into the trillions.)

* In 2003, with its invasion of Iraq over, the Bush administration had about 150,000 troops in Iraq. Just under three and a half years later, almost as long as it took to win World War II in the Pacific, and despite much media coverage about coming force "draw-downs," U.S. troop levels are actually rising--by 15,000 in the last month. They now stand at 145,000, just 5,000 short of the initial occupation figure. (Pre-invasion, top administration officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz took it for granted that American troop levels would be drawn down to the 30,000 level within three months of the taking of Baghdad.)

Reconstruction

While Americans are planning to remember 9/11 with four vast towers and a huge, extremely costly memorial sunk into Manhattan's Ground Zero, Baghdadis have been thinking a bit more practically. They are putting scarce funds into constructing two new branch morgues (with refrigeration units) in the capital for what's now most plentiful in their country: dead bodies. They plan to raise the city's morgue capacity to 250 bodies a day. If fully used, that would be about 7,500 bodies a month. Think of it as a hedge against ever more probable futures.

While the various New York memorial constructions can't get off (or into) the ground, due to disputes and cost estimate overruns, what could be thought of as the real American memorial to Ground Zero is going up in the very heart of Baghdad; and unlike the prospective structures in Manhattan or seemingly just about any other construction project in Iraq, it's on schedule. According to Paul McGeough, the $787 million "embassy," a 21-building, heavily fortified complex (not reliant on the capital's hopeless electricity or water systems) will pack significant bang for the bucks--its own built-in surface-to-air missile emplacements as well as Starbucks and Krispy Kreme outlets, a beauty parlor, a swimming pool, and a sports center. As essentially a "suburb of Washington," with a predicted modest staff of 3,500, it is a project that says, with all the hubris the Bush administration can muster: We're not leaving. Never.

Record-breaking Months

* Roadside bombs (or IEDs), "the leading killer of U.S. troops," rose to record numbers this summer--1,200 in August, quadrupling the January 2004 figures according to the Washington Post, while bomb and attack tips from Iraqi citizens fell drastically. They plummeted from 5,900 in April to 3,700 in July. ("It will improve once it's not so darn lethal to go out on the street," was the optimistic observation of retired Army Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization.)

* According to a recently released quarterly assessment the Pentagon is mandated to do for Congress, Iraqi casualties have soared by a record 51% in recent months, quadrupling in just two years.

* From the same report, monthly attacks on U.S. and allied Iraqi forces rose to about 800, doubling since early 2004. In Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency (where a "very pessimistic" secret Marine Corps assessment indicates that "we haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically--and that's where wars are won and lost . . ."), attacks averaged 30 a day.

* A sideline record in the War on Terror: Afghanistan's already sizeable opium crop is projected to increase by at least 50% this year and would then make up a startling 92% of the global supply. According to Antonio Maria Costa, the global executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, those supplies would exceed global consumption by 30%--so other records loom. (Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, the investigation into the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden has hit a record low. His trail has gone "stone cold . . . U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years.")

The Iraqi Condition

Along with civil war, the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods, the still-strengthening insurgency, and the security situation from hell, Iraqis are also experiencing soaring inflation, possibly reaching 70% this year (which would more than double last year's 32% rise); stagnant salaries (where they even exist); an "inert" banking system; gas and electricity prices up in a year by 270%; massive corruption ("An audit sponsored by the United Nations last week found hundreds of millions of dollars of Iraq's oil revenue had been wrongly tallied last year or had gone missing altogether"); lack of adequate electricity or potable water supplies; tenaciously high unemployment, ranging--depending upon the estimate--from 15-50/60% (the recent Pentagon report to Congress offers Iraqi government figures of 18% unemployment and 34% underemployment); acute shortages of gasoline, kerosene, and cooking gas in the country with the planet's third largest oil reserves, forcing the Iraqi government to devote $800 million in scarce funds to importing refined oil products from neighboring countries and making endless gas lines and overnight waits the essence of normal life ("Filling up now requires several days' pay, monastic patience or both . . ."); an oil industry, already ragged at the time of the invasion, which has since gone steadily downhill (its three main oil refineries are now functioning at half-capacity and processing only half the number of barrels of oil as before the invasion, while the biggest refinery in Baiji sometimes operates at as little as 7.5% of capacity); government gas subsidies severely cut (at the urging of the International Monetary Fund); malnutrition on the rise and, according to that Pentagon report to Congress, 25.9% of Iraqi children are stunted in their growth.

