Thursday 29 April 2004

Bush, Cheney to Face 9 / 11 Questioning in Secret

If there's no conspiracy, why all the secrecy....? All governments are lying cocksuckers, I hope you know that.

The White House said on Tuesday it would not allow any recordings or transcripts of private testimony this week by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

Rebuffing demands from families of some of the nearly 3,000 dead and other critics of the administration for public testimony, Bush and Cheney only agreed to Thursday's unprecedented interview under pressure and on the grounds they would appear together and behind closed doors.

At the administration's request, the session will not be recorded and an official transcript will not be made. The White House said Bush was already providing unprecedented access to the panel and that the decision was consistent with previous private interviews.

"This is a private interview and it's being treated that way," said commission spokesman Al Felzenberg.

Both sides said they will have note-takers present.

In preparation for Thursday's session, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush was reviewing documents and meeting with his top advisers.

He said Bush does not plan to make an opening statement and is likely to personally field most of the questions -- rather than Cheney. They will not be under oath.

While details of the commission's line of inquiry remain secret, it is clear from previous public hearings that the panel of five Republicans and five Democrats will press for answers to a now-famous Washington question: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

Past testimony has established that elements of the U.S. intelligence apparatus were aware of threats to American targets from the militant al Qaeda network, led by Osama bin Laden.

McClellan said the president's demands for secrecy -- which were not applied to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice or other top Bush officials during their public testimony -- would not undermine the process.

"The president will tell it exactly how it happened," he said.

Full story...

Wednesday 28 April 2004

Blog-Tracking May Gain Ground Among U.S. Intelligence Officials

Super, well I guess we are the canaries - if you start to see blogs going down you know we are all screwed. Blogs are harmless, they may annoy you (like this one) but they are an expression of freedom and no allegedly freedom-loving individual should have a problem with it, we're not harming anyone or anything by expressing our opinions in fact quite the opposite is true because we stimulate the debate and most of us try and inform our readers. If we don't have the freedom to say what we think then we don't have any freedom at all.

People in black trench coats might soon be chasing blogs.

Blogs, short for Web logs, are personal online journals. Individuals post them on Web sites to report or comment on news especially, but also on their personal lives or most any subject.

Some blogs are whimsical and deal with "soft" subjects. Others, though, are cutting edge in delivering information and opinion.

As a result, some analysts say U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials might be starting to track blogs for important bits of information. This interest is a sign of how far Web media such as blogs have come in reshaping the data-collection habits of intelligence professionals and others, even with the knowledge that the accuracy of what's reported in some blogs is questionable.

Still, a panel of folks who work in the U.S. intelligence field - some of them spies or former spies - discussed this month at a conference in Washington the idea of tracking blogs.

"News and intelligence is about listening with a critical ear, and blogs are just another conversation to listen to and evaluate. They also are closer to (some situations) and may serve as early alerts," said Jock Gill, a former adviser on Internet media to President Clinton, in a later phone interview, after he spoke on the panel.

Some panel and conference participants, because of their profession, could not be identified. But another who could is Robert Steele, another blog booster. The former U.S. intelligence officer said "absolutely" that blogs are valid sources of intelligence and news, though he said authenticating the information in blogs "leaves a lot to be desired."

Steele is founder and CEO of consulting firm OSS.Net, which organized the conference. The OSS '04 conference focused on public sources of intelligence. (OSS stands for open source solutions. In this case, open source is an intelligence term, not a reference to Linux and open source software.)

China Wants To Block Blogs

The CIA and FBI haven't publicly commented about use of blogs in their work, but many D.C. observers believe both agencies monitor certain blogs.

At least one nation, China, is actively tracking blogs. It's also reportedly trying to block blogs. Several press reports earlier this year said the government shut two blogging services and banned access to all Web logs by Chinese citizens.

Many journalists write blogs and use other blogs to help find sources or verify facts and rumors. Blogs hail from just about any spot on the globe. They can provide first-hand insights into local events and thinking, even in parts of the world where there's little official information.

One example is the "Baghdad Blogger."

In March 2003, as U.S. forces stormed Iraq, one of the few sources on the Iraqi viewpoint was a blog written by a person who turned out to be 29-year-old Iraqi architect Salam Pax, though it's not certain that is his real name.

Some reporters followed his blog daily, which gave gritty insights into how the war was shaking the lives of Iraqis.

The U.S. military never publicly acknowledged Pax, but people at the conference say they believe U.S. military officers read the blog.

Some news organizations valued the blog. Britain's Guardian newspaper was so impressed that it hired Pax in May 2003 to write a biweekly column on life in Baghdad. He's still writing it.

Blogs last year also provided information during the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome. In China, where the SARS outbreak began, the government at first said little. But health officials and reporters were able to get a sense of what was happening through blogs, as well as from e-mail and cell phone text messages sent to people outside China. This might have spurred China's blog crackdown.

Gill says blogs are a good way to uncover news that regular media aren't covering or can't cover. "Blogs may be the best and only channel for such news stories," Gill said.

Full story...

Only Iraqi Uprising Can Deny Bush Re-election Now

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Barring a general uprising by the people of Iraq, George W. Bush seems poised to win re-election in November despite all the horror stories and hoopla to the contrary. Instead of pouring over the papers for all the stories about how the White House has botched the war in Iraq readers should be thinking about what should be the slogan of the current campaign: "It's the result, not the economy, stupid!" If they don't soon, they will be confronted by another four years of nation-building around the globe, and a new lease on life for their indentured servants in Britain, Blair and his servile supprters.

Instead of grabbing for all the red-herrings, deceptions, and wishful thinking that the White House and Downing Street have thrown out about the war against Saddam Hussein - all the stuff about WMD, building democracy, making a peaceful multi-ethnic Middle East, promoting human rights, finally getting the process right, etc., ad nauseam - people should see what they are really attempting, and what they possibly can achieve.

The necons in Washington and London are aiming to build a cordon of national republics in the fashion of the Turkish one around Israel at the expense of Sunni-dominated Syria, the mullahs in Iran, and the monarchs of the Gulf states - regimes which will cough up their oil at rock-bottom prices, let the IMF and the World Bank dictate their social and economic policies without a whimper, follow NATO's demands at the drop of the hat, and snuggle up to Tel Aviv any time the Mossad makes a murmur.

In order to achieve this gigantic project, Washington, London, and Tel Aviv had to adopt a most long-term strategy, one where they would first break down any pan-Arab interests in the region; then get rid of the troublemakers, starting with Saddam, one by one; coerce each country into adopting some kind of republic at the expense of any political interest in Islam, open up their economies to Western capital, and consumer goods; and finally become part of a still expanded NATO which would take on the rising Chinese and their Asian allies.

To achieve this agenda, Washington, London, and Tel Aviv were willing to fan any fear, engage in any deception, promote any false assurance, utter any lie, and enlist any devastating corrective. All their cultivation of false claims, lack of preparation bordering upon incompetence, promises to do better, efforts to seek more reasonable assistance, proceedings which might lead to their criminal undoing, etc., were nothing more than sops to still the uninvolved, inattentive, and unsophisticated.
They know that their own societies can be led like sheep to endorse whatever they are attempting when called upon at the appropriate time.

How many more books by people like Paul O'Neil, Richard Clarke, and Bob Woodward do the American people have to gobble up before they get the idea and the message - we have been set up to expect false solutions to our difficulties? How many more fumbling press conferences by the President do they have to endure before they get the idea that he is merely providing cover for Cheney and his ilk to do their damndest? How many red-herring threats of criminal prosecutions of these people do they have to hear of before they give up on the whole empty remedy? How much carrot-and-stick maneuvering by L. Paul Bremer III, Colin Powell, and John Negoponte do they have to witness before they get the idea?

In Iraq, this means seeing the the Coalition as an invader which is slowly hammering íts disparate people into a malleable whole which will ultimately so do its bidding that it can be left to do it on its own. This means dividing and ruling the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shias so that they will give up their aims of independence, national identity, and Islamic orientation. The crushing of Sunni nationalists in Falluja is essential if this objective is to be achieved, and the Americans are pounding the city in order to force its more moderate citizens to muzzle them. Moqtada Al- Sadr and his Islamic Mahdi are being corralled into Najaf where they will be rendered harmless, preferably by other mullahs disarming and decommissioning them. The Kurds will be kept on tender hooks about a national homeland, and oil of their own until it is too late.

Despite all the apparent bad news for the White House's re-election chances, George W. Bush seems increasingly likely to be returned by the electorate in November, showing that Americans are more influenced by myths, dreams, and patriotism rather than facts and reality when it comes to national well-being. Apparently, the worse the war on terror gets, the more dogged American orneriness, their outstanding quality, becomes. Under the circumstances, Senator Kerry's fears of former President Clinton torpedoing his chances of gaining the White House proved the far greater threat than any Mossad assassination squad.