In other words, economically speaking, Iraq has essentially been deconstructed.

Diving into Iraq

On December 9, 2001, Vice President Cheney began publicly arguing on Meet the Press that there were Iraqi connections to the 9/11 attacks. It was "pretty well confirmed," he told Tim Russert, that Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, had met the previous April in Prague with a "senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service." On September 8, 2002, he returned to the program and reaffirmed this supposed fact even more strongly. ("[Atta] did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center.") All of this--and there was much more of it from Cheney, the President, and other top officials, always leaving Iraq and 9/11, or Saddam and al-Qaeda, or Saddam and Zarqawi in the same rhetorical neighborhood with the final linking usually left to the listener--was quite literally so much Bushwa.

These were claims debunked within the intelligence community and elsewhere before, during, and after the invasion of Iraq. We learned only the other day from a belated partial report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that U.S. intelligence analysts were strongly disputing the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda while senior Bush administration officials were publicly asserting those links to justify invading Iraq. We learned as well that our intelligence people knew Saddam Hussein had actually tried to capture Zarqawi and that the claim that Zarqawi and he were somehow in cahoots was utterly repudiated last fall by the CIA. None of this stopped the Vice President or President--who as late as this August 21 insisted that Saddam "had relations with Zarqawi"--from continuing to make such implicit or explicit linkages even as they also backtracked from the claims.

As is often the case, under such lies and manipulations lurks a deeper truth. In this case, let's call it the truth of wish fulfillment. The link between 9/11 and Iraq is unfortunately all too real. The Bush administration made it so in the heat of the post-9/11 shock.

Think of that link this way: In the immediate wake of 9/11, our President and Vice President hijacked our country, using the low-tech rhetorical equivalents of box cutters and mace; then, with most passengers on board and not quite enough of the spirit of United Flight 93 to spare, after a brief Afghan overflight, they crashed the plane of state directly into Iraq, causing the equivalent of a Katrina that never ends and turning that country--from Basra in the south to the border of Kurdistan--into the global equivalent of Ground Zero.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The Last Days of Publishing, a novel, and in the fall, Mission Unaccomplished (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.

Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt

[Source]

Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror

As he dissects the truth and lies in the "war on terror," award-winning journalist John Pilger investigates the discrepancies between American and British claims for the "war on terror" and the facts on the ground as he finds them in Afghanistan and Washington, DC. [Watch]

In 2001, as the bombs began to drop, George W. Bush promised Afghanistan "the generosity of America and its allies." Now the familiar old warlords are regaining power, religious fundamentalism is renewing its grip, and military skirmishes continue routinely. In "liberated" Afghanistan, America has its military base and pipeline access, while the people have the warlords who are, says one woman, "in many ways worse than the Taliban."

In Washington, Pilger conducts a series of remarkable interviews with William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, and leading Administration officials such as Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. These people, and the other architects of the Project for the New American Century, were dismissed as "the crazies" by the first Bush Administration in the early 90's when they first presented their ideas for pre-emptive strikes and world domination.

Pilger also interviews presidential candidate General Wesley Clark and former intelligence officers, all the while raising searching questions about the real motives for the "war on terror."

While President Bush refers to the US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq as two "great victories," Pilger asks the question--victories over whom, and for what purpose? Pilger describes Afghanistan as a country "more devastated than anything I have seen since Pol Pot's Cambodia." He finds that Al-Qaida has not been defeated and that the Taliban is re-emerging. And of the "victory" in Iraq, he asks, "Is this Bush's Vietnam?"

The genocidal savagery known as Israel

Taken from your wallet by threat of deadly force are billions of dollars that were given to these murderers by the United States federal government.

"Gaza is a jail. Nobody is allowed to leave. We are all starving now"

by Patrick Cockburn in Gaza

Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq.

A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets.

Many people are being killed by Israeli incursions that occur every day by land and air. A total of 262 people have been killed and 1,200 wounded, of whom 60 had arms or legs amputated, since 25 June, says Dr Juma al-Saqa, the director of the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City which is fast running out of medicine. Of these, 64 were children and 26 women. This bloody conflict in Gaza has so far received only a fraction of the attention given by the international media to the war in Lebanon.

It was on 25 June that the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was taken captive and two other soldiers were killed by Palestinian militants who used a tunnel to get out of the Gaza Strip. In the aftermath of this, writes Gideon Levy in the daily Haaretz, the Israeli army "has been rampaging through Gaza - there's no other word to describe it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately". Gaza has essentially been reoccupied since Israeli troops and tanks come and go at will. In the northern district of Shajhayeh they took over several houses last week and stayed five days. By the time they withdrew, 22 Palestinians had been killed, three houses were destroyed and groves of olive, citrus and almond trees had been bulldozed.

Fuad al-Tuba, the 61-year-old farmer who owned a farm here, said: "They even destroyed 22 of my bee-hives and killed four sheep." He pointed sadly to a field, its brown sandy earth churned up by tracks of bulldozers, where the stumps of trees and broken branches with wilting leaves lay in heaps. Near by a yellow car was standing on its nose in the middle of a heap of concrete blocks that had once been a small house.

His son Baher al-Tuba described how for five days Israeli soldiers confined him and his relatives to one room in his house where they survived by drinking water from a fish pond. "Snipers took up positions in the windows and shot at anybody who came near," he said. "They killed one of my neighbours called Fathi Abu Gumbuz who was 56 years old and just went out to get water."

Sometimes the Israeli army gives a warning before a house is destroyed. The sound that Palestinians most dread is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying they have half an hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs or missiles. There is no appeal.

But it is not the Israeli incursions alone that are destroying Gaza and its people. In the understated prose of a World Bank report published last month, the West Bank and Gaza face "a year of unprecedented economic recession. Real incomes may contract by at least a third in 2006 and poverty to affect close to two thirds of the population." Poverty in this case means a per capita income of under $2 (£1.06) a day.

There are signs of desperation everywhere. Crime is increasing. People do anything to feed their families. Israeli troops entered the Gaza industrial zone to search for tunnels and kicked out the Palestinian police. When the Israelis withdrew they were replaced not by the police but by looters. On one day this week there were three donkey carts removing twisted scrap metal from the remains of factories that once employed thousands.

"It is the worst year for us since 1948 [when Palestinian refugees first poured into Gaza]," says Dr Maged Abu-Ramadan, a former ophthalmologist who is mayor of Gaza City. "Gaza is a jail. Neither people nor goods are allowed to leave it. People are already starving. They try to live on bread and falafel and a few tomatoes and cucumbers they grow themselves."

The few ways that Gazans had of making money have disappeared. Dr Abu-Ramadan says the Israelis "have destroyed 70 per cent of our orange groves in order to create security zones." Carnations and strawberries, two of Gaza's main exports, were thrown away or left to rot. An Israeli air strike destroyed the electric power station so 55 per cent of power was lost. Electricity supply is now becoming almost as intermittent as in Baghdad.

The Israeli assault over the past two months struck a society already hit by the withdrawal of EU subsidies after the election of Hamas as the Palestinian government in March. Israel is withholding taxes owed on goods entering Gaza. Under US pressure, Arab banks abroad will not transfer funds to the government.

Two thirds of people are unemployed and the remaining third who mostly work for the state are not being paid. Gaza is now by far the poorest region on the Mediterranean. Per capita annual income is $700, compared with $20,000 in Israel. Conditions are much worse than in Lebanon where Hizbollah liberally compensates war victims for loss of their houses. If Gaza did not have enough troubles this week there were protest strikes and marches by unpaid soldiers, police and security men. These were organised by Fatah, the movement of the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, which lost the election to Hamas in January. His supporters marched through the streets waving their Kalashnikovs in the air. "Abu Mazen you are brave," they shouted. "Save us from this disaster." Sour-looking Hamas gunmen kept a low profile during the demonstration but the two sides are not far from fighting it out in the streets.

The Israeli siege and the European boycott are a collective punishment of everybody in Gaza. The gunmen are unlikely to be deterred. In a bed in Shifa Hospital was a sturdy young man called Ala Hejairi with wounds to his neck, legs, chest and stomach. "I was laying an anti-tank mine last week in Shajhayeh when I was hit by fire from an Israeli drone," he said. "I will return to the resistance when I am better. Why should I worry? If I die I will die a martyr and go to paradise."