Evidence of Kerry's slipping on every front in the polls is manifest, once viewers turn their casual
attention away from Iraq and Palestine to the home front. Admittedly, almost all the sources of information are biased in favor of Bush - and those which aren't mostly feel that Kerry is worse - but still the polls show a steadly drop in the Senator's support. It is only bound to get worse as election day approaches with the administration having all kinds of opportunities to manipulate its input and outcome - what could cause almost one-fifth of the possible electorate not included in the current calculations to vote for the incumbent at the last minute.

The most shocking thing about this steady erosion of Kerry support is how his Vietnam service has been used against against him - another clever example of how the White House carefully chooses its ground to attack any opponent. First, there was the false photograph of the Senator having been with Jame Fonda at an anti-war rally. Then there were claims that he threw all his Vietnam medals away. Then there were doubts that he really deserved three Purples Hearts, as if getting wounded or killed in any conflict is the highest award one can aspire to. Finally, other veterans said that he had bad-mouthed American forces in Vietnam, claiming that they had executed prisoners, raped women, and committed a variety of war crimes.

It was only with this claim that political correctness came home to haunt the Democratic candidate. Of course, everyone who knows anything about the war and its host of atrocities is aware of the validity of Kerry's claims. In fact, the other Senator Kerrey, the former one for Nebraska, got in a heap of trouble recently for his alleged participation in such activities, and Lt. Calley's famous massacre of villagers was by no means a one-off event. And what would one call carpet-bombing vast amounts of real estate, and making whole areas uninhaibtable by spraying Agent Orange? Still, the Massachusetts Kerry has been forced by demands of political correctness to amend his claims of atrocities into merely unsubstantiated hearsay in order to soothe the veterans with most foggy memories.

Kerry's backpedalling on the wars in Iraq, and in Palestine has been fatal blunders for the sake of political correctness, though it is hard to see how he could have avoided them, and still be a viable candidate. A principled person who has been opposed to these conflicts throughout would have about as much chance of being nominated by a major party, much less elected, as one of the Founding Fathers of the Republic. Those aspiring for the White House must adhere to the doctrine that the King can do no wrong, and our President is the closest America can come to royalty. This means that realistic candidates are coopted into the process, and can hardly be more than a Johnny-come-lately with amendments to whatever is well in progress.

The leads to all kinds of flip-flopping over policies, what Bush is now exploiting with relish at Kerry's expense. The most painful ones for the Senator, though, must be those over Ariel Sharon, and his wall to imprison the troublesome Palestinians - what has been worked out with former Clinton officials Sandy Berger, and Dennis Ross, and is being sought legitimization by Jewish vote-getter and former Vice Presidential Candidate Joseph Lieberman. In the process, the Israeli Prime Minister is snubbing Kerry with a vengeance for having only second thoughts about such vital interests regarding Israel.

Clinton's backing Kerry into this corner - what I have long feared - is just the tip of the iceberg he had created to make it almost impossible for anyone to unseat Bush. Clinton, while he was President, stoked up the fires for a war in Iraq by claiming endlessly that Saddam was building up a vast aresnal of weapons, especially biological ones, for settling scores with the West because of the Gulf War. Anyone who even glances through the pages of Tom Mangold's Plague Wars, and Judith Miller's Germs: The Ultimate Weapon - works before the current war which everyone is understandably avoiding - can be in no doubt after the matter.

To give their flavor, here are some of their choicer bits:

"Whenever President Clinton travels around Washington an anonymous black van tucks itlself itself discretely inside the tail of the extensive motorcade. It is President's personal anti-biological warfare attack amublance." (Mangold, p. 8)

"Iraq is fully capable of producing terrorist quantities of biological agents on demand." (p. 3)

"In a bone-dry statement early in 1999, Clarke said: 'We're not doing this just because people in the White House like to read thriller novels and watch movies that have exciting plots. We're doing it because we understand the nature of the poltential threat. It's a real potential threat. We are not exaggerating it.' " (p.. 12, emphasis Clarke's)

"One Sunday morning, Bill Cohen unveiled his simulated weapon of mass destruction - a five-pound bag of sugar. 'Anthrax,' he said, stunning the normally loquacious Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts into momentary silence. If Saddam Hussein spread this amount of anthrax over a city the size of, say, Washington, D.C., ' it would destroy at least half the population of that city.' " (Miller, p. 216)

"In December 1997, six years after the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon announced that it had decided to vaccinate its 2.4 million soldiersand reservists against anthrax." (Opening sentence to Miller's book, p. 13)

Little wonder that Clarke was little more than grist in Bush's mill when Clinton so testified secretly before the 9/11 Commission - what even persuaded the current President and Cheney to so testify jointly before it - leaving Kerry with hardly a pot to piss in. Clinton has rendered any further measures by the Mossad unnecessary.

Police State on the Cards

I hope Mr Morgan doesn't mind but I'm copying this whole article, I don't normally but this one is a must read, this is what's on the cards people. Make no mistake about it! All this terrorism and stuff they keep bleating on about, well it's all a ruse to make you welcome the emergence of a totalitarian state - when the time comes. Call me paranoid if you want but open your eyes and LOOK at what is going on... Oh yeah, I forgot, Pop Idol is far more important. Watching pituary retards belting out commercial cheese like an overstuffed cheese toastie is far more important that the type of country your fucking kids are gonna grow up in, isn't it? All this conditioning and manipulation, fuckit, the bastards put a TV show on CALLED fucking Big Brother, and it's the most popular damn show on TV. What the fuck?

by Paul Routledge in The Mirror

Obey! David Blunkett loves the police so much he wants them to run the country.

If the hard-line Home Secretary gets his way, PC Plod will be able to stop me and you and demand an identity card. If we fail to produce one, he could march us to the nearest police station to "check on the database, sir".

This is not the country I want to live in. Not the country that New Labour promised to build. More like Sharon's Jerusalem than the New Jerusalem.

Blunkett claims to have the support of the people in this Draconian act of authoritarianism. Six out of ten back the move in opinion polls.

They do so on the basis of a fraud. The Home Secretary claims that "biometric" ID cards will cut crime, keep out illegal immigrants and prevent terrorism.

They will do none of these things, but they WILL change the whole way we live. Britain will increasingly feel like apartheid South Africa.

The police already know who the criminals are on their patch. Illegal migrants will simply buy an ID card from the people smugglers who profit from this trade.

All the hijackers who caused the attacks on September 11 had the right form of American ID.

Do we want a virtual police state? Big Brother Blunkett clearly does.

Today he pleads the "war against terror" as justification. But you can bet once ID cards become compulsory, that they will stay that way.

Original story in The Mirror

Tuesday 27 April 2004

A Warning To Those Who Dare To Criticize Israel

If more reasonable people weren't so cow-towed by the intimidation of the quasi-fascists Israeli lobby then maybe we would get some more movement on the issue. A fascist bastard is a fascist bastard whether he wears jackboots or a skull-cap. I say that with all due respect to both Germans and Jews who are not represented by these extremist idiots. Besides, what's wrong with a bit of criticism? Are your views so egg-shell thin that they can't withstand a little debate, if so then that should tell you something it itself.

In The Land Of Free Speech Another Case Study: Mary Robinson

by Robert Fisk


click here to visit his website Behold Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, would-be graduation commencement speaker at Emory University in the United States. She has made a big mistake. She dared to criticise Israel. She suggested--horror of horrors--that "the root cause of the Arab- Israeli conflict is the occupation". Now whoah there a moment, Mary! "Occupation"? Isn't that a little bit anti-Israeli?

Are you really suggesting that the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Israel, its use of extrajudicial executions against Palestinian gunmen, the Israeli gunning down of schoolboy stone-throwers, the wholesale theft of Arab land to build homes for Jews, is in some way wrong?

Maybe I misheard you. Sure I did. Because your response to these scurrilous libels, to these slurs upon your right to free speech, to these slanderous attacks on your integrity, was a pussy-cat's whimper. You were "very hurt and dismayed". It is, you told The Irish Times, "distressing that allegations are being made that are completely unfounded".

You should have threatened your accusers with legal action. When I warn those who claim in their vicious postcards that my mother was Eichmann's daughter that they will receive a solicitor's letter--Peggy Fisk was in the RAF in the Second World War, but no matter--they fall silent at once.

But no, you are "hurt". You are "dismayed". And you allow Professor Kenneth Stein of Emory University to announce that he is "troubled by the apparent absence of due diligence on the part of decision makers who invited her [Mary Robinson] to speak". I love the "due diligence" bit. But seriously, how can you allow this twisted version of your integrity to go unpunished?

Dismayed. Ah, Mary, you poor diddums.

I tried to check the spelling of "diddums" in Webster's, America's inspiring, foremost dictionary. No luck. But then, what's the point when Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines "anti- Semitism" as "opposition to Zionism: sympathy with opponents of the state of Israel".

Come again? If you or I suggest--or, indeed, if poor wee Mary suggests--that the Palestinians are getting a raw deal under Israeli occupation, then we are "anti-Semitic". It is only fair, of course, to quote the pitiful response of the Webster's official publicist, Mr Arthur Bicknell, who was asked to account for this grotesque definition.