His father, Adel, said he was proud of what his son had done adding that three of his nephews were already martyrs. He supported the Hamas government: "Arab and Western countries want to destroy this government because it is the government of the resistance."

As the economy collapses there will be many more young men in Gaza willing to take Ala Hejairi's place. Untrained and ill-armed most will be killed. But the destruction of Gaza, now under way, will ensure that no peace is possible in the Middle East for generations to come.

The deadly toll

* After the kidnap of Corporal Gilad Shalit by Palestinians on 25 June, Israel launched a massive offensive and blockade of Gaza under the operation name Summer Rains.

* The Gaza Strip's 1.3 million inhabitants, 33 per cent of whom live in refugee camps, have been under attack for 74 days.

* More than 260 Palestinians, including 64 children and 26 women, have been killed since 25 June. One in five is a child. One Israeli soldier has been killed and 26 have been wounded.

* 1,200 Palestinians have been injured, including up to 60 amputations. A third of victims brought to hospital are children.

* Israeli warplanes have launched more than 250 raids on Gaza, hitting the two power stations and the foreign and Information ministries.

* At least 120 Palestinian structures including houses, workshops and greenhouses have been destroyed and 160 damaged by the Israelis.

* The UN has criticised Israel's bombing, which has caused an estimated $1.8bn in damage to the electricity grid and leaving more than a million people without regular access to drinking water.

* The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem says 76 Palestinians, including 19 children, were killed by Israeli forces in August alone. Evidence shows at least 53 per cent were not participating in hostilities.

* In the latest outbreak of violence, three Palestinians were killed yesterday when Israeli troops raided a West Bank town in search of a wanted militant. Two of those killed were unarmed, according to witnesses.

[Source]

Wanta confident $4.5 trillion will be released as corrupt US authorities back themselves into a corner

Ambassador Leo Wanta hoped the money would be released by September 7 but has "dropped the financial hammer," notifying major European banks of U.S. government's nonpayment. In turn banks are placing stop orders on all transactions with the U.S. government of $100 million or more. Further, U.S. Treasury does corrupt deal with Vietnam and Taiwan to delay Wanta payment.

by Greg Szymanski

According to Michael C. Cottrell, treasurer of the financial group waiting to distribute $4.5 trillion to the American people, Ambassador Leo Wanta assured him on Thursday the money eventually will be released, as corrupt U.S. authorities withholding it illegally are "backing themselves into a tighter and tighter corner."

Wanta and Cottrell, who together formed AmeriTrust Groupe, Inc. to oversee proper distribution of the massive amount of money, were hoping the money would be released by the end of the business day on Sept. 7, the same day the Chinese were also to be paid trillions by the U.S. government for prior investment gains.

However, the deadline passed without the Wanta $4.5 trillion being paid and still being illegally withheld in a Clearing House Interbank Payment System credit account (CHIPS), an account credited to Goldman Sachs and Co. at Citibank.

In what has become known in international financial circles as one of the most important and explosive stories in the history of modern banking, the Wanta settlement has been the subject of a Bush administration cover-up ever since Ambassador Wanta entered into an official written agreement in November 2005 to repatriate money for the betterment of the American economy.

Further, in May Wanta verbally agreed to the distribution of the $4.5 trillion with President Bush along with the assistance of one Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) court judge and two U.S. Supreme Court Justices.

The settlement, also negotiated with the help of two major U.S. law firms, represents only a portion of the $27.5 trillion offshore fund established at the end of the Cold War, which is now under the legal control of Ambassador Wanta, as duly appointed trustor, a position given to him by former President Ronald Reagan.

"Well the news is, so far, we have not been paid and the reason they don't want to make a pay-out is they do not want it to show up on the books," said Cottrell in a Thursday evening telephone conversation. "We have heard, though, through one of the people working for the government that they have not said they won't pay us just that they can't pay us now."

Concerning an estimated $32 trillion payable to the Chinese on Sept. 7 and the Wanta $4.5 trillion, Cottrell added that Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson, Jr., went to China for an Asian/Pacific Economic Conference and, on directions of President Bush, cut a deal with Vietnam and Taiwan China to essentially "buy more time" in an effort to delay release of the Chinese and Wanta money.

"Last night they struck a deal to essentially buy more time which allows them to use Fanie Mae and Ginnie Mae as a cover," said Cottrell. "They are also using 1933-1934 U.S. dollars held in a repository of Taiwan Central Bank that were given to China from 1933-1945. Now each box of cash in the repository is worth $100 million and that is to be repatriated. In 2000, a bank law was passed allowing for a five percent repatriation fee and we believe they are using part of that as actually money being traded.

"Now the Fanie Mae and Ginnie Mae's are used as a front and they use the cash from the boxes from the repatriation. To cover all of that they have been given loans both to Vietnam and Taiwan and those loans allow them to do trading through Deutsche Bank similar how they are trying to use our Chip worth $4.5 trillion in Citibank to turn over tremendous profits like I explained earlier.

"Now they are using this cash and the cover of loans for Taiwan and Vietnam. They still have not paid us, but we learned there are going to be funds paid out tomorrow apparently via CHIP, however, we rather doubt at this point if we are going to be paid.

Cottrell added that in lieu of nonpayment, Ambassador Wanta "has already lowered the hammer," notifying the major banks in Europe, save Deutsche Bank, who have all agreed to put "stop orders" on any transactions with the U.S. government of $100 million or more.

"Most of the major banks in Europe other than Deutsche Bank have already agreed to the stop orders based on the failure to pay Ambassador Wanta," said Cottrell, including Credit Swiss and UBS. "We have asked the Chinese but I have not heard confirmation that they will go ahead and pull the $32 trillion owed in CHIPS. However, given that President Bush and Paulson cut a deal with Viet Nam and Taiwan whether the Chinese pull the CHIPS is irrelevant because they now have a cash flow through the system that allows them to stash more money away.

"What is most aggravating to me is that the President of the United States and the Secretary of the Treasury have made a deal with a communist country to circumvent an American company from paying taxes. That is what makes me angry because these guys go over and strike a deal to circumvent the American people. They essentially would rather cut a deal in Hanoi than allow us to pay the $1.6 trillion in taxes and use the rest of the money for the betterment of the American economy."

Besides alerting European banks about nonpayment, Cottrell said he didn't want to "tip his hand" on future plans to secure release of the $4.5 trillion, saying he fears the U.S. government would use this information to circumvent their plans.

Although Wanta and Cottrell have been trying to get paid since June, he still felt optimistic the money will be released.

"I was just talking to Leo tonight and he said we will get paid and that there is no question or doubt about that," added Cottrell. "But what they are doing is boxing themselves into a tighter and tighter corner because this is truly a fraud against the United States of America. The more they try to circumvent the more violations of federal law keep adding up."

In related matters, one week ago Cottrell learned James R. Wilkinson, deputy national security advisor for communications, signed off on the release of the $4.5 trillion being held in the Clearing House Interbank Payment System credit account (CHIPS), an account credited to Goldman Sachs and Co. at Citibank.

Wilkinson and Paulson are the only two officials with signature approval over the $4.5 trillion Wanta money, but both have failed to comment publicly.

Wilkinson assumed his post in 2003 after serving as Director of Strategic Communications for General Tommy R. Franks. In his present position, he reports directly to the National Security Advisor and the White House with the specific task of crafting long-term messaging for the National Security Council.

However, according to Cottrell, after Wilkinson officially "signed-off" on the $4.5 trillion, disturbing twists and turns began to take place as the funds never were properly directed into Ambassador Wanta's account.

"We tried calling Paulson a week ago, but his secretary told us, point blank, never expect a call back from him - ever," said Cottrell Wednesday in an extended telephone conversation about the reluctance of the highest officials in the land to release trillions that would benefit the American economy.

Instead, after repeated inquiries, Cottrell learned the Bush administration had deviously devised an illegal plan to defraud Ambassador Wanta and, in turn, the American people by diverting the CHIPS account first to the Deutsche Bank/Berlin and then to two other banks.

Cottrell added this method of "signing-off and then transferring credit accounts" is used by less than scrupulous individuals as a financial smokescreen, giving the appearance the money is being released when, in fact, it is being illegally diverted for other purposes.

"They have been lying to everyone and it is clear they never want to release the $1.6 trillion into the U.S. Treasury. They are simply trying to steal the money and it appears they really want to bring down the economy and the country," said Cottrell, referring to the $1.6 trillion to be paid by Ambassador Wanta in federal taxes generated by the massive $4.5 trillion settlement.