"Our job," he responded, "is to accurately reflect English as it is actually being used. We don't make judgement calls; we're not political." Even more hysterically funny and revolting, he says that the dictionary's editors tabulate "citational evidence" about anti-Semitism published in "carefully written prose-like books and magazines". Preposterous as it is, this Janus-like remark is worthy of the hollowest of laughs.

Even the Malaprops of American English are now on their knees to those who will censor critics of Israel's Middle East policy off the air.

Full story...

Your Middle East policy is doomed

Dear Prime Minister: We the undersigned, former British ambassadors, high commissioners, governors and senior international officials, including some who have long experience of the Middle East and others whose experience is elsewhere, have watched with deepening concern the policies which you have followed on the Arab-Israel problem and Iraq, in close co-operation with the United States. Following the press conference in Washington at which you and President Bush restated these policies, we feel the time has come to make our anxieties public, in the hope that they will be addressed in Parliament and will lead to a fundamental reassessment.

The decision by the US, the EU, Russia and the UN to launch a "road-map" for the settlement of the Israel/Palestine conflict raised hopes that the major powers would at last make a determined and collective effort to resolve a problem which, more than any other, has for decades poisoned relations between the West and the Islamic and Arab worlds. The legal and political principles on which such a settlement would be based were well-established: President Clinton had grappled with the problem during his presidency; the ingredients needed for a settlement were well-understood and informal agreements on several of them had already been achieved. But the hopes were ill-founded. Nothing effective has been done either to move the negotiations forward or to curb the violence. Britain and the other sponsors of the "road-map" merely waited on American leadership, but waited in vain.

Worse was to come. After all those wasted months, the international community has now been confronted with the announcement by Ariel Sharon and President Bush of new policies which are one-sided and illegal and which will cost yet more Israeli and Palestinian blood. Our dismay at this backward step is heightened by the fact that you yourself seem to have endorsed it, abandoning the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land and which have been the basis for such successes as those efforts have produced.

This abandonment of principle comes at a time when, rightly or wrongly, we are portrayed throughout the Arab and Muslim world as partners in an illegal and brutal occupation in Iraq.

Full story...

Former ambassadors unite to condemn Blair's foreign policy

Could sanity be breaking out on this little island of ours? I hope so.

Tony Blair was facing a severe crisis of confidence in his foreign policy yesterday after an unprecedented attack from dozens of the most senior figures in the British diplomatic service.

The letter from 52 former ambassadors and heads of mission who held the most senior postings in the Foreign Office, lambasted Mr Blair for abandoning his principles over the road-map to peace in the Middle East and criticised the United States-led coalition in Iraq for failing to plan for the post-Saddam era.

In a damning verdict on Mr Blair's special relationship with President George Bush, they called for a "fundamental reassessment" of British policy towards the White House and the Middle East, urging Mr Blair to exert real influence over American policy as "a matter of the highest urgency".

They added: "If that is unacceptable or unwelcome there is no case for supporting policies which are doomed to failure."

Signatories include former ambassadors to Baghdad and Tel Aviv, and senior figures who served in postings including Moscow, Brussels and the United Nations. Downing Street said that Mr Blair would reply in due course, but Labour critics seized on the diplomats' intervention as evidence that Britain was too close to the White House.

Oliver Miles, a former ambassador to Greece and Libya who helped co-ordinate the letter, said: "A number of us felt that our opinions on the two subjects, Iraq and the Arab-Israel problem, were pretty widely shared and we felt that we ought to make it public.

"Never has government policy been so controversial. It is an indication of our serious concern that what is probably the biggest such collective group has gone straight to government in this way.

"Our objective is not to damage Blair politically but to strengthen the hand of those who feel as we do."

Full story...

Monday 26 April 2004

Ryongchon - Nuclear Trigger for American Conscription?

by Joe Vialls

Viewed through the eyes of desperate Zionist neocons like Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Sharon, if North Korea could be successfully provoked into action by a small tactical nuclear strike deep inside its own territory, the most likely response would be 5,000 North Korean artillery shells per hour raining down on Seoul, the capital of South Korea. Within days or weeks, the United States of America would once again be obliged to protect South Korea and the rest of the western world from the Communist "Red Menace", this time artificially reborn as "Axis of Evil" member North Korea. Clearly this new 'patriotic defensive' action against Korea would require hundreds of thousands of American conscripts.

Although Iraq is where the conscripts are really needed, no sane American would accept the illegal invasion of Iraq as justification for conscription, because all have already worked out that this stupefying atrocity in the Middle East has nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, nothing to do with Saddam Hussein, and absolutely nothing to do with American national security. Trying to enforce conscription today in a visible attempt to obtain the extra 500,000 troops needed to steal Iraq's oil reserves for the Zionist madmen on Wall Street, would simply result in every campus across America exploding into justifiably violent protests.

Because the photographs and other hard evidence in this report completely rule out an "accident" in Ryongchon, we are left with the harsh reality that one of the most important strategic locations in the whole of North Korea was deliberately nuked with a relatively low-yield weapon, by a nation or nations currently unknown. This inevitably draws us to ask who has the opportunity, motive and method for the attack, or, put another way, to ask which nations on earth have the nuclear weapons, stealth delivery systems, and the political need to vaporize more than a thousand North Koreans civilians in a cowardly sneak attack reminiscent of Pearl Harbor.

Nowadays there are dozens of nations with declared or undeclared nuclear weapons, but only a handful with long range precision stealth delivery systems, the latter limited to America, Russia, China, France and Great Britain. Of these five possible candidates for the sneak nuclear attack, only America has openly labeled North Korea a member of the mythical "Axis of Evil", and, equally, warned openly of horrific but unspecified military reprisals if North Korea does not stop supplying missile delivery systems to Iran. Thus before we even take into account America's current perilous military predicament in Iraq, there is only one candidate out of the five left with the necessary motive for the attack.

Regardless of any future call to arms to block the "Commies" in Korea, rest assured this entire scenario is all about Iraq and its priceless oil reserves. The Zionist Cabal in New York knows perfectly well that unless it can somehow import up to half a million more sacrificial American soldiers into Iraq to 'secure' all of that priceless oil, the tottering economies of American and the Jewish State will finally collapse, in turn robbing them of any future prospect of global control, and leaving the cabal and its lackeys vulnerable to an unprecedented furious backlash by the American people.

Ominously, as I write this report on 25 April, the Republican Guard has just killed another six American servicemen in Iraq, this time using the relatively new technique of firing 57-mm spin-stabilized rockets from converted taxis and waterborne Zodiac speedboats. This Mach 2 rocket has a deadly flat line-of-sight range of about 5,000 yards, and before the invasion was fitted to every ground attack aircraft and helicopter used by the Iraqi armed forces. Before the Americans arrived the entire arsenal of 40,000 x 57-mm rockets was removed and hidden for a rainy day, and it seems that rainy day has now arrived.

During the dual attacks on Tikrit and Basra harbor yesterday, the Republican Guard used four of these weapons to kill six American soldiers and wound thirteen others, which means that on pre-invasion estimates they have only 39,996 of these rockets left. However, by using this weapon for the first time since the invasion started, the Republican Guard is sending a far more chilling message to America and its nervous conscripted 'allies' from Britain and Australia.

The message is disarmingly simple: It matters not if four-star General John Abizaid lines the highway from Kuwait to Baghdad shoulder-to-shoulder with soldiers ordered to stop the Republican Guard planting culvert bombs designed to blow up American convoys, because the counter-insurgents will simply use 57-mm spin-stabilized rockets fired from 5,000 yards away instead. Without potable water, food and fuel, and with desert temperatures already soaring over 100F, the American invasion army will be beaten primarily by a complete lack of vital supply convoys, leading in turn to broken morale and total psychological defeat.

When Marine three-star General James Conway 'anonymously' told the New York Times on 22 April that forces under his command could turn the Iraqi city of Fallujah into "a killing field in a couple of days", he was either drunk or smoking dope. Less than 48 hours earlier General Conway received an intelligence analysis from the DIA that detailed the perilous position of all American forces. Of the total marines deployed in Iraq on 19 April 2004, sixty-percent had been reduced to two hot meals a day, while the remaining forty-percent had been reduced to one hot meal per day. There was no water available for washing, and potable drinking water supplies had reached an all-time low. Forget fuel completely, because there was [and is] barely enough to top up the tanks of a few Humvees.

Presumably Conway has a high-ranking friend in the USAF who has offered to turn the city into "a killing field in a couple of days" by using several squadrons of B-52 strategic heavies to carpet-bomb the good citizens of Fallujah into a bloody pulp. If this real possibility brings back unpleasant memories of North Vietnam and Cambodia, it is only because Iraq is already well beyond the Vietnam stage in terms of outright brutality borne of sheer desperation.

Full story...

UK Gov't Mulls Jailing Terror Suspects' Associates

This Orwellian shit is getting out of hand, freedom is slavery! So we're trying to protect democracy by abrogating it? Sure, at the moment it's only "foriegn" "terror" suspects, next it will be UK terror suspects, the dissenters, then me, then you and finally your Nan after she kicks up a fuss in Sainsbury's about the price of baked beans. Blunkett is a quasi-fascist totalitarian and a danger to democracy in this country!

Obey! Asserting that the war on al Qaeda is going to last for years to come, the British government has quietly begun to look at plans to jail friends and associates of suspected terrorists

According to recently released government documents, officials from the British Home Office have started to study seriously French anti-terrorism laws as a basis for future legislation in the United Kingdom.

In particular, they are looking at the French crime of "association de malfaiteur" or associating with a wrongdoer -- an offense carrying a prison term for someone who is simply connected with a suspected terrorist.

Speaking before the House of Commons earlier this year, Home Secretary David Blunkett said such a law could prevent people from being drawn into terrorist support networks.

He suggested that people found to be "connected" with suspected terrorists - either in person or through organizations - could be warned, and then jailed if they persist in maintaining those links.

"Let us suppose that it were possible to seek to prevent someone from being engaged in a low-level connection or association with terror by preventing them from using a particular bank balance ... or a telephone or computer," Blunkett said.

"Let us suppose that an order were placed on that person to preclude them from using those facilities for a particular length of time. That would be a civil order, but if they breached it, it would be a criminal offence."

In recent days, media here have quoted sources in the British government as saying such a law would help cripple terrorist networks and keep people from "hanging around" with undesirables.

Such a law would cover not only meeting in person, but communicating via e-mail, phone or even fundraising.

Full story...

Globalism - Sun Tzu and The Art of War

Sun Tzu The Orient has developed in a very distinct and exotic way from Western Europe. Any traveler or student of the Far East recognizes the vast differences. The concept of holistic is a term that is commonly applied to a form of medicine, but within the varied cultures of China it has a critical meaning that emphasizes the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts. Mutuality in the family creates a reciprocity within the community. The values of ethics reflects a symbiosis that is judged by the benefits to the whole. That may sound appealing on the surface, but in practice the group becomes the ultimate criterion for a fluid moral behavior.

Contrast this approach with the emphasis upon the singular, the atomistic ethics, that rests upon social institutions and processes arising solely from the acts of individual people. This Greek notion is the basis for our entire Western Civilization. The Christian Gospels rest upon the message of personal redemption and individual responsibility. The rule of law, while only a sham in practice, is based on natural rights and standards of conduct that have their root in Mosaic scripture. The nature of property and the economic principles that underpin free enterprise, have created wealth and achievement, stemming from the inspiration, genius and risks of individuals.

East and West have always been a contrast in cosmology and sociology. Sun Tzu seems to be the bridge that binds the emergence of the new global financial system, with the discredit of Marxism. The West has been in turmoil ever since Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory spurred an interdisciplinary effort to develop a more dynamic worldview, as is evidenced by ever-increasing emphasis placed on nonequilibrium dynamics. The ethics of clashing systems is at the core of the struggle we are undergoing. The "monistic" approach to values, which Sun Tzu embodies, conceives the ethical enterprise "as aiming to produce, and to defend against all rivals, a single coherent and complete set of principles capable of governing all moral quandaries." This approach was popularized in conduct that ran amuck on Wall Street in the late 80’s and most of the 90’s.

In the Art of War we discover timeless methods of strategy, deception, treachery and deceit. The height of strategy is not to subdue the enemy in battle, but to subdue him without fighting at all. Sun Tzu, unlike many Western analysts, focuses on the period before the war begins as a principle realm for strategy. This pre-war period requires deft manipulation of friends and enemies during the mobilization of military forces, stockpiling of logistic requirements for the initial campaigns, and other preparations for war. Sun Tzu, therefore, pays particular attention to deceit and diplomacy. While the precepts are illustrated toward waging war among rulers and states, the actual lessons in the Art of War deals with applying the moralistic standards of the holistic interdependent whole to the battle for supremacy.

The Sun Tzu, and Oriental view for victory, is defined in control of your advocacy. The righteousness of conduct does not have an intrinsic standard. It is defined as circumstance warrants, within the context of the community that applies the methods. The duty of each member within that group is to the collective whole. Society is confined to a restricted definition. Those outside the group are latent enemies, with no inherent value or ordained privilege.

Strategy 33 states: Let the enemy's own spy sow discord in the enemy camp. (Use double agents.) Undermine your enemy's ability to fight by secretly causing discord between him and his friends, allies, advisors, family, commanders, soldiers, and population. While he is preoccupied settling internal disputes his ability to attack or defend, is compromised.

Apply this approach to the BALANCING ENDS, WAYS, AND MEANS IN THE INFORMATION AGE by Lieutenant Colonel William R. Fast United States Army.

In his conclusion: "At times, we must be willing to subordinate our national objectives to the greater objectives of the networked nations and multinational firms with whom we interact."

The forces of Globalism have long targeted national sovereignty as an expendable and outdated concept. Little doubt remains that America has been ruled by agents of the interdependence mindset. Isn’t that the main theme in the Trilateral Commission approach? Jimmy Carter and George Bush 41 are dedicated NWO proponents. Bill Clinton was the most transparent double agent, who implemented the sell out of America.

The merging of the one world economy took place under his watch. What emerges is the holistic codependence of every individual to the dictates of the elites that claim special preeminence. Isn’t this exactly the kind of deception and group conduct that rules the "World Community"?

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US keeps intelligence secret from British

So our government is making decisions based on.... what precisely? These bloody people are even bigger morons than I thought they were!

The Americans are preventing the British and other key allies in the war on terrorism from seeing intelligence that could save lives, a US conference on military intelligence has been told.

British and Australian officers working in allied command centres during the war in Iraq were not allowed access to the intelligence they needed to do their job, one Australian complained.

RAF and RAAF officers were asked to leave the room during briefings, though some of the information they were prevented from seeing had been provided by the British or Australian intelligence services.

"They gave us stuff and we labelled it secret and then they weren't allowed to see it," said Col Allen Roby, director of the US air force intelligence directorate, one of a number of speakers and delegates who complained about the issue.

The US military's failure to share intelligence fully with its major allies dominated the conference after it was raised by Wing Commander Alex Gibbs, a member of the air attache's office at the Australian embassy in Washington.

It was easy to spot the British and Australian officers working in the allied combined air operations centre in Saudi Arabia during the Iraq war because they had to have an American sitting alongside them accessing the computer, he said.

The British and Australian officers had to ask an American to search the databases and tell them what they were allowed to know, one USAF delegate confirmed. "You could look over his shoulder but you couldn't touch the keyboard."

Maj-Gen Tommy Crawford, commander of the US air force intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance centre, confirmed to the conference that the problem still existed, adding that it also affected other close US allies such as Canada.

Responding to a series of questions from American delegates clearly unable to comprehend the policy, Gen Crawford insisted that it was not a problem dictated by the Pentagon and that Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, wanted it changed.

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"Remember, Pearl Harbor..."

by Trowbridge H. Ford

In explaining anything, especially a country's entry into a war, the analyst must keep his eye on key events, especially what started it, and make sure that his account really explains what he claims. Only then can he venture with any confidence into the much more speculative areas like comparative history, a field lined with examples which ultimately proved most unfounded.

The kind of thing I am thinking about is when Robin Cook resigned as Leader of the House of Commons when Prime Minister Blair girded up his minions for the war in Iraq, the press clamoring that this might well be the 'Howe moment' for the Labor government. The allusion was to the resignation by the former Tory Leader of the House Sir Geoffrey Howe, also a former Foreign Secretary, in anticipation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher seeking re-election as Party Leader in November 1990. In this campaign, Viscount Younger, the former Defence Secretary who resigned in protest over Howe's sacking, was nowhere to be seen in organizing the Prime Minister's support - what he had done in the previous leadership challenge.

In explaining Howe's decision, he engaged in much veiled allusion to the failings of the government, especially its slap-dash decision-making by a trusted few at the expense of Cabinet government - what the press interpreted to mean bitter differences over No. 10's policies towards Europe. Actually, his complaints were about secret, covert actions which the Prime Minister undertook with little consultation with her ministerial colleagues.

Many papers, in making the comparison, even claimed that Howe was still Foreign Secretary - a confusion that Thatcher had assisted by conflating this Cabinet shakeup with the one a few months later when then Foreign Secretary John Major replaced Nigel Lawson as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

While the Tories were deeply divided over Europe, their division over dealing with the Provisional IRA was more divisive. Howe had been sacked as Foreign Secretary back in July 1989 when it was learned that Captain Simon Hayward, former Operations Officer of the 14 Intelligence Company's South Detachment in Northern Ireland, was to time his bitter account of his imprisonment in Sweden, Under Fire: My Own Story, with his release from its maximum security prison in Malmö in September 1989.

Downing Street had learned through MP John Gorst that Hayward was most bitter over the government's, especially the Foreign Office's, failure to prevent him from being imprisoned on a drug-smuggling charge that 'Steak Knife', the leading PIRA mole of the British Army's Force Research Unit, had arranged with the help of MI5 and MI6 while they were attempting to catch shipments of Libyan arms to the PIRA for a 'tet offensive' - attacks which ultimately forced the United States out of Vietnam. Thatcher compounded what she could do to stop dissemination of his message by doing a U-turn over Britiain's struggle with the Provisionals - having Northern Ireland's new Secretary of State, Peter Brooke, declare that London was willing to reach a settlement, once they stopped their terrorism.