Regarding the trillions of offshore money generated by Wanta at the end of the Cold War, it was always the intention of President Reagan and Ambassador Wanta to use the money for the benefit of the American people. But after Reagan left the political spotlight, Wanta was indiscriminately and illegally jailed by operatives working for the last three presidential administrations, who have instead pilfered trillions for their own agenda and personal gain.

After Wanta's release from a Wisconsin jail in 2005, he was instructed in a 2003 memorandum opinion by Federal Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Virginia, to try to return the $27.5 trillion to U.S. coffers according to President Reagan's instructions.

The $4.5 trillion settlement is a culmination of his efforts after finding a dark and ominous financial trail of theft, bribery and deception, discovering in his quest to retrace the whereabouts of the offshore money that much of it had been stolen or diverted for private use by the last three presidential administrations.

Wanta also discovered to his dismay that a CIA disinformation campaign had been waged, spreading false rumors of his death, making it easier for those criminals inside the government to abscond with trillions.

To date he has provided the Arctic Beacon with documentation of more than $745 billion in stolen funds, including accounts leading to Bush. Sr., Neil Bush and former President Clinton.

Wanta added that at the time he entered into the settlement in May he had further identified upwards of $2 trillion in stolen funds from accounts under his control, keeping the documentation as financial leverage in case the $4.5 trillion settlement falls through.

And since President Bush was notified in writing of the settlement in July, observers claim his "false American colors" have come shining through as he placed an immediate illegal hold on the money in an effort to protect the "financial dike from exploding" and the criminals in government being exposed instead of doing the right thing and injecting an immediate trillion dollar boost into the American economy.

After learning of the Wanta settlement and the fact the Ambassador was still alive, the Chinese set the Sept 7 due date for the return of their investment money, long since frozen by U.S. authorities in what has become known as the "China Foundation Money."

"The link between Ambassador Wanta and the $32 trillion owed the Chinese goes back to the days of World War II-Cold War and connections with his Chinese business partner, Howe Kwong Kok," said Cottrell. "Out of loyalty and respect, the Chinese have thrown their support behind Ambassador Wanta and have applied added pressure so that U.S authorities release the money."

[Source]

Dave von Kleist: You can't trust the mainstream media

"The only way out of this mess is to inform the American people, on a massive scale . . . which means to take back the media." [Watch]

What did Iraq have to do with 9/11?

BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

REPORTER: The attacks upon the World Trade Center.

BUSH: Nothing! [Watch]

How religious icons lead to babies' footwear

by Mark Yannone

(A) A guy draws a picture.

(B) Another guy is offended by it. He wants others to be offended by it too, so he does some rabble rousing (C).

(D) Another guy tells (B) that he and "his kind" are even more offensive (E), that (A) has a right to be offensive, and if (B) and "his kind" don't like it they can leave the country.

The offended guys (B) and (C) are even more offended, so they want (F) to punish (D).

But (F) won't punish (D), so the offended guys (B) and (C) are even more offended . . . again.

(A) The artist drew so much attention with his little picture that he got a nice raise, bought a new car, and moved to a better neighborhood (L). Now he's working on a new picture (M) involving everybody. He figures this could be big--really big. His editor, his attorney, and his accountant agree.

The next picture will probably be even more reprehensible because the artist's family is growing, and baby needs a new pair of shoes.

(Based on a true story. The names were changed for no good reason.)

A year and a half later the publisher of the cartoon was ordered by a court to explain himself. What you are about to see and hear is a free man who knows he is free asserting his freedom in no uncertain terms to a state that would dearly love to enslave him. The short form of what publisher Ezra Levant has to say to this so-called human rights commission from Alberta, Canada, is "BITE ME!"



Part [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

South Dakota's curious non-reader members of the bar

by Mark Yannone

Judging by the content of some of the opinion pieces about Amendment E (here's a real whopper), you might wonder if South Dakota had schools that taught writing but not reading. The next paragraph is the part that some people can't read. See if you can.

"No immunity shall extend to any judge of this State for any deliberate violation of law, fraud or conspiracy, intentional violation of due process of law, deliberate disregard of material facts, judicial acts without jurisdiction, blocking of a lawful conclusion of a case, or any deliberate violation of the Constitutions of South Dakota or the United States, notwithstanding Common Law, or any other contrary statute."