When this most ambiguous course led to the assassination of Thatcher's one-time Parliamentary Private Secretary, Ian Gow, Howe decide to pull the plug on the Prime Minister, and his effort succeeded because no one was willing any longer to support her continuance in office. (For more on this, see my article about Thatcher's downfall.)

To compare this moment with Cook's gesture was the height of folly. While the former Tory Foreign Secretary finished off Thatcher, Cook merely gave up being a political irrelevancy for becoming a celebrity while Blair's government marched boldly off to war, and none of his followers have been able to rein him in in the slightest since. If anything, Cook's "moment" helped keep the Labor Prime Minister on track for war, all the Labor Party sceptics thinking that he had done their work for them.

A similar but more serious confusion of what happened occurred when Dr. Stephen J. Sniegoski used Thomas E. Mahl's Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44, to claim that London secretly maneuvered Washington into an unwanted war with Hitler's Germany - what Israel was now done with the United States in its war on terrorism. Actually, all Sniegoski had done is to create a most false analogy, based upon a complete misreading of why Washington went to war back in 1941.

Sniegorski claimed that British intelligence services, through their covert, illegal operations in America right after the opening of WWII, forced America unnecessarily into the war with the Axis powers - what, as Tory historians like John Charmley have been contending, should have been settled by London with a negotiated settlement with Berlin. According to Sniegorski, London's overturning the democratic will of Americans was organized by William S. Stepenson's covert group, British Security Coordination (BSC), which promoted all kinds of disinformation about German intentions in the Western Hemisphere to inflame public opinion for war while carrying out all kinds of black bag operations against sympathizers like Charles Lindbergh and Texas oilman William Rhodes Davis, and German agents.

By doing so, London was doing all it could to assist the aims of America's White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment, and of FDR's White House. Leading writers like Walter Lippmann provided a chorus of articles in favor of intervention. They even promoted the presidential candidacy of Wendell Wilkie for the Republican Party in order to assist intervention in Europe's war. "Wilkie himself consciously participated in this deception," Sniegoski claimed, "maintaining close ties with British agents and the White House."

The President, for participating in such conduct, deserved not only to be removed from office, but sent to prison. Nixon's Watergate caper was tame by comparison, Sniegoski concluded. For Mahl then to have seen the intervention, arranged by British covert operations, as saving the world just added to Sniegoski's sense of outrage.

Actually, without going into the litany of outrages coming out of Nixon's White House during its last days, Mahl's analysis of America's entry into the war, and Sniegoski's moral strictures of it leave much to be desired. Mahl's work does not detail anything that any other nation under similar dangers Britain was facing would not have engaged in. Mahl, in doing so, leaves out what MI6, MI5, and BSC really did to force Washington's hand on the matter - what gives Sniegoski the liberty to make light of the deadly threats to everyone.

Mahl just developed loose ends that Christopher Andrew had indicated in For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush about Stephenson and BSC before he discussed the failures of US Amry and Navy intelligence to prevent the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - one quite similar to what happened on 9/11. Thanks to their breaking the Japanese diplomatic code, they increasingly knew that Japan was going to attack Anglo-American interests around the beginning of December 1941. It was just a question of where, and the President didn't seem too concerned, just so long as it resulted in a manageable war as Germany was now committed to joining any war in the Pacific.

The key operation that Britain mounted to achieve this objective was the German double-agent one it was running with Yugoslav Dusan 'Dusko' Popov - noticeably absent in all the previously discussed research. (For good accounts, see Anthony Summers, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, p. 122ff., and Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, pp. 269-73.)

By this time, London had learned that FBI Director Hoover was most opposed to sharing any intelligence with Stephenson's BSC or William Donovan's fledgling Coordinator of Intelligence (COI) in Washington. And MI6 learned from Popov that the Japanese were committed to a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor - like what the British had carried out with deadly results on the Italian fleet at Taranto. Popov was provided by Berlin with a questionaire about important details at Hawaii to answer, and microdots for their transmission to Tokyo so that attacks could go ahead.

No sooner had Popov arrived in New York than he was met by FBI agents, of all people, to give details to about what the Japanese were up to. Of course, the Bureau, under the strict leadership of the Director, treated the threat as essentially a law-enforcement one - ultimately even trying to prosecute the German agent under the Mann Act for transporting a woman across state borders for immoral purposes. In the process, the Director forgot all about the questionaire. Ultimately, he did tell FDR about discovering the microdots, acting as if it were another Bureau counterintelligence coup.

Why Popov didn't go to Donvovan's COI immediately no one has even tried to explain. It seems that it would have foiled what the Japanese were planning, and if Donovan had not satisfied Popov, he should have been instructed to seek out Stephenson to make sure that the President got the message. Instead Britain was apparently planning to seeing that FDR got his nice little war, and London would have a great alibi when it happened. It tried to tell Washington what was in the works, but the imperious Hoover foiled their well-intentioned effort.

In sum, this was a pro-active, counterintelligence effort which deserves the highest marks, no matter what one's political aims. London used a German agent to get Washington on board for what it so desperately needed. It is another example of the difficulties of describing and evaluating spies and spying - what most historians are not unprepared to attempt, much less succeed in. To compare this, as Sniegoski has done, with what Israel has been achieving now with Washington is turning morality on its head. There is a vast difference between preventing the Triple Alliance from taking over the world, and allowing Tel Aviv to take over the Middle East.

If readers still need more proof, I suggest they get out the score of the song indicated by the title of this article, and sing its marital music.

Home From Iraq, and Without a Home

This is how much governments care about the patriotic men and women who answer the call to arms. It's fucking sick! You give up your life, do things that give you nightmares, live through hell and then get shafted at the end of it and end up homeless. Nice. This is why wars happen.

Uncle Sam wants YOU to die for big business His is how Nicole Goodwin travels these days: with her 1-year-old daughter pressed to her chest in a Snugli, a heavy backpack strapped across her shoulders, and a baby stroller crammed with as many bags of clothes and diapers as it can hold. When you are a homeless young mother, these are the things you carry.

And tucked away somewhere are the documents attesting to Ms. Goodwin's recent honorable discharge from the United States Army, as well as Baghdad memories that are still fresh.

Two months ago, she returned to Bronx circumstances that were no less difficult than when she had left them three years earlier; no yellow ribbons greeted her. Now, every day, she soldiers on to find a residence where the rent is not covered by in-kind payments of late-night bus rides to shelters and early-morning rousting. All the while, she keeps in mind the acronym she learned in the Army: Leadership. L is for loyalty; D for duty; R for respect; S for selfless service; H for honor; P for personal courage. "And I is my favorite," she says. "It's integrity."

On Thursday morning, Ms. Goodwin wheeled her heavy-duty stroller into the Lower Manhattan office of the Coalition for the Homeless, a nonprofit organization that is trying to help her. For the last couple of nights it has put her and her nuzzling daughter, Shylah, up in a hotel.

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We are facing death in Iraq for no reason

A serving US soldier calls for the end of an occupation based on lies

For the past six months, I have been participating in what I believe to be the great modern lie: Operation Iraqi Freedom.

After the horrific events of September 11 2001, and throughout the battle in Afghanistan, the groundwork was being laid for the invasion of Iraq. "Shock and awe" were the words used to describe the display of power that the world was going to view upon the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was to be an up-close, dramatic display of military strength and advanced technology from within the arsenals of the American and British military.

But as a soldier preparing to take part in the invasion of Iraq, the words "shock and awe" rang deep within my psyche. Even as we prepared to depart, it seemed that these two great superpowers were about to break the very rules that they demanded others obey. Without the consent of the United Nations, and ignoring the pleas of their own citizens, the US and Britain invaded Iraq. "Shock and awe"? Yes, the words correctly described the emotional impact I felt as we embarked on an act not of justice, but of hypocrisy.

From the moment the first shot was fired in this so-called war of liberation and freedom, hypocrisy reigned. After the broadcasting of recorded images of captured and dead US soldiers on Arab television, American and British leaders vowed revenge while verbally assaulting the networks for displaying such vivid images. Yet within hours of the deaths of Saddam Hussein's sons, the US government released horrific photographs of the two dead brothers for the entire world to view. Again, a "do as we say and not as we do" scenario.

As soldiers serving in Iraq, we have been told that our purpose is to help the people of Iraq by providing them with the necessary assistance militarily, as well as in humanitarian efforts. Then tell me where the humanity is in the recent account in Stars and Stripes (the newspaper of the US military) of two young children brought to a US military camp by their mother in search of medical care.

The two children had, unknowingly, been playing with explosive ordnance they had found, and as a result they were severely burned. The account tells how, after an hour-long wait, they - two children - were denied care by two US military doctors. A soldier described the incident as one of many "atrocities" on the part of the US military he had witnessed.

Thankfully, I have not personally been a witness to atrocities - unless, of course, you consider, as I do, that this war in Iraq is the ultimate atrocity.