When the non-readers encounter that paragraph, they can't see the word "judge," so they pretend there are other nouns there instead, like "councilman" and "water board." Isn't that hilarious?

The non-readers can't understand the concept of "violations of law" either, so they pretend Amendment E is about other things instead, like "having a bad hair day" or "disagreement." I wonder how they even manage to cross the street safely if these non-readers are so easily confused by such simple words and concepts.

What's really strange is how many of these non-readers are members of the bar, like the judges who are just about to lose their immunity from prosecution when they break the law. Maybe that association has something to do with their apparent inability to read. Do you think so?

Vote Here/Vote Aqui?

by Mark Yannone



Q: Why are voting materials written in English AND Spanish? Don't you have to be a US citizen to vote? Can you be a US citizen if you can't read English?

A: Yes, you have to be a citizen to vote, but not all citizens have to be able to read English.

Q: What! How can this be? Who is exempted?

A: If you were not born in the US, you can become a US citizen even if you can't read, write, or speak basic English as long as you are over 50 years old and have lived in the United States for at least 20 years since you became a permanent (legal) resident; or you are over 55 years old and have lived in the United States for at least 15 years since you became a permanent (legal) resident; or you have a disability that prevents you from fulfilling this requirement and you file a "Medical Certificate for Disability Exceptions" (Form N-648), completed and signed by a doctor, with your application for citizenship.

Q: Wow! But wait a minute! What about the civics test? Don't you have to be able to pass the civics test before you can become a US citizen?

A: Not necessarily.

Q: Huh? What do you mean? Who is exempted from this?

A: If you can't pass the civics test because you have a disability that prevents you from fulfilling the civics requirement and you file a "Medical Certificate for Disability Exceptions" (Form N-648), completed and signed by a doctor, with your application for citizenship, then you are exempted from the civics test requirement.

Q: So, in other words, we are printing everything in English and Spanish just in case a citizen over 50 or 55 years old, who has been here legally for at least 15 or 20 years and who never learned basic English, decides to vote.

A: Correct. Or if he has a medical disability that prevents him from learning basic English and . . .

Q: And if the guy with the medical disability who can only speak, read, and write Spanish decides to vote?

A: Right.

Q: If they don't read English, how are they going to know enough to make intelligent choices at the polls, even in Spanish?

A: You're right. We ask the same question about English-speaking American citizens who don't read. But they vote anyway.

The Crawford Pig Farm Treaty of 2005

by Mark Yannone

After a long walk around the pig farm in Crawford, Texas, Paul Martin, Vicente Fox, and George Bush meet behind closed doors, with Dick Cheney skulking in the deep shadows. They are standing before a chart on the wall, studying intently. The hidden microphone picks up their spirited conversation as they gesture toward the chart:


TX NM AZ CA
52 45 64 47 Anglo
32 42 25 32 Hispanic/Latino

2000 Census (percent, rounded)
Source: http://quickfacts.census.gov

Bush: "It's the American state of Texas!"

Fox: "This is 2005, George. Our numbers are much higher now. It's the Mexican state of Texas." He sits down and lights a cigar. "Oye, chico! Traigame una Corona, y que sea bien fria, eh?" he calls to Mr. Cheney.

Bush: "Well, Vinny, I guess you're right."

Fox: "Damn right I'm right. We've had New Mexico and California for years now, and Arizona is only a couple more coyote trips away from being ours too. So, George, you want to make a deal? Perhaps you want to wait another five years, George?" he suggests, smiling.

[Fade to black.]

[The scene opens on a sunny, windy day. In the distance, a cadet is raising a flag. The camera slowly zooms in on the flag . . . the Stars and Stripes . . . but, wait! What's that?]

Americans begin to stand up for truth

Salt Lake sounds off in protest and support

by Heather May
and Christopher Smart
The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake Tribune

A crowd of thousands cheered Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson for calling President Bush a "dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights violating president" whose time in office would "rank as the worst presidency our nation has ever had to endure."

The group--including children and elderly and some hailing from throughout Utah--then marched to the federal building Wednesday to deliver a copy of a symbolic indictment against the president and Congress for abuse of power and failure to uphold the U.S. Constitution.

With their signs labeling Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the "axis of evil," calling the Iraq war a "mission of lies" or comparing the invasion of Iraq after September 11, 2001, to invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor, the estimated 1,500 to 4,000 protesters hoped their demonstration at the Salt Lake City-County Building sent a message about the reddest state in the country.

"If they [the Bush administration] lack support in Utah, my God they're in trouble," the Reverend Tom Goldsmith of the First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City told the lively gathering between protest songs and banner waving.

For those who didn't get enough, organizers held a "Rock Against Rumsfeld" concert at Pioneer Park in the evening. Between songs, Salt Lake City singer Colin Robison challenged Rumsfeld's Tuesday speech to the American Legion.

"Critics of the war were equated with Nazi sympathizers. How dare he?" Robison asked the crowd of over 300. "What about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay? Who's the Nazi?

A mother of an Iraqi war veteran on his second tour, Debbie Johnson, told the crowd they need not heed the "Orwellian double-speak" of the administration.

"This war is illegal. You don't have to support the war to support our troops."

Earlier in the day, Anderson started going hoarse while speaking--often yelling--to the anti-Bush throng for 35 minutes. At times his message strayed from an anti-war theme to criticism of federal policies on illicit drugs, global warming, tax cuts, and Hurricane Katrina.

Anti-war expressions were one of many messages during an eruption of free speech Wednesday in Salt Lake City. Seven official rallies took place--most of them aimed at praising or pelting Rumsfeld, Rice and Bush's visit to Utah this week to speak to the American Legion national convention. The trio are on a campaign to bolster sagging public support for the three-year-old war in Iraq.

Hours after the anti-Bush demonstration, the Republican Party held a smaller counter rally with about 400 people in support of the president. But a far larger crowd--expected to be several thousand strong--was gathering late Wednesday to greet the president at the Utah Air National Guard Base.

At Liberty Park, uniformed military veterans and civilians spoke in support of the U.S. troops--and against Anderson--at a 300-strong Freedom Rally.

They clasped hands and sang "God Bless the USA." Yellow ribbons printed with the phrase "Support Our Troops," hung from shirt pockets, baseball caps, and American flags.

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff addressed the group saying, "I have to support the right of Rocky to be stupid. But I will not support his right to hurt people. What he is doing is hurting those people whose loved ones gave the ultimate sacrifice."

But protesters at the anti-Bush rally vehemently defended their patriotism.

"I love America as much as anybody else," said Brenda Durant, 52, who traveled to the protest from Vernal. "I support the troops and I want to bring them home alive."

Former Marine Captain Eric Martineau was in his dress blues to protest the war in Iraq and the Bush administration policies. "I want to let Utah know that pre-emptive war is not LDS doctrine," he said, noting he is Mormon. "We'll look back at this [war] and see it as a turning point."

Big-headed papier-maché likenesses of Bush, Rumsfeld, and Rice--dressed in jailbird shirts and led through the crowd in handcuffs--added to the carnival atmosphere. A band played the flower-power anthem "Get Together."

Police, who said the crowd was peaceful and reported no arrests, estimated the gathering at 1,500 to 2,000. Rally organizers and reporters put the numbers at double that, making Wednesday's rally bigger than last year's anti-Bush demonstration when the president visited to speak at a different veterans' conference.

Anderson has been attacked by the GOP in radio ads for headlining in the rally, but he didn't soft-pedal his condemnation of Bush. He led the crowd to chant, "Give us the truth," throughout his speech and lambasted the president, Congress and the media for leading the country into an "unjustified and illegal" war.

"The truth has been established. Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on the United States," Anderson said. "There is no evidence of any operational ties between Iraq and al-Qaida. And there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq . . . . We are fed lie after lie, our media reinforces those lies, and we are a nation that has been led to a tragic, illegal, unprovoked war."

Anderson, the two-term Democratic mayor whose name was chanted by demonstrators during his speech, had invited national anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan to speak, but she canceled because of poor health.

At the federal building, protesters had to wait outside as organizers delivered the petition. The lingering pack, observed by five armed federal guards, chanted "No more war" and "We are the people."

Looking around the spectacle, Ruth Dunn, of Tooele, summed up the day: "This is what democracy looks like."

[Source] [Thanks to Citizens for Legitimate Government]