So what is our purpose here? Was this invasion because of weapons of mass destruction, as we have so often heard? If so, where are they? Did we invade to dispose of a leader and his regime because they were closely associated with Osama bin Laden? If so, where is the proof?

Or is it that our incursion is about our own economic advantage? Iraq's oil can be refined at the lowest cost of any in the world. This looks like a modern-day crusade not to free an oppressed people or to rid the world of a demonic dictator relentless in his pursuit of conquest and domination, but a crusade to control another nation's natural resource. Oil - at least to me - seems to be the reason for our presence.

There is only one truth, and it is that Americans are dying. There are an estimated 10 to 14 attacks every day on our servicemen and women in Iraq. As the body count continues to grow, it would appear that there is no immediate end in sight.

I once believed that I was serving for a cause - "to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States". Now I no longer believe that; I have lost my conviction, as well as my determination. I can no longer justify my service on the basis of what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies.

With age comes wisdom, and at 36 years old I am no longer so blindly led as to believe without question. From my arrival last November at Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, talk of deployment was heard, and as that talk turned to actual preparation, my heart sank and my doubts grew. My doubts have never faded; instead, it has been my resolve and my commitment that have.

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Friday 23 April 2004

Bearing the Cross of Free Speech

Now it is fully understandable that the people of the United States, in this time of war and terror, would seek some sort of grip onto the reality that seems to have left us during the night of September 10th, 2001.

Amid the seas of American flags, banners praising the freedoms of our nation, and a bubbling new nationalism, one almost feels as if the tide of patriotism brought to the forefront of our nation after the immense tragedies on September 11th, 2001, is an endless positive front against those shady specters of terror that lurk just beyond the line of sight of the castle cannons.

However, there are scattered groups out there that feel as if this rush of patriotism is breeding something far darker than outside terrorism, if indeed that is a possibility. Those scattered groups feel that the rush to support President George W. Bush in his march to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq signals a shift in the policy of America’s citizenry – the will to question the motives and agendas of those who lead us. To believe that the government of these United States of America has not used the uneasy acquiescence of the people to its will for personal gain shows both a foolish naïveté and an ignorance of history.

It has become un-American to speak out against those leaders for which some have an unaffected scorn. Showing anything but full support for our president on any issue relating to the security of this country is met with cat-calls of “terrorist,” and “treason.” Online stores now stock bumper stickers that read “Does My Flag Offend You? Get Out!” while Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh, among the top brash leaders of a movement determined to stomp out dissent speech, rail on those Americans who do not believe that President Bush is always correct in his motives.

Free speech, indeed, free dissent, is being stepped on by the most conservative and secretive administration since Richard Nixon took office. Protesters, a common sight – or maybe not – at Bush Administration speaking venues, are herded into “Free Speech Zones,” often enclosed areas up to a mile away from where the official they are protesting is speaking.

Protesters who carry signs often have them confiscated as “The stick with which the sign is attached could be used as a projectile weapon,” as one Miami riot officer said upon dispersing a crowd of protesters outside a building where Florida Governor Jeb Bush, President Bush’s brother, was speaking.

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Why Jared Israel Is Attacking Scott Ritter And Deceiving The 9-11 Truth Movement

"By way of deception, thou shalt do war." - Motto of the Mossad

Jared Israel says that Scott Ritter changed his description of why he left UNSCOM, and is therefore a liar, and that he abruptly changed from a hawk to a dove on Iraq, and is therefore an agent of military intelligence. The first claim has to be evaluated very carefully from Ritter's actual statements. The conclusion of the second claim makes no sense at all. Also, Jared seems to label Ritter as a "hawk" for favoring "confrontations" with Iraq, but what Ritter was talking about were confrontational (i.e., unannounced and vigorous) *inspections*. That's not being a "hawk", which is a person who advocates war.

I present evidence here that Jared Israel has many lies on his own website, which have the purpose of covering up the role of the state of Israel in perpetrating the war on Iraq by proxy via the Bush administration neocons (as well as covering up and justifying Israel's mass robbery, torture, and murder of the Palestinians). In fact, most of his home page, and much of his entire website, is now devoted to lying propaganda on behalf of the state of Israel, rather than information about 9-11 and Yugoslavia. To put it simply, Jared Israel is a total zionist.

And Scott Ritter has voiced many criticisms of the state of Israel, thus providing a backer of Israel, such as Jared, with many motives for attacking him:

1. Ritter tried to stop the U.S. from attacking Iraq (while the state of Israel wanted the attack to happen), by exposing the "evidence" of Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) as false.

2. He criticized Israel for its role in *providing* false evidence of WMD in Iraq.

3. He criticized the neocons for their close ties to Israel, putting the good of that nation ahead of the interests of the U.S.

4. He criticized the neocons for sending U.S. soldiers to die to protect Israel, saying this is "a travesty".

5. He criticized the idea of a "Greater Israel" — the zionist goal of annexing large sections of the nations around it.

6. He criticized the Israeli government for instructing its citizens to open the seals on their gas masks when the attack on Iraq began, even though it knew that Iraq had no WMD. This act of propaganda cost Israel billions, because the masks or the absorbent substances in them will now have to be replaced.

It therefore appears very likely that Jared Israel's extreme hostility toward Scott Ritter, and his attempt to pressure the New York 9-11 truth movement into dropping Ritter from its upcoming public presentation, is an attempt to discredit Ritter and to fraudulently invalidate his criticisms of the state of Israel. And this is why Jared Israel is willing to *sabotage* the breakthrough of 9-11 information into the antiwar movement as brought in by Scott Ritter, which is the all-important step for spreading the information widely and thus stopping the bogus "War on Terror" — actually an eternal war of world conquest with its Nazi police state, mass murder attacks on many nations and possible nuclear war.

Furthermore, there have been recent reports that the U.S. has been secretly moving old "weapons of mass destruction" (chemical or biological) into Iraq, with the intention of "discovering" them, to serve as a pretext for extending the U.S. war of mass murder and wreckage of Iraq's infrastructure. This would continue to be largely on behalf of the state of Israel, which wants Iraq destroyed to the point where it is no longer a modern technological nation. And who would be the public figure with the greatest experience and authority to debunk this "discovery" and prove that the weapons had been planted, thus thwarting the intentions of the state of Israel? None other than Scott Ritter!

An important part of solving any crime is knowing who had the motive — who benefits — cui bono, because they are the natural suspects. Israel has used 9-11 as an excuse to greatly intensify its attacks on the Palestinians (whom it has long called "terrorists"), and as the means to attack Iraq (by proxy, using the zionist neocons).

Yet, contrary to a great deal of evidence, Jared Israel denies that the Israeli government wants to get rid of the Palestinians, denies that Israel wants Iraq destroyed, and denies that the neocons are backers of Israel (zionists). Thus, despite his reputation as one of the first 9-11 researchers, Jared Israel is now trying to deceive the 9-11 truth movement, and the world, about these very important aspects of the motivation for 9-11. And the fact that these *were* motivations for 9-11 is proven conclusively by one single piece of evidence — the "dancing Israelis", the Mossad agents that were seen filming the attack and collapse of the WTC towers and dancing with glee. This proves that the state of Israel had planned to benefit from 9-11 *before* it happened.

For Jared Israel, a 9-11 researcher, to lie about some of the motives for 9-11, and thus try to divert attention away from some of the likely perpetrators of the crime, is an extremely harmful action — a betrayal that is far worse than anything he has accused Scott Ritter of doing. It means that Jared Israel cannot be trusted to speak truthfully about any aspect of 9-11 or current events that even remotely involves the state of Israel.

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Fake Al-Qaeda cell busted in Gaza

I told you, it's all a fucking lie! There are no terrorists, there are only corrupt quasi-fascist wannabe-totalitarian GOVERNMENTS who INVENT "terrorists" and "terrorism" to use the fear they generate as a mechanism for social control. It's pure Hegel, right out of the box! But most people don't even realise it, they're too busy looking in the wrong place for people who don't really exist. It's not the "turr" we should be worried about, it's the people continually harping on about how much danger we're all in all the time. It's all about fear and control and finding the excuse for a war, this has nothing to do with "terrorism".

Palestinian security forces have arrested a group of Palestinians for collaborating with Israel and posing as operatives of Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terrorist network, a senior official said yesterday.

The Palestinian Authority said Israel's Mossad spy agency has set up a fake Al-Qaeda cell in Gaza so that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could justify Israeli attacks in Palestinian areas.

The arrests come two days after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon charged Al-Qaeda militants were operating in Gaza and in Lebanon.

'The Palestinian Authority arrested a group of collaborators who confessed they were working for Israel, posing as Al-Qaeda operatives in the Palestinian territories,' said the official, on condition of anonymity. He said the alleged collaborators sought to 'discredit the Palestinian people, justify every Israeli crime and provide reasons to carry out a new (military) aggression in the Gaza Strip.'

'It is a big, big, big lie to cover (Sharon's) attacks and his crimes against our people everywhere,' Palestinian President Yasser Arafat told reporters at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Arafat termed Israeli claim of Al-Qaeda in Gaza presence ridiculous.

Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo pointed to an Israeli plot. 'There are certain elements who were instructed by the Mossad to form a cell under the name of Al-Qaeda in the Gaza Strip in order to justify the assault and the military campaigns of the Israeli occupation army against Gaza,' Abed Rabbo said.

Earlier, International Cooperation Minister Nabil Shaath announced he would hold a press conference here at 2 p.m. (1200 GMT) on the alleged presence of Al-Qaeda operatives in the Gaza Strip.

Sharon's claim about the presence of Al-Qaeda in Gaza was considered a surprise because Gaza Strip is virtually sealed off by Israeli troops.

The Israeli leader also charged other members of the terror group were cooperating with Lebanon's Hezbollah.

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When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History

The problem is that there are too few people still alive who remember the full horror of war. To us it's just this Hollwoodised, sanitised, big-screen spectacular where we have no contact with the death or destruction that is wrought in our name. Have we fallen so far?

The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the United States, and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago - February 27, 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for peace that mobilized citizens all across the world.

It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most recent research implies they did not.)

But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.

Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.

To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Legislators would later say they hadn't had time to read the bill before voting on it.

Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader with such high popularity ratings. Citizens who protested the leader in public - and there were many - quickly found themselves confronting the newly empowered police's batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader's public speeches. (In the meantime, he was taking almost daily lessons in public speaking, learning to control his tonality, gestures, and facial expressions. He became a very competent orator.)

Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. He wanted to stir a "racial pride" among his countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie "Triumph Of The Will." As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it's of little concern to us.

Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn't act first and foremost in the best interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of The United Kingdom to create a worldwide military ruling elite.

His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a "New Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" - God Is With Us - and most of them fervently believed it was true.

Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's leader determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably terrorist and communist sympathizers, and various troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals." He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader.

He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office for the homeland, and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.

Full story...

Thursday 22 April 2004

Give that woman a medal

Maybe if the greedy capitalist scum-fucks paid their employee a bit more and themselves a bit less then they wouldn't feel the urge to steal.

The PA who liberated millions from her super-rich bosses was simply doing her bit for the economy

Joyti De-Laurey will shortly be sentenced for stealing several million pounds from some City squillionaires. But if there was any justice in this world, Joyti would not only be a free woman, she'd be given a medal for services to the community.

True, she did filch over £4m from the bank accounts of three financial whiz-persons. Stealing things is wrong, as a rule, although if De-Laurey had confined herself to a few Post-it Notes, then she wouldn't have been splashed all over the newspapers. But here's the thing: De-Laurey has single-handedly put forward the best case for higher income taxes since Pitt the Younger and, at the same time, done a big favour to the shareholders and investors in Goldman Sachs and other mega-banks.

The most mind-blowing aspect of the whole affair is that the personal assistant managed to remove £4m from the accounts of three City bankers - and they didn't even notice. Is that crazy? Yes, but it's a sign of the twisted world they live in.

Michael Lewis's book on the lifestyles of rich and famous bankers, Liar's Poker, opens with an arresting scene: John Gutfreund, the head of trading at Salomon Brothers - at that time the ne plus ultra bank of Wall Street - challenging his chief bond trader John Meriwether to a childish game. Gutfreund wanted to play one round of liar's poker against Meriwether, just one hand, for $1m. And that was in 1986, when $1m was worth something.

Sadly, the game was never played - Gutfreund backed down when Meriwether raised the stakes to $10m - but it certainly wasn't lack of money that stopped them. Scott Mead of Goldman Sachs, one of the three people from whom De-Laurey liberated the £4m, had reaped around £50m when Goldman Sachs floated in 1999. He reaped that windfall because he was a partner of the investment bank when it went public - in other words, he was in the right place at the right time. And so too, in a way, was De-Laurey.

Fools and their money are soon parted, and so it was that Mead, Jennifer Moses and Ron Beller allowed a proportion of their wealth to be redistributed to their PA, who earned - in her best year - £38,000, a fraction of the salaries and bonuses they were paid.

This is where De-Laurey was doing them a favour. The trio were far too busy with their 6am meetings and long-distance business trips to enjoy or even know how much money they had. It was just lying dormant in their accounts, doing nothing. Instead, De-Laurey took out their money for a brisk trot down to the shops - like exercising a dog, really.

Frankly, it was much better for the economy that the £4m was in circulation, providing employment and creating profits, being recycled into other hands. True, De-Laurey did spend the money on Cartier jewellery, but don't kid yourself the aggrieved trio were going to use it to help the homeless. For all the talk of De-Laurey wanting to "fund a lavish lifestyle", what do you think the trio were using it for?

De-Laurey was only doing to the bankers what they have been doing to investors and governments for years - fleecing them. Goldman Sachs once made more annual profit ($2.6bn) than the national income of Tanzania ($2.2bn). It was Goldman Sachs that allowed Robert Maxwell to illicitly shuffle pension funds around. The difference is that one gets sent to Holloway prison, and the other gets the fast car, the plush house and the big power-boat.

As crimes go, this was a victimless one. Goldman Sachs's official reaction to the verdict on Tuesday was that this was "an extremely unpleasant incident". Unpleasant? So is halitosis, but people don't get sent to jail for it. Although maybe they should.

Full story...

The Armagedon Plan: Nightline Sells Martial Law

One day you're gonna wake up in the morning and realise that codshit.com was telling you the truth but by then, of course, it will all be too late..

Uncle Sam wants YOU to die for big business Will the US be under martial law by June, 2004? That is the impression some are expressing after witnessing a recent episode of Nightline (4/7/2004), with Ted Koppel. On this particular program Koppel is host to Richard Clarke, former Reagan officials Edwin Meese III and Kenneth M. Duberstein; former Clinton official Sally Katzen, author James Mann, and former Bush official Richard Clarke. The subject matter is named The Armageddon Plan.

Because many US citizens hold favorable views of Richard Clarke he was playing a key role. His affability enables him to convey the dark plans of the Bush Regime to critical observers without alarming the unconcious masses. On this program Clarke was on to inform elite audiences that they better get used to the idea the Bush Regime will sponsor a cataclysmic event in order to plunge the US under martial law.

Richard Clarke is already a legend in the world of propaganda. So far the Bush Regime has parlayed his "defection" from them with great success. As Karl Rove probably surmised, The Left Gatekeepers (e.g., Democracy Now! and Counterpunch, etc.) have been only very eager to treat Clarke's mild disagreements with the Bush Regime as their outer limit of permissible dialogue. With the liberal US media regarding Clarke's thesis that the Bush Regime was merely negligent about 9-11 as if it were the only idea possible the White House sailed through the 9-11 Commission/Coverup proceedings.

Now that the 9-11 Commission/Coverup has been safely wrapped for the Bush Regime the mainstream media is now giving some focus to James Mann's curiously-timed book (Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, Viking Press, 2004)). Vulcans concerns the efforts of present and past White House officials to establish a set of procedures for the highest-levels of government to follow should a catastrophic attack occur on US soil.

(Note that Nightline has dropped the moniker Rise of the Vulcans for the more Regime-friendly The Armageddon Plan. The latter conveys a greater sense of a Regime reacting to a stimulus, not being the source of it.)

The segment began with congenial chatter between the past and present government officials. As if he is hosting a dinner party Koppel smoothly has his guests reminisce fondly about past drills performed by high-level government officials to test their emergency preparedness. Koppel then imagines an attack that decimates the US Congress. They break for a timely commercial. After the break Koppel immediately launches into the key part of their script: "... aren't [we] left for at least the foreseeable future with some sort of martial law anyway?"

Duberstein agrees with Koppel, adding "You have to suspend rights."

Full story...

The War on Terror Really Sucks Now

by Trowbridge H. Ford

The first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks found the world in much different shape than the leaders in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv had planned, and anticipated. Rather than a slow build-up for regime change in Afghanistan at the expense of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda, and his hosts, the Taliban, America and Britain had been forced by Israel - thanks to its apparent assassination of the Northern Alliance's Ahmed Shah Masood, its failure to inform the Americans what the hijackers had planned, and the anthrax letters it sent to important Democrats in the Senate to panic the population - to accelerate rapidly the process, and radically expand its scope.

The attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon - which the Bush administration totally miscalculated by thinking that they were simple hijackings which could be escorted to Los Angeles, and then put down at Afghanistan's expense - stampeded Washington into an all-out-war against its Muslim enemies, though its character and timetable had to be hidden for domestic, international, and legal reasons. To get the country behind the mission, Washington acted as if they attacks represented another Pearl Harbor, arresting Muslims like FDR did Japanese back in 1941. To get Prime Minister Blair behind the war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the United States conducted a swfit air assault against the Taliban, opening up the country for reoccupation by the Northern Alliance and other warlords, and making Al-Qaeda take to the mountains and parts unknown - Western intelligence increasingly claiming Iraq.

Then London put together its Iraqi Weapons Dossier, contending that Saddam's regime had put in place rapidly developing nuclear, biological, chemical and missile weapons programs since the UN weapons inspectors had been forced out of Iraq in 1998, and Iraq was now deeply involved in hiding what it was doing. Within 45 minutes, it claimed, Saddam could attack Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, and, of course, Israel, though it was unnamed for obvious reasons, with biological and chemical weapons. Iraq was allegedly seeking nuclear technology which could result in it having atomic weapons within two years. Several mobile biological and chemical laboratories were giving it almost the same capability with these WMD.

At this point, the war on terror spun again dangerously out of control, thanks to these developments:

(1) Washington still had an opportunity to stop making matters worse, but it, especially the Congress, chose not to do so. When the 9/11 attacks occurred, President Bush acted as if the United States was confronted with WWIII, recalling the attacks which started WWII in most self-serving terms. The Whie House acted as if there was no precedent for seriously investigating what had happened at this juncture, though President Roosevelt did appoint an inquiry to investigate why the attacks at Pearl Harbor were allowed to occurr - resulting in the scapegoating admittedly of Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short. But when the war in the Pacific was still progressing, the US Navy conducted an inquiry of its own which resulted in a far differnt result - Admiral Bull Halsey volunteering at the hearings that Admiral Kimmel had been badly treated by FDR's men in explaining the attacks

In this context, Bush should have immedialey appointed a proper commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks since the crisis was far less serious than what had happened back in 1941, and when he did not, the Congress should have immediately done so. It only got up the gumption for one of its own after a year, and a year is a very long time under such circumstances - a time for all kinds of more immediate and self-serving considerations to be paramount. The joint inquiry conducted by the Intelligence Committees of both Houses of Congress, while identifying most of the dots which America's intelligence community either misread or overlooked in the leadup to the attacks, explained them almost completely at the expense of Saudi Arabia - what the White House helped validate by excising those parts from its report when it allowed it to become public.

The source, of course, of the problem was the 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, and its officialdom, like America's, had dealt with them in all kinds of ways. This did not mean that Riyadh, or Washington, for that matter, was involved in the plots, but the hard-pressed congressmen chose to do so. Things like any official assistance to the hijackers themselves, or private help to persons who came in contact with them, or slightly knew them were seen as complicity in the plots. (Just think of the consequence of following this course with ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of JFK.) In this case, the Saudis became the fallguys for everyone else's foul ups.

(2) Having politicised the attacks in a way which drew bipartisan support, President Bush allowed the appointment of a commission to examine the facts surrounding them. Its content was determined by the leaderships of the Repubican and Democratic parties, and they picked persons who collectively would reinforce a similar conclusion - partisans who would attack the other's parties efforts to prevent terrorism, former officials whose records would oblige them to be most protective of their former bosses, and compromisers who had already been effective in cover ups.

The commissioners who come to mind in the first regard are former Illinois Governor James Thompson and Senator Max Clelland of Georgia. John Lehman when he was Secretary of the Navy helped bring on the Iran-Contra Scandal, resulting in his being forced to resign, and Jamie Gorelick spent much of her time at the Department of Justice, protecting her boss, President Clinton, from being removed from office. Former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean and Congressman Lee Hamilton made their careers by working with the leadership of the other party. For good measure, historian Philip Zelikow, who had co-authored books with NSA Condoleezza Rice, and was serving on panels appointed by Bush, was made the Commission's Staff Director, guaranteeing that it would essentially cover up its causes.

Zelikow is on record that the attacks could not be prevented because of structural problems with American intelligence gathering - the United States does not have an agency like Britain's Security Service which can act both at home, and abroad. Once former Bush insiders spread convenient distractions that the White House had been too preoccupied with Iraq, Zelikow even testified before the Commission that the attacks could not have been prevented. With all the groundwork having been laid, Rice has now testified to the same effect. The Bush administration, like all effective autocratic regimes, knows how to get its way no matter what it does to the nation.

(3) When crunch time came at the United Nations - when the Coalition was still thinking about the need of a second resolution to justify an attack upon Iraq - Secretary of State Colin Powell could have greatly simplified matters by simply ruling it out. While Blair was still telling everyone that Britain would not go to war without a second resolution - what he still didn't stick to when the resolution seemed doomed to failure - the French indicated that they would not make a fuss if Washington and London simply went ahead with their war.

Instead of going ahead, Powell made the most outrageous statement to the Security Council on February 5, 2003 - a wish list about Iraq's WMD which the most sceptical inspectors, crazy members of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and supporters of the Mossad's new Director General, Meir Dagan, could hardly add to. His thick intelligence file was bostered by NSA tapes of alleged conversations between Iraqi officials in the field and Baghdad, showing that they were moving prohibited vehicles and weapons to fool the inspectors. Powell was most pointed about Saddam's massive, mobile anthrax capability, reminding the Council of what Al-Qaeda might have done with just a teaspoon of the dried spores after the 9/11 attacks. For good measure, the Secretary of State alluded to what Iraq's biolgoical weapons chief Rihad Taha, known by the sobriquet Dr. Germ, had done with massive experiments upon unwilling prisoners, and what Osama's expert in the field, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, might well have done in America while seeking medical treatment in Baghdad.

While the claims promised finding Saddam's WMD the top priority if there was a war, Washington and London hard liners in the intelligence community made it inevitable by spying on reluctant members of the Council trying to work out a compromise, making sure that it didn't succeed.

(4) The war in Iraq was, perhaps, the most barbaric in history, smashing its society, blasting its infrastructure, murdering masses instead of leaders, destroying necessary facilities for maintaining security and any possible peace after the end of conflict, putting such a high priority on avoiding casualities that it killed many of its own forces through "friendly fire" incidents, etc., ad nauseam.
By my calculations, 25,000 Iraqis were killed during this brutal attack, many in their own homes, and several thousand troops in their bunkers and barracks. The amount of depleted uranium in the weapons used could lead to massive problems with cancer in the Iraqi population down the road.

As even America's proconsul for the occupied country, L. Paul Bremer III, recently admitted, its "economy was flat on its back" after the attack, there was no police anywhere to be seen, the smashed army had simply disappeared, electrical power generated for April 2003 amounted to a meaningless 300 megawatts, the public health system was an empty shell, the canal system was totally useless, the telephone system was inoperative, the banking system was in ruins, there were no institutions of government, etc. The Coalition of the willing had subjected Iraq, except for its bridges to minimize its casualities, to total war, hardly what one would expect from an invader claiming its only motives in coming was to free the population from its cruel dictator and his minions.

Then the Coalition was more interested in settling scores with dangerous members of the former regime - seeking solutions to its problems - rather than serving the interests of the Iraqi people. Saddam's sons were killed to make sure that these most deserving enemies of it were never in a position to tell tales about Washington's, London's, and Tel Aviv's former dealings with them, making them martyrs in the process. Saddam, on the other hand, was captured, given prisoner of war status, and left to the Iraqis to try so that he did represent the same threat as his dead sons. Other members of the notorious pack of cards were treated with kid gloves in the hopes that they would help find Íraq's WMD.

(5) The Coalition compounded these problems by replacing administrator Jay Garner, the joivial general who had some real rapport with the peoples of Iraq, by the neocon mission maker Bremer. He is an America firster in the Teddy Roosevelt style, but he also has a special agenda for those killed in the 9/11 attacks.

Bremer served with Oliver North as co-chairman of the NSC's Operations Sub-Group when the illegal activities of Reagan's White House entered their most dangerous phase. As the President's Ambassador at-Large for Counterterrorism, he was deeply invovled in carrying a big stick against the Soviets while speaking softly, if at all. Bremer believed that everyone, including the press, should get behind Washington's covert war against the "evil empire", and consequently, he was deeply involved when North, Secretary Navy Lehman, and CNO Admiral James Watkins arranged to take out the Soviet underwater nuclear deterrent by surprise - what the asssassination of Swedish statsminister Olof Palme was to trigger on February 28, 1986. He then helped solve all the problems at Libya's expense when Soviet spies Rick Ames and Robert Hanssen helped spoil plans against Moscow.

With these credentials, Bremer became Managing Director of Kissinger Associates in 1989. After the 9/11 attacks which killed 295 employees of the financial services firm Marsh & McLennan, Bremer was appointed Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Marsh Crisis Consulting Company, a new company to help repair the damage.

(6) In Iraq, Bremer has been completely concerned with managing the situation, not helping solve the problem - getting the Iraqis so they can manage their own affairs. While concentrating upon restoring services, killing troublemakers, and building up businesses - what Marsh Crisis Consulting is ecstatic about - he has increasingly adopted a hard nose approach to growing political turnoil and social unrest, and expects the press to do the same. In the process, he has adopted just the wrong approach he has long protested against in dealing with terrorism.

Bremer expects, demands that the press adopt a "do no harm" approach to terrorism. "They have to understand that they are not just observers," Bremer explained in 1990, "they are part of the incident. They are a major reason for the incident...so they don't have the luxury of folding their arms and saying, "Well, we're just reporters here.' " When this has not happened increasingly in Iraq, Bremer has taken to the soapbox, explaining that the unrest is the result of outside troublemakers, there is little room for compromise with people like Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the terrorists must be crushed, the perpetrators of the ghastly attacks in Falluja must be punished, and the like.

Terrorists worldwide could not have hoped for a better script for bringing down America, and its Coalition of the willing